Did you know that in 2007, 122 people who lived in Alabama had lived in Vermont a year earlier? And that 65 Vermonters had been Alabamians in 2006?

Or so says the Census Bureau.

The bet here is that you didn’t know. Now you do. Do you care? Should you?

Probably no to both those questions, too. In and of itself, those statistics mean little, if anything. And if they do mean anything, it’s not clear just what that anything is.

That’s a good rule to keep in mind when analyzing population statistics, especially interim population statistics, which are estimates and projections, not hard numbers. (Actually, the Census itself is something of an estimate and projection, too; but much less).

For instance, we (sort of) know how many people moved between Alabama and Vermont. We have no idea who they are or why they moved. As Will Sawyer, the manager of the Vermont Data Center at the University of Vermont’s Center for Rural Studies noted (via email), “Secondary data only tells us so much.  The real answers are in people’s stories on the ground.”

Meaningful or not, interim population info is interesting, and as long as one resists the temptation to over-interpret, possibly useful.

Also, as Sawyer indicated, complex, with too many details and contradictions to examine in one sitting. So this will be the first of several postings over the next few weeks examining the interim numbers that the Census Bureau released earlier this month. In these exercises, we will stick to the numbers as much as possible, but a certain amount of conjecture will be inevitable.

Meaningful or not, those Alabama-Vermont numbers are representative. By and large, more people are moving from Vermont to other states than from other states to Vermont.

The state’s population is growing, if slowly, due to natural increase (more births than deaths) and to immigration from other countries. But there is “a net domestic migration decrease (state to state) throughout Vermont,” in the words of Will Sawyer’s memo to Vermont census data contacts.

Are we doing something wrong?

Maybe. But we’re also in the Northeast, from which people have been moving elsewhere for decades.

No great mystery here. The Northeast is older, colder, and more crowded. Ever since there has been an America, people have been moving from the more settled to the less settled areas. (Come to think of it, they were doing this before there was an America; that’s why there is an America.

It’s demography’s version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which holds that, in a closed system, heat and energy flow from the warmer to the colder spots (but it doesn’t all get there, meaning entropy rules, so why bother to do anything at all?). In this case, though, the movement is from the colder to the warmer spots, not to mention that the world is not a closed system.

Here’s what might be a contradiction, though. People may move from the more crowded regions, but they move to the more crowded parts of those less crowded regions. Meaning that (here’s some of that inevitable conjecture) most of those Vermonters who moved to Alabama went from rural or small-town Vermont to Birmingham or Mobile and their suburbs, not to rural or small-town Alabama.

Here we have a possible (more conjecture) solution to an apparent mystery in the latest Census numbers, which showed small population declines in the southern part of the state.

That’s not the mystery. After all, those are rural counties, and rural counties are losing population all over the country, especially if, as is the case here, many residents earned their keep in small factories, also on the decline nationwide.

But then why isn’t the Northeast Kingdom losing population? Orleans, Caledonia, and Essex Counties are rural, with some manufacturing jobs. Essex did lose a handful of people. But the other two counties grew. What have St. Johnsbury and Newport got that Bennington and Brattleboro don’t?

Maybe it’s what they don’t have that Bennington and Brattleboro do: Nearby cities.

People tend to move to nearby places. Specifically, people tend to move from rural and small town areas to the nearest metropolitan area. More Vermonters move to New Hampshire (3,772 in 2007) than vice versa (2,267). But they didn’t just move to “New Hampshire” as some abstract entity. Most of them moved to the Manchester, Nashua, Portsmouth, or Concord areas. That’s where the jobs are.

A fairly short hop from Brattleboro, and not that far from Bennington. The cities of northern Massachusetts aren’t far, either. But all of them are much farther from the Northeast Kingdom. For all sorts of reasons – family, friends, familiarity, inertia – many people like to stick as close to home as possible. And there’s not much point in moving from Caledonia or Essex County, Vermont, to Coos County, New Hampshire, where the economic outlook is no better.

Gregory “Rex” Burke, the executive director of the Bennington County Regional Commission, said his county is losing population for several reasons, one of which might be that what he called “the Vermont mystique” keeps prices high.

This makes sense. “Vermont” is surely a state and perhaps a state of mind. But it has also become a brand. A product made in Vermont is slightly more desirable than the same product would be if it were made elsewhere. The same is true of real estate. By and large, this is good for the state’s economy. But as the words to the 1944 Mills Brothers hit Till Then pointed out, “every gain must have a loss.” A house or land just over the line in Rensselaer County, New York, might be slightly cheaper than a comparable property in Bennington County simply because it isn’t in Vermont, and Burke said some (now former) Vermonters have taken advantage of the lower prices.

A closer look at the numbers indicates that simply pointing out the population decline in Bennington County is insufficient. Burke and his assistant, Jim Sullivan, noted that the northern part of the county is growing, thanks to second home development, ski areas and other tourist amenities. It’s southern Bennington County, and especially the town of Bennington itself, one of the places which has lost manufacturing jobs.

“The town of Bennington lost 400 (manufacturing) jobs in ten years,” Sullivan said. “Then before the recession came we had an increase of 200. We thought we were going to see population growth along with this manufacturing growth.”

Needless to say, what they thought did not come to pass, for reasons not at all peculiar to Bennington or to Vermont. Those numbers do indicate, though, that even the parts of Vermont that are losing population are hardly fading away, Even the population declines, Sullivan said, that “we really don’t know whether it’s a blip or the beginning of some new trend.”

To recap, there is much we don’t know, and much more to discuss—about jobs and taxes, about why Chittenden County is both Vermont’s fastest-growing and the county which more people leave, about who stays, who goes, who arrives, and why, about whether population growth is necessary or even desirable in the first place.

More coming anon.

Tags: population

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 12:15 am and is filed under Business & Economy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.