Population and Housing Change
The decennial census occurs every ten years at the start of a new decade. The intent of these animations is to show population and housing change in the downtown and nearby neighborhoods (newer suburban areas had no population in the earlier decades of the city’s history). The units are Census Tracts, which are small geographic areas within a city. The dates run from 1900 through 2010. Because census tracts did not exist prior to 1980, data were reconstructed for earlier decades using populations of voting precincts, partitioning numbers into appropriate Census Tracts when boundaries did not align. Peak population in the downtown city occurred in 1940, with continual subsequent decline as suburban flight took off (except for recent growth downtown post 2010). This map shows the two downtown Census Tracts highlighted in yellow so you can see how the inner city was affected by suburbanization:
