Every county in the region lost population from 2011 to 2012, according to new Census Bureau estimates.
Data released by the government Thursday indicates nominal population losses in Lackawanna, Luzerne and Wyoming counties.
Pike County was the region's largest population loser by proportion - 1.15 percent - and Monroe County experienced the largest population decline, 1,188. Wayne County, the third leg of the area's Pocono Mountains territory, lost 365 residents, or 0.7 percent.
Susquehanna County's population decreased by 385 residents, or 0.9 percent, according to the data.
Lackawanna and Luzerne counties, though, experienced small population gains from 2010 to 2012, census figures indicate. The other five counties in the region all had declines over the two-year period.
"The estimates, you have to take with a grain of salt," cautioned Teri Ooms, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Economic Development, a regional think tank financed by higher education.
Her agency's statistical models indicate population in the urban counties continues to grow slowly from in-migration.
"We still show more people moving into Lackawanna and Luzerne than leaving," Ms. Ooms said.
Both counties had marginal population growth from 2010 to 2012, the data indicate, and residency in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre metro area remained virtually the same at 563,629.
The situation in the Poconos, though, reflects a continuing rough patch there.
December unemployment in Pike County was 11.1 percent and the jobless rate in the East Stroudsburg micropolitan area was 9.9 percent, state data show. The housing crash that led to an international financial crisis in 2008 continues to plague parts of the Poconos and the severe recession of 2007 to 2009 created still-existing obstructions to mobility.
"People are just hunkered down," said Gordon DeJong, Ph.D., a demographer at Penn State University. "The internal migration data for the entire country has shown a pattern of marked decrease in people moving around at all for the last five years."
Some Poconos residents also find themselves stuck in place, Dr. DeJong said.
"With their high unemployment, some people don't have the money to move to places that are recovering more quickly than Pike and Monroe," he said. "The potential payoffs of the labor markets in other places are too iffy."
Many Poconos residents commute to New York and New Jersey for work. They are not counted among the employed in the Poconos when working, but they are tabulated among the unemployed when they are not working, said Chuck Leonard, executive director of the Pocono Mountains Economic Development Corp. in Tobyhanna.
The unemployment data can be misleading, he said, but there is no question decades of population expansion in the Poconos has reversed.
"We did go through very explosive growth for years," he said. "We will come back, but we might never see the rate of growth that we have in the past."
Population growth in Monroe County in recent years mostly came from elderly people moving into senior housing developments, Mr. Leonard said.
The younger population has dropped, he said.
"We have had significant declines in some of our school populations," Mr. Leonard said.
Dr. DeJong sees the same aging pattern taking a toll on Poconos populations.
"There's a lot of older people there and the death rates are high," he said.
Monroe County, in particular, continues to suffer a hangover from the housing crisis and has hammered construction employment in the area, Mr. Leonard said.
Property prices have plummeted. At least 4,000 homes in the county are for sale, Mr. Leonard said.
"We have had a lot of foreclosures," he said. "Our real estate marketplace needs to work out a little bit."
Contact the writer: jhaggerty@timesshamrock.com