Northeast PA Business Journal -  June 6, 2005

 

 

A temporary exodus

Region's exit a revolving door, not a one-way street

By: Kathy Ruff 

ennsylvania's rural economy reflects similar economies around the country as declining populations present unique challenges.

According to the 2000 census, more people in the U.S. are moving out of rural areas and into areas of increased population concentrations, factors which contribute to congestion and sprawl around urban areas.

The flight from rural America contributes to the sprawl choking many of our great metropolitan areas, as people settle - not in densely populated urban cores - but on the peripheries of cities, most notably Minneapolis, Atlanta or New York.

Statistics show that young, single people are moving to central cities and young, married, college-educated people are moving to the suburbs.

Trends show that young, single, college-educated people are moving to "migration magnet" areas including the southern and mountain states that attract other segments of the population or large metropolitan areas where other, older residents are leaving, such as New York and Chicago.

Nationwide between 1995 and 2000, 57.2 percent of young people ages 15 to 24 moved, while 64.9 percent of those ages 25 to 39 moved. What's even more astounding is that, of those numbers, 75 percent of the young, single, college educated people and 72.3 percent of their married counterparts moved.

Pennsylvania suffered the highest net migration loss of its young, single, college-educated population in the country with 29,574 more people leaving than coming.

For northeastern Pennsylvania, this means different things, depending on the region in question. Between 1990 and 2000, about 4 percent of those born between 1965 and 1975 moved out of northeastern and rural Pennsylvania in general. But that's only part of the story since about 6.5 percent of Baby Boomers returned. 

That may explain why Pennsylvania is one of the top five states in the country with the oldest population. 

"You have a revolving door," says Jonathan Johnson, senior policy analyst for the Center for Rural Pennsylvania, Harrisburg. "Young people are leaving; however, older boomers are moving back." 

Even within northeastern Pennsylvania, the impact of those dynamics varies significantly. "You get very different stories depending on what region you are in," says Johnson. "The coal region has the distinction of having more deaths than births. The Poconos are the completely opposite picture." Between the two extremes, the Endless Mountains and Middle Susquehanna Valley reflect slightly higher birth than death rates. Migration growth and high birth rates continue to present challenges for the Poconos as education officials estimate consistent school enrollment growth for at least the next 10 years.

But in areas with declining population due to low birth rates and outmigration of young families, residents may soon face difficult choices as school enrollments decay.

"With that decline, you have to think we will need to perhaps consolidate or close schools," says Johnson.

As migration and birth trends continue, experts predict declining population will result in a growing labor shortage in skilled and professional jobs. Even today, demand for specialty manufacturing, technology and healthcare professionals causes concerns for business and industry.

Pennsylvania is not alone. Other areas of the country continue to see similar trends in population migration and struggle with hard decisions on how to cope with or reverse declining populations as economic forces threaten to wipe away many small towns. The lessons learned may help Pennsylvania.

An example from the Great Plains

For example, the Great Plains has a long-standing depopulation issue, and different regions try diverse approaches to encourage young families to live in their dying rural areas.

Free land promotions promote three small municipalities in the Great Plains. In North Dakota, if you move to Crosby, not only will the town give you a free plot of land on which to build your house, they'll throw in a free membership to the country club.

If you have children who will attend public school in Ellsworth, Kansas, they'll give you free land and thousands of dollars toward a down payment on a house. Move to Plainville, Kansas, and in addition to the free land, they'll drastically reduce your property house on the house for 10 years - zero percent the first year.

These strategies focus on bringing young families into the area while other regions focus on strategies to create jobs and economic development. Miner County, South Dakota, adopted a survival strategy to let pieces of its economy die and focus instead on niches such as organic beef production and wind-turbine repair. In Pennsylvania, programs such as the Keystone Opportunity Zone work to attract business with tax abatements. Finding out what works and what doesn't represents the ultimate challenge.

Two New York academics - Drs. Deborah E. Popper, professor at the City University of New York, and her husband, Frank J. Popper, professor at Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning & Public Policy at Rutgers University - have studied population migration trends for over 20 years.
The pair pose an alternative vision for future development in the Great Plains, a vision with applications throughout the country.

This philosophy centers on "restoration ecology," tapping into an area's natural assets to reinvigorate the economy, even if that means smaller populations or economic development.

The duo suggested a large-scale land restoration project focused on developing and promoting native species and less on conventional agriculture. The Great Plains project, called "Buffalo Commons," suggested, in part, a return to free-ranging buffalo herds.

The ideas implemented in the Great Plains may shed light on how Pennsylvania can incorporate strategies to deal with the migration trends and growing population loss of its young people.

"For a lot of the period beginning and after the great Depression, central Appalachia, including Pennsylvania, was suffering from (population loss)," says Frank. "Regions find ways to deal with it . . . Sometimes it involves a lesser population or lesser economic development, but it doesn't necessarily have to alter the long sweep of history."

Those economic changes can include transition to a natural resource economy or high-tech industry depending on the culture, history and vision of the area.

"That happened in central New Jersey and to some extent in northeast Pennsylvania," says Frank. "They tried to build on the local facilities that were the lynch kingpin of the local economy." Facilities to build around include universities, hospitals and government or military facilities.

"Those (who successfully built around existing facilities) are the towns or counties where you don't see the population declining so much, even as their surroundings may be declining," says Deborah. "So they do provide the holdouts, and if they are used strategically, they may be able to reverse the trend."

Reversing the trend

Reversing those trends requires enlightened, energetic local leadership to brainstorm what ideas are best for that region and transform that vision into reality. 

Recognizing why people migrate from an area and why they stay starts the process. For example, many young people seek good-paying jobs but also want cultural, social and recreational opportunities. "What's attracting the elderly is also what potentially can attract the young," says Deborah. "You're talking about having a clear and vibrant service sector. You're talking about having all those amenities." 

Creating a mix of people and activities can help to recharge a lethargic economy. But the very things that attract people who revitalize a city - vertical housing, fashionable restaurants and shops and access to mass transit - are driving children out by making the neighborhoods too expensive for young families.

As suburbs such as the Poconos grow, residents see similar cost increases as schools and governments raise taxes to keep up with growing infrastructure demands for transportation, schools and services.

For declining rural areas, costs also affect those left behind as fewer people must bear the costs to maintain needed services and infrastructure.

Reality shows costs grow whether an area grows or declines, so some question exists as to whether growth is always a desirable or viable solution.

"You certainly have to have growth if you have to have new people coming in and younger families moving in," says Joel Kotkin, author of "The City: A Global History," Los Angeles. "If you're going to get the same population, everyone is going to get old and die and just move away, that's not much of a future. You have to look toward some amount of growth."

How much and what type of growth depends on the region and its offerings. For example, attracting or retaining those out of college or in their 20s may not work for some areas.

A change in focus

Kotkin suggests some areas that cannot retain the college graduates and youth to consider targeting people in their 30s and 50s.

"People in their 30s, because they are looking to buy a home, start a family, start looking for something that's affordable and a good quality of life," says Kotkin. "The people in their 50s are looking to downshift but still are interested in being active. They might want to sell their home in Philadelphia and go and move to a much less expensive place and have a bit of an equity windfall."

Finding the right balance is a critical key to an area's future.

"The big thing is you have got to figure out why people stay there, why they leave and then try to address those issues," says Kotkin. "Find out specifically what the reality is in your area. Any region is like a person. You have to know it's history, its places, its historic evolution and characteristics. There is no one theory that applies to every place in the sense of what strategies work best."

Creating great places

Finding what strategies work best represents the crux of an initiative undertaken by the National Governors Association. The "Creating Great Places" initiative will assist governors in creating stronger, more competitive and sustainable communities through the coordination of housing and economic development strategies in six states, including Pennsylvania.

"It is a model workshop that's designed to help a small number of states develop and implement their own large-scale initiatives on an issue that they see in common," says Matt Lambert, NGA's senior policy analyst. "What we are really hoping to accomplish with this is to explore how states are comprehensively addressing the issues of community development and how they might better tailor their policies to work on these more efficiently and more effectively, and look toward the future."

The project will look at trends to determine how housing and economic development agencies can work together to balance the needs for housing and jobs, critical factors to stem migration.

"We're going to try to figure out, try to understand what we can possibly do to get the jobs and the housing together to make more attractive urban places where people want to come and stay and live but have access to jobs," says Joanne Denworth, senior policy manager with the Governor's Policy Office. "In some of our bigger cities there's enough mass, there's enough jobs where people can commute to a job though that's not the ideal because we have so much congestion. We're better if we can get the jobs closer to the people. We are trying to do that."

The initiative will allow different constituencies from each of the participating states to share information and management practices that worked and that didn't work.

"It helps us to think about what are the most innovative and likely-to-be-successful things that we could do to include more economic development and housing in the packages of the investments that we're trying to put together," says Denworth. "What our hope is we learn lots, we know every tool that's out there and we make use of the ones we think we can."

Denworth hopes the project will offer ideas to help over a thousand urban places throughout the state that are largely in decline.

"Every region presents the same but a somewhat different problem, depending on a lot of things: the age of the population, the vitality of the economy, what can be attracted there," says Denworth. "We're really working hard at the state level to try to coordinate all the different state agency programs, like the investment in brownfields, with compatible economic development, industry clusters that are feasible, all of that and strategic thinking about what will work best in this region."

Denworth believes the most success will come from those areas with local participation leveraging the private sector.

Whether in the private or public sector, observers agree directed action is necessary to deal with Pennsylvania's population and job loss. While the experts may disagree on the correct strategies to remedy those woes, they agree each region must find and develop its own solutions. While progressive growth may be right for one area, retaining its niche may be right for others. Successful regions will find the key to unlock its solutions.

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©Northeast PA Business Journal 2005

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