It was a day a decade in the making: Last week’s release of granular population data by the U.S. Census set off a frenzy of number-crunching and analyzing to better understand how the country and its counties, cities, and regions have grown and changed since 2010.

In the Washington region, the top line numbers looked good: the overall population grew by 13%, outpacing the national average of 7.4%. But that local growth was also smaller than any other decade since the 1970s, potentially offering warning signs of what’s to come.

Beyond sheer numbers, much of the focus on the new data surrounds race and ethnicity. In short, the Census found a country “much more multiracial and much more racially and ethnically diverse than what we measured in the past,” according to Nicholas Jones, a senior official with the Census.

And that was certainly on display in the Washington region, where for the first time Fairfax County’s white population is no longer in the majority and D.C. and Maryland were ranked amongst the most diverse places in the country.

Below are some regional outtakes from the Census data.

D.C.: No longer Chocolate City?

The few times she ran for D.C. mayor, the late performance artist Faith had a favorite way of critiquing the change that was sweeping across the city: “Chocolate City is becoming Vanilla Village.”

She was, of course, referring to D.C.’s demographic makeup, which in the 1970s was 71% Black but by 2010 had decreased to 50%, even as the city’s population was on the upswing. And according to the Census data released last week, that trend has continued: The city’s Black residents accounted for 40.9% of the city’s population in 2020, only barely leading white residents at 38%.

When stacked against all 50 states, D.C. led the country in the increase of the percentage of white population:18%, or 41,723. (Second place was Idaho at 8.2%; the national average was -8.6%.) Also, D.C. was also the only jurisdiction in the Washington region where the white share of the overall population actually grew. On the other end, there were 19,315 fewer Black residents in the city in 2020 compared to a decade prior. (To get real granular, the biggest loss of Black residents came in wards 1, 2, and 4; the biggest gain, of 58.1%, occurred in Ward 3.)

For many residents, the apparent racial changes in D.C. aren’t much of a surprise. D.C. has gotten progressively more expensive as the population ballooned by almost 100,000 residents over the last decade, and a study found that the city once had more gentrifying neighborhoods than any other comparable city across the country.

“Gentrification is an understatement… Erasure is more of an adequate descriptor,” tweeted Tony Lewis Jr., a D.C. native and longtime activist for criminal justice reform last week. “This demographic shift in D.C. isn’t just about white people moving here, it’s more about how many Blacks are leaving… and why they are leaving: death, incarceration, economics, housing.”

Still, there could be caveats to the demographic change that has swept D.C., and they have to do with how the Census was conducted — and who may have been left out of the count.

“The demographic conversations around the Census have been missing the very key component, which is that we we know that there was an undercount,” says Councilmember Christina Henderson (I-At Large), referring to longstanding concerns with how the Trump administration’s attempt to add certain immigration-related questions and the pandemic may have held down participation by Black and Latino households. “I do think that the number of Black residents in D.C. is higher than perhaps what was captured by the Census.”

Andrew Trueblood, the director of the D.C. Office of Planning, largely agrees that there could have been an undercount, something he first noticed when the Census released overall population counts earlier this year. That count put D.C. at 689,545, while the American Community Survey — the annual demographic estimates put out by the Census — had the city at over 705,000 people in 2019. And questions over the count extend to the tally of the city’s Black population, he says.

“The last five-year estimate had the Black population about 35,000 people higher than [the Census]. And so understanding why there is that 35,000-person discrepancy I think is important. It could be because of an undercount. It could be because of issues with access, could be something else. But we don’t know,” says Trueblood.

The Office of Planning said in a statement late last week that it will “review the data and validate the Census’s quality checks to identify and improve the accuracy of the 2020 Census data” — and possibly file a formal appeal to the Census. And Trueblood says there’s still time for more analysis to be done; simply saying that D.C. got more white is too simple of a narrative, he argues.

“The ‘Two or More Races’ category I think is quite interesting,” he says. “That is, after the white population, the second biggest growth and almost as much as the white population growth.”

Still, some elected officials and activists generally agree that D.C.’s current demographics have been shaped by economics, and continuing efforts will be required to keep housing affordable for as many people as possible, notably Black residents, who on the whole have lower net worths than their white counterparts. In the coming year’s budget, Mayor Muriel Bowser dramatically increased funding for affordable housing to $400 million over two years, while lawmakers included new spending and initiatives to help low-income households.

“I really want us to shift the conversation to talk about how do we get more Black and brown residents as homeowners in the District, because that allows us to establish some semi-permanent population, if you will, and then also helping those families build generational wealth,” says Henderson.

Maryland: now one of the most diverse places in the U.S.

While D.C. did become whiter over the last decade, it also became more diverse — landing it on the Census’ list of the five most diverse places in the U.S. One step ahead was Maryland, which also claimed honors as the most diverse state on the East Coast.

And that wasn’t a total surprise for planning experts in Montgomery and Prince George’s counties, where populations have been diversifying since the early 1990s.

“It’s really the major counties, the [most] populous counties in the state that are really driving the racial change,” Pam Zorich, a research coordinator with Montgomery County’s planning department, tells DCist/WAMU. “It’s confirming our path forward to increasing racial diversity.”

Both counties’ populations grew between 2010 and 2020. Montgomery County’s population grew by 9.3% to approximately 1.1 million people, which aligned with planning experts’ projections. The growth in Prince George’s County was 12%, to roughly 967,000 residents in 2020.

The state’s increasing diversity was driven in part by the growing share of Latino residents, especially in places like Prince George’s County. It was there that the population identifying as Latino/Hispanic grew from 14.9% of the overall population in 2010 to more than a fifth in 2020. The proportion of Black residents decreased by more than 6 percentage points since 2010 — though they still make up almost two-thirds of the county’s population — while many white residents have seemingly left the county. In 2010 white residents were almost a fifth of the population, and now make up make up 12.9%.

Jim Cannistra, an official with Prince George’s County’s Department of Planning, also points out that the number of people who identified as two or more races also increased since 2010.

“For whatever reason, the number of people that are identified as other or multiracial increased significantly. It may also be reflective of the fact that some people did not want to indicate what their race was,” Cannistra says.

In Prince George’s County, those who identified as two or more races more than doubled from 3.3% of the population in 2010 to 7.5% in 2020. And those who identified as another race almost doubled from 8.8% of the population in 2010 to 14.4% of the population in 2020.

In Montgomery County, the population that describes itself as “white alone” dropped by 18% — though it remains the biggest group, at 43% of the population — while the proportion of Black, Asian, and Latino residents all increased. Additionally, the number of people who identified as multiracial almost doubled from 2.5% of the county’s population in 2010 to 4.5% of the population a decade later.

According to Jeannette Chapman, director of the Stephen Fuller Institute for Research on the Washington Region’s Economic Future, the region as a whole saw fast growth in people identifying as multiracial. “The fastest growth in percentage-point basis was in multiracial individuals. They more than doubled in the past decade,” she says.

And much like in D.C., the issue of who got counted was on the minds of officials in Prince George’s County, who say an undercount in 2010 cost the county an estimated $363 million in federal funds over a decade.

County Executive Angela Alsobrooks was adamant last year about making sure that everyone was counted in the Censes. In February, the county’s planning department reported that the county’s self-response rate — or the rate at which county residents completed the Census form online without a Census taker knocking on their door — stood at 70%, higher than the 68% reported at the same time a decade prior.

“Prince George’s County started its outreach in 2019, because we knew this Census count would have major implications for our community for the next decade,” Alsobrooks says in a statement to DCist/WAMU. “Although the Census Bureau has not released data yet indicating the accuracy of the count in Prince George’s County or the State of Maryland, we do know that we exceeded our self-response rate from 2010, an indication that our extensive outreach programs were successful.”

Once more Census data is released in the coming weeks and months, counties’ demographers intend to take a deeper look at neighborhood data, housing, and income levels.

Northern Virginia maintains growth, but region catches up

Loudoun County, step right up — you’re number one.

While Northern Virginia has long led growth across the commonwealth (and the region, by and large), the 2020 Census results have handed Loudoun County top honors in terms of how many people it took on over the last decade.  According to the Census, the county grew by 35% since 2010, outpacing only Prince William County and far exceeding the state, Northern Virginia, and national tallies (7.9%, 14.3%, and 7.4%, respectively). It also beat Fairfax County, which grew by 6.3%.

Still, experts say that even with Loudoun County’s impressive expansion, one pattern has emerged over the last two decades: growth in the Washington region is more evenly spread across it. And part of that has come at the expense of Northern Virginia, where the rate of growth has actually slowed in recent decades.

“Usually Northern Virginia led growth by quite a lot, whereas D.C. was the biggest laggard. And instead what happened in this past decade was D.C. started having population gains starting around sort of with the 2000 to 2010 period. And between 2010 and 2020, D.C. actually led in growth, not by much, but by just a little bit. And that hasn’t happened in since at least 1960. So that transition is noteworthy,” says Chapman.

“While Virginia still outperformed the region’s growth again, just by a little bit, the delta of that outperformance has shrunk significantly. So going back to, say, 1970, the Northern Virginia region was growing several percentage points faster than the rest of the region. And now that’s down to two percentage points, not even,” she adds.

Chapman says there’s plenty of analyzing of the Census data to be done, but one thing she is looking at is what the Washington region’s overall population growth says about future economic growth. On first glance, it might not be great.

“Slowing population growth does typically lead to slowing economic growth. They tend to correlate. Not all the time, but typically that’s what happens. It does look like our young adult population was weakening a little bit, which would also kind of feed into this. It would continue to suggest that economic growth for us would be a little bit harder going forward,” she says.