And while House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R) represents most of Kern County, the population center is in a corner of the county that sits in Rep. The state’s population center leans toward Los Angeles it’s about a third of the way north toward San Francisco along Interstate 5, just outside of Bakersfield in the agricultural town of Shafter and surrounded by dairies. At the turn of the century, Fayetteville and Bentonville had combined populations of about 78,000 residents today, those two cities have 147,000 residents, and they’re exerting a much greater pull on the population center as a result.Ĭalifornia’s two big population centers in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area are seemingly always in competition - for economic power, for political influence, for cultural import. Its movement, north and west away from Little Rock, has happened as Northwest Arkansas has grown. At the turn of this century, the population center was due east of Conway, closer to the town of Perryville. Here’s an example of people shifting from one urban center to another: The population center in Arkansas sits on the shores of Lake Overcup, just outside of Morrilton and about 10 miles northeast of Conway along Interstate 40. It’s cliche to talk about people leaving California and moving to Texas, but in the last decade, virtually an entire congressional district has left Los Angeles for the Phoenix metro area, known as the Valley of the Sun, home to more than half of Arizona’s 7.3 million residents. Mesa sits in Phoenix’s southeastern suburbs, abutting Gilbert and Chandler, some of the fastest-growing cities in America. There is something poetic in the fact that Arizona’s center of population sits in a housing development in Mesa, down the street from a golf course and across from a neighborhood called Optimist Park. The exact point sits atop a mountain about halfway between the Knik River and Eklutna Lake. The second- and third-largest cities in the state, Fairbanks and Juneau, have only about 32,000 residents, so Anchorage’s influence pulls the population center to a point in Chugach State Park, about 30 miles from the city. The exact point is about two miles north of Jemison in Minoka Park, and about 22 miles east of the aptly named Centerville.Īlaska is the home of about three-quarters of a million residents, more than a third of whom live in Anchorage. Here’s where to find that point in every state:Īlabama’s population center sits just off Interstate 65, which connects the state’s four largest cities - Huntsville on the Tennessee border, Birmingham and Montgomery in the center of the state, and Mobile on the Gulf Coast. Now, after another decennial census found 331 million residents living in the United States, the Bureau has recalculated each state’s population center. In a state without a dominant urban core, the center is just that, closer to the center, as in Alabama, where it sits just about halfway between Birmingham and Montgomery. In states dominated by a big city, the center will be heavily influenced by that major urban area - Nevada’s population center is just outside of Las Vegas. The population centers give a sense of how people are distributed around a state.
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