Photo by specimenlife

The District of Columbia’s population expanded to an estimated 632,323 residents in 2012, according to statistics published today by the U.S. Census Bureau. D.C. grew at a rate of 2.2 percent in the year between July 2011 and June 2012, and while the city is still expanding, the pace at which it is doing so is decreasing.

Meanwhile, the Washington region continued to expand, but also at an increasingly sluggish pace. The area’s total population expand to 5,860,342 in 2012, with 89,129 new inhabitants, or a growth rate of about 1.5 percent. By comparison, the region grew at a 1.9 percent clip between 2010 and 2011, according to the Census Bureau.

Washington is still growing, but not nearly as fast as other parts of the country. The Austin, Texas metropolitan area was the nation’s fastest-growing region at a rate of 3 percent. The D.C. region, meanwhile, dropped from the fourth-fastest to 15th.

Suburban counties continued to grow, too. Fairfax County again topped the region with 1,118,602 residents, while in Maryland, Montgomery County topped 1 million residents for the first time.

But the allure with which the Washington area seemed to be luring people from all over the country appears to be fading, turning a supposed “boomtown” into a place that is chugging along at a more relaxed clip. The District’s increased population was driven by births, the arrival of 2,093 immigrants, and 6,050 people who moved from other parts of the country.

Most suburbs, however, actually experienced net losses in domestic migration. Fairfax County saw 4,919 leave for other parts of the United States, Alexandria lost 1,238, Montgomery County lost 3,134, and Prince George’s County lost 5,034. However, all of those declines were offset by increased immigrant populations.