Pittsfield, MA Metro Named One of America’s Fastest-Shrinking Cities by Business Insider

A new analysis from Business Insider, using fresh U.S. Census Bureau data, ranks the Pittsfield metro area among the 15 fastest-shrinking communities in the entire country.

From July 2024 to July 2025, our population dropped 0.6 percent, leaving us at an estimated 128,200 people. -businessinsider.com

To put that in perspective, the average U.S. metro area grew 0.6 percent over the same period. We went the other direction by the same amount.

The Berkshires have been fighting this battle for a long time. When General Electric scaled back and eventually pulled out of Pittsfield around 1990, the region lost thousands of jobs and never fully recovered. Families left. Young people left. And the population has been slowly declining ever since.

We are in some familiar company on this list. Watertown-Fort Drum in New York topped the rankings at minus 1.1 percent. West Virginia communities like Charleston, Beckley, and Wheeling made it too. So did Johnstown, Pennsylvania, and Decatur, Illinois. These are post-industrial cities wrestling with the same generational headwinds the Berkshires have faced for decades.

The Census data tracks net migration, meaning more people are leaving the Pittsfield area than arriving, and more people are dying than being born locally. It is a tough combination that smaller cities across the Northeast and Midwest know all too well.

Pittsfield has seen real investment in recent years, from downtown revitalization to arts and culture to outdoor recreation tourism. But something is not sticking when it comes to keeping residents here or convincing new ones to put down roots.