First Toronto Surpasses Chicago In Population, Now Brooklyn Is Eyeing Us

By Amy Cavanaugh in News on Apr 6, 2013 4:00PM

Let's look on the bright side—we may not be the fourth largest city in North America anymore, but we still have the bronze medal for the United States. When Toronto recently surpassed us in population—they have 2,791,140 residents to our 2,707,120—they also moved up a notch in the population rankings, taking the fourth place spot and moving us to fifth. But there's a caveat to that—they amalgamated seven municipalities into the City of Toronto in 1998, in order to streamline government (which was apparently unsuccessful), but also increasing the size of the city. The greater Chicago area is still larger than the greater Toronto area, but that doesn't factor into the city size list.

Houston has been champing at the bit to surpass us in population for a few years now, but a new contender for third place has emerged—Brooklyn. Brooklyn can't actually rank on the list since it's part of New York, but the borough is on pace to have a greater population than us sometime in the next 12 years. Brooklyn is growing at a rate of 2.4%, more than any other borough, while Chicago has the slowest growth rate of the large U.S. metro areas, according to Census data.

The moral of this story? Let's start convincing all our friends to move to Chicago.