Cleveland’s population has stopped shrinking, according to data released by the U.S. Census Bureau on September 12. The 2023 American Community Survey estimated that there were 351,383 residents of Cleveland, virtually unchanged from the 2022 population count. This is the smallest change since annual data began being collected in the mid-2000s.
Cleveland is still the second poorest city in the U.S.
Over the decades, Cleveland’s population shrunk while the number of people living in poverty remained relatively steady, making Cleveland a high-poverty city. While population loss seems to have slowed to insignificance, poverty remains concentrated here. For yet another year, Cleveland is the second poorest large city in the United States. Detroit is the only city with at least 300,000 residents that has a higher poverty rate than Cleveland.
Our recently released neighborhood data profiles showed dramatic differences in poverty among Cleveland neighborhoods, with poverty in Collinwood, Hough, Brooklyn, Kinsman, and Central about twice as high as that in Lee-Harvard, Kamm’s Corners, Downtown, and University.
Poverty is worst among children and older adults in Cleveland
In the city as a whole, about 4,000 fewer working age people were poor, but 5,700 Cleveland adults worked full time for the full year and still didn’t earn enough to be above poverty. Cleveland continued to have the worst child poverty rate of any large city. In 2023, nearly 35,000 of Cleveland’s children lived in poverty, for a poverty rate of 48.4 percent.
In 2023, nearly 35,000 of Cleveland’s children lived in poverty.
Perhaps more concerning are changes in poverty among older adults. In line with state and national trends, the number and share of Cleveland residents over age 65 continued to grow. In 2023, 24.7 percent of older adults lived in poverty, up from 20.9 percent just two years before. And it looks like it will continue to get worse – poverty rate for ages 60-65 in Cleveland was even higher at 29.0 percent.
None of the year-over-year differences were statistically significant, yet they give us a sense of the direction our community may be heading and a way to decide where to target resources. For good or bad, not much has changed.
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