New Orleans could be on the verge of losing its ‘Chocolate City’ moniker
3rd August 2020 · 0 Comments
By Christopher Tidmore
Contributing Writer
If the current trends continue, Orleans Parish will no longer enjoy a majority African-American population in 15 years, but Caucasians could likewise fall to a minority in Jefferson Parish as the numbers of Asians, Hispanics and Blacks rise in suburbs. These likely demographic changes were suggested by information released two weeks ago by the New Orleans-based research group The Data Center. If these trends achieve their logical outcome, a tremendous impact on the politics of the entire metro region may be felt.
Most critically, in Orleans Parish (which has coequal boundaries with the City of New Orleans), the share of the 2019 population which is African American – while lower than in 2000 when it constituted 67 percent of the population – currently continues to represent the majority of city residents at 59 percent. But that will likely change over the next decade and a half.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2019 population estimates, there are now 92,974 fewer African Americans living in Orleans Parish compared to 2000, but there are also 8,289 fewer whites. Meanwhile, the number of Hispanics grew by 6,658. The number of Blacks living in the City of New Orleans did grow every year post-Katrina (from 2006 to 2017) but decreased for the first time post-Katrina from 231,943 in 2017 to 231,360 in 2018, a decrease that continued in 2019 by similar amounts.
Roughly, that amounts to a net decline of just over 1,000 African Americans every three years in the City of New Orleans. In 2019, the total population of Orleans Parish was estimated at 390,144, according to U.S. census figures (down from 484,674 prior to Hurricane Katrina). Using that benchmark, as a percentage of population, Blacks are declining by slightly more than 0.25 percent of the total every three years.
In contrast, Caucasians have gone from 27 percent of the Orleans Parish population to 31 percent, due to a slower rate of outmigration. The share of Hispanics in the city doubled in that same period from three percent in 2000 to six percent by 2019, and the share of Asians increased from two percent to three percent.
If the African-American majority in the City declines at the current rate by just over 1.25 percent of the current overall population by 2035, whilst the rate of growth for Hispanics doubles in the same period, Asians continue to grow by a third, and Caucasians stay effectively steady, African Americans would no longer constitute 50 percent of Orleans Parish’s population. Put another way, the simple net loss of 5,000 African Americans over the next 15 years, as the other populations either remain constant or grow during the same time period, will threaten the dominant Black political position in Orleans Parish, by virtue of simple numbers.
The political impact may have already been felt as Caucasian candidates have become more competitive in City Council seats – which previously hosted African-American incumbents over the past few decades. Moreover, the increasing strength of the Vietnamese electorate was elucidated through the election of District E Councilwoman Cyndi Nguyen – with Asians constituting a growing percentage of the voters in eastern New Orleans. This trend will likely continue with New Orleans remaining an ardent Democratic-leaning city, but one less focused on African-American issues.
According to Lamar Gardere, executive director of The Data Center, that demographic change is not yet set in stone. “We have not run those estimates yet,” Gardere said.
“We are not sure it’s a trend, yet,” Gardere said to The Louisiana Weekly about whether the African-American identity of Orleans Parish will decline, adding that rising housing costs and other quality-of-life factors could slow Hispanic in-migration to the city.
These same factors, however, could also accelerate African-American out-migration to the suburbs. After all, it appears that the overall metro area has not lost population. Instead, ethnic groups simply seem to be re-distributing across the inner parishes, with the overall population numbers up since 2010. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that 1,270,530 residents were living in metro New Orleans as of July 2019, a seven percent increase from April 2010. The metro area now has 95 percent of its pre-Katrina 2000 population of 1,337,726.
Meanwhile, The Data Center noted in a recent press release that “Hispanic, Asian, and African-American populations increased as a share of the total population in Jefferson, St. Bernard, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, and St. Tammany parishes, each. In fact, the number and share of Hispanics have increased in all eight parishes in the metro area.
“Between 2000 and 2019, the number of Hispanics in Jefferson Parish increased by 32,109, reaching over 15 percent of the total parish population. Orleans Parish and St. Tammany Parish gained 6,658 and 15,186 Hispanics, respectively, such that the Hispanic share of the population was 6 percent in Orleans and six percent in St. Tammany in 2019. As of July 2019, there were 114,657 Hispanics in the metro area, representing nine percent of the metro population. This is up from 2000 when there were 58,545, representing four percent of the metro population.”
The Hispanic population doubled to almost 62,000 in Jefferson, just as the African-American population drastically increased and by all indications the Caucasian population grew considerably older – and slightly smaller.
Aging constitutes a trend across all ethnic groups, but the spiking senior citizen population of Jefferson Parish presents an interesting possibility. In other words, outmigration matched with the demise of the baby boom “white flight” generation who could leave Jefferson with no dominant racial group.
The political impact of those demographic changes have already been felt in the politics of what was once Louisiana’s largest and youngest suburb. Democratic Gov. John Bell Edwards won 57 percent of the vote in Jefferson Parish, a previously unthinkable idea in the one-time bastion of David Vitter and Dave Treen. Across the board, Democrats have been increasingly excited at potential gains at the expense of the Republican majority on the parish council and throughout the municipalities.
Nevertheless, notes The Data Center, the whole metropolitan area grows older, and at a rate even faster than the rest of the country. The metro had 358,092 children under 18 years old in 2000 and only 280,958 in 2019. Much of this loss was driven by Orleans Parish, where the under 18 population declined to 77,280 from 129,408. The under 18 population is now 22 percent of the regional population, down from 27 percent in 2000.
“As households with children have declined,” the press release explained, “the share of single-person households has grown in the metro and nationwide. The metro area share of individuals living alone grew from 27 percent in 2000 to 35 percent in 2018 – similar to the trend for Jefferson Parish where the share of households living alone grew from 27 percent to 32 percent. The increase was larger in Orleans Parish, which jumped from 33 percent to 49 percent.”
Similar aging populations in other parts of the United States have impacted public support for higher education funding and long-term infrastructure investment. Needs of the moment, trends suggest, come to outweigh a focus on the future.
This article originally published in the August 3, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
