Cities’ relative shares of Wisconsin population over time

By the numbers

It’s one matter to track whether a city has grown and how fast. It’s another to ask whether it has grown in relation the state as a whole. Here, we’ve done so by tracking the share of the state’s population that lives in selected Wisconsin cities relative to the share that lived there in the 1960 census.

Think of it this way: In 1960, pick any Wisconsinite at random. What are the odds that person lived in, for example, Wausau or Madison? Then, at each subsequent decennial census, have those odds increased or decreased, and by how much? The change in those odds is one measure of the changing importance of that city to Wisconsin as a whole.

We started by looking at the 20 most populous cities in either the 1960 or the 2020 census. There was much overlap between the lists, but the outliers tell a story of places either falling behind and pulling ahead of the state’s overall growth. We added a few selected places, including Sun Prairie, an example of a large and high-growth place.

Places that are growing faster than the state include suburbs of major Wisconsin cities, perhaps due to the effects that the recent COVID-19 pandemic had on remote work options. Also outpacing the state’s overall growth have been some of the state’s major cities.

On the graph, the 1 on the y-axis marks the rate at which Wisconsin’s overall population has grown. Places with trendlines above 1 have had faster population growth than that of Wisconsin, and an upsloping line means faster than average growth in that city for that decade. Places with trendlines below 1 have had slower population growth than that of Wisconsin overall since the 1960 census.

Sun Prairie’s rise since 1960 puts it off the chart above. Here’s what it looks like relative to those cities:

The underling numbers