The fastest shrinking county in the United States is at the southern tip of Illinois, where the Ohio River flows into the Mississippi. Alexander County lost 20 percent of its population between 2010 and 2020, falling from 7,821 people to 6,260.
Alexander’s county seat is Cairo. Once a bustling river port and a strategic outpost during the Civil War, Cairo’s population has declined from 15,000 in the mid-20th Century to around 2,000 today, as the barges stopped calling and the railroads and I-57 bypassed the town. Cairo’s only chain restaurant, a Subway, closed several years ago. In 2017, the Department of Housing and Urban Development shut down two apartment houses there, dispersing their residents throughout Little Egypt. Then-HUD secretary Ben Carson called Cairo “a dying community.”
“There is no grocery store,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch wrote at the time. “No hospital. No community center, so the high school gym hosts weddings and post-funeral meals and pickup basketball.”
Illinois lost more people than any state in the 2010s: 243,102, according to a new report by the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning based on Census estimates released in December. By percentage, we were second only to West Virginia in population loss (1.89 to their 3.68).
To see where Illinois is shrinking, look Downstate. Outside of the Chicago area, only five counties gained population: McLean, Champaign, Effingham, Williamson, and Monroe. Most of those contain, or are near, universities. The exception, Effingham, is a transportation hub, at the intersection of I-57 and I-70.
The Chicago area mostly held steady in population. The city lost only 3,000 people during the decade, while Cook County lost 29,552, a .57 percent decline.
However, in most states, rural population loss has been offset by urban growth. Chicago’s growth rate is 46th out of 50 in the nation, leading only the Rust Belt cities of Buffalo, Cleveland, Hartford, and Pittsburgh. So we’re also responsible for Illinois’s decline.
“Our situation is typical of rural America,” says John Jackson of Southern Illinois University’s Paul Simon Public Policy Institute. “Towns that used to be market towns are now drying up, disappearing. The possibilities of keeping young people there are difficult.”
Coal and manufacturing, once the basis of the region’s economy, are now negligible factors in employment. There are fewer than 3,000 miners left in Illinois, down from an all-time high of 50,000.
“Coal is a cultural factor, still a major part of the political culture,” Jackson says. “As an economic factor, it’s almost totally disappeared. Industrial isn’t coming back. All these little towns have an industrial park. That’s not working. Executives don’t want to live in areas that are deserts for people who make those decisions.”
For that exact reason, Caterpillar and ADM moved their headquarters to the Chicago area from Peoria and Decatur respectively.
Chicago’s economic dominance of Illinois is one of the factors holding Downstate back, says University of Illinois sociology professor Cynthia Buckley. Jobs and talent are migrating from the small towns to the big city, preventing Downstate from developing a 21st Century economy.
“We have one huge city, and then a lot of micro-urban areas, and a lot of very sparsely populated areas,” Buckley says. “A kid doesn’t want to study hard, get a good education, and move to Tolono. There isn’t that sort of Downstate diversification, investment in green energy and IT. Much of that would get sucked up into Chicagoland.”
Loss of population means loss of power. Illinois is guaranteed to lose a congressional seat, dropping the size of our delegation from 18 to 17. That’s the lowest number since the Civil War era, when Illinois was one of the fastest-growing states. The legislature will probably eliminate the seat of freshman Rep. Mary Miller, who represents southeastern Illinois, from Danville to Metropolis.
However, if the state invests in high-speed Internet, roads, and colleges, the 2030 Census could look a lot different, according to both professors. Since the 1960s, economic changes have been detrimental to the region. But the shifts resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic could benefit Downstate, if remote workers migrate from cities to less expensive rural areas.
“Remote work has demonstrated there are things you can do if you have high-speed Internet,” Jackson says. “Some of these semi-urban small cities are viable places for young people to live, and not just old people.”
After every Census, we read about Downstate’s decline. Ten years from now, we may be reading about its revival.
I wouldn’t be to optimistic about Chicago . It’s current population mix has twelve percent over sixty five . So its an older population which means it will be less dynamic and that population by its nature will have to die off pretty soon. Covid and the continued miserable performance of its public school system which has seen a decline of almost 40,000 the last several years will make Chicago much older. And severely cut back on growth. Add in remote work and a lot more people will be working at least part of the time outside the City. The need for higher and higher taxes will further cause more people to leave. So the result will be a continued decline of both the city and the State. While rural areas have lost the most. Those people worked, paid taxes and contribute to the states budget . Now they will be gone and Illinois will have to make that up by taxing other people more.
The shadow government in front of are own eyes and everyone is buying into the grand illusion
Cry me a river. Rural areas revel in their backward-ness and denial of progress. They are not entitled to nor do they deserve high speed internet. Their attitudes and actions have lead to their becoming a desert – they earned it.
Excuse me. I live downstate and I do not revel in the backwardness. The population loss that took place in Alexander county was and is because of two reasons. 1. The 2011 flood that wiped out most of the county, followed by the 2015/16 flood that took out the levee that won’t be fixed because there aren’t enough people that live here anymore. 2. The city of Chicago sucks up all resource dollars before they have a chance of making their way downstate.
Visiting the old custom house and three rivers park in cairo are must-do experiences, not to mention the plentiful indigenous mound structures nearby. In the future, the illinois amtrak train that currently ends in carbondale, the saluki, should be extended, with a terminus at Cairo. There can be a glass pyramid there with a tropical forest for all the people from kentucky and missouri to buy legal marijuana and hang out. Also a beach downtown along the ohio river, with needle palms and magnolia trees, taking advantage of the peninsular microclimate. What a cool experience a train ride and bike tour around the landscape would be! Cairo would make one cute a** river town if the downtown had a direct link to chicago. Maybe even a steamboat might dock there again someday.
Enough with the highways! We’ve been building the for decades and they only rob our state of the vitality of its small towns and cities. Our state developed with rail lines as arteries that fan across the state. Highways lacerated the landscape and entire communities, leaving a forlorn dystopia strewn with the discarded debris of detritus. When the lifeblood returns to the veins, just watch as our economy diversifies and develops.
YES!!!! People need to understand this… so much wasted money
Back in the ’50’s, my grandfather explained to this young man how poking shallow wells into the rural grounds of Illinois provided a good water supply for livestock farmers who came there in the 1800’s. His thinking was that not only was there already plentiful water in most areas, but that once wells were dug and used consistently, the ‘arteries’ in the ground that fed water to the wells improved, became more efficient. As times changed, and many farmers throughout rural areas discontinued raising livestock on open ground, unused wells went unused The arteries that used to feed them dried up, and row crops redirected those water arteries to millions of veins, directed toward millions of acres of plants.
We see a similar cycle happening now in rural America. Where there used to be neighbors throughout the countryside every 1/8th mile or so, down every square mile of land laid out in sections by first gravel roads and eventually (in most cases) blacktops, the small towns that serviced the rural areas are dying or gone because those rural folks–those small livestock and crop farmers, are mostly gone. The older blacktop roads are being allowed to return to gravel, and in some cases roads are being closed. No reason to keep them around, as rural populations disappear.
If you’re familiar with our nation’s history, you know the development throughout the country was in scattergun fashion with the single exception of the railroads and eventually waterborne traffic. However, the interior was built by pioneers who eventually created roads from what used to be wagon trails, wildlife trails, etc., all of which opened this country, in historical terms, virtually overnight. If rail and water were the arteries of this nation, the trails were literally the veins that brought this nation to life.
Slowly our nation’s physical appearance is changing in terms of population dynamics. The people in rural America are leaving. It is conceivable that in 50-100 years, there will mostly exist islands of varying degrees of mass humanity. In between will be open country still crisscrossed with highways and rails, but much fewer of both than today. It is an obvious conclusion. But to imagine having built America in some 300 years without going through the process of establishing wells for livestock that eventually led to more population needing more roads–well, you get my drift. It has been a logical and necessary progression that in some fashion has occurred in all reaches of the globe. As for your last sentence regarding “lifeblood returning to the veins”, I humbly suggest that possibility is left almost entirely in the hands of those who direct our Republic. Freedom and capitalism brought us this far.
“Freedom” and “Capitalism” are dusty buzzword relics from a time of militaristic expansionism that followed WWII, warned about by Eisenhower himself. They are as meaningless to us now as mask requirements and the corporate welfare state currently existing. Far more profound than any simple infrastructure project, the grand project of our state requires the care and recognition of humanity of ALL of its citizens. This means providing healthcare for all, funding education, and ending the repressive police state that targets citizens for expressing their freedom via nonmaskwearing or substance use. The pitiful state of Illinois today= you can’t work at this business because it is unhealthful (and profitable to target minorities)+ heaping loads of money on our corporate overlords+ public pension mess. If the constitution can’t be changed, it looks like we may have to follow the example of our shining colony, Iraq, and devalue our currency to avoid having to pay the pension’s full value. In that case, the only reason real estate prices are going up is to cushion the eventual crash. And if the possibility of real change is only in the hands of our leaders, we are screwed beyond all belief.
Illinois will become a better place to live with fewer congressmen and congresswomen. Less government, less competition for national attention, more individual responsibility, freer people. It will be easier to care for the elderly and homeless when there’s less elite whining and more down home community engagement.