Twinsburg's Population Growth One of the Highest in Northeast Ohio

When she read the population numbers from the 2010 Census last week, Mayor Katherine Procop was not surprised with what it revealed.

Since 2000, Twinsburg's total , an increase of 1,789 people.

But that's just a mild growth compared to the nearly 77 percent spike from 1990 to 2000, Procop said.

“This decade has been one of modest growth,” Procop said. “We have less residential property that is developable and housing starts have declined dramatically during this decade, but we have had several new developments and the increase in population relates directly to them.”

The city's trend goes against the population trend of Summit County as a whole. The total population dropped 1,118 people.

This is a less drastic count than the neighbors up north in Cuyahoga County. There, the population decreased by about 113,000 people.

Among six cities within 10 miles of Cleveland we surveyed, only one city's population grew, and by only 0.3 percent. And within 20 miles, eight of 13 city populations dropped. Cities between 21 and 40 miles from Cleveland fared much better, with only two of the 10 we surveyed dropping in population.

Robert L. Fischer, Ph.D. and co-director of Case Western Reserve University's Center on Urban Poverty & Community Development, said that there is little doubt that foreclosures are a piece of the drop. Cuyahoga County has seen 14,000 foreclosures per year since 2006, and half of those have occurred in the city of Cleveland.

"The other matter that is well documented is that while Cleveland population has declined markedly (-17 percent), the population in Cuyahoga County has not dropped as much (-8.2 percent) and the region has remained relatively flat (-2 percent)," he wrote in an e-mail.

"Partly this reflects the migration of families out of the urban center and the sprawl of the metropolitan area, that has been taking place since the 1950s. Certainly the shifts in the regional economy have also fueled these patterns as well," he added.

But Cleveland is not alone in this pattern: Fischer added that other major cities including Cincinnati, Toledo and Akron have seen similar population patterns.
There are outliers: , for example, which grew by 85 percent in the past 10 years, saw the largest growth by a wide margin, and East Cleveland's drop in population is far from the next largest drop – Cleveland proper.