The Outstater
Where Are All the People?
ACCORDING TO the most recent census figures my city gained only a few hundred people in 2021 through migration, perhaps a quarter of it from other countries. When you figure in natural population loss and screen for a solid middle-class citizenry we may be at stagnation levels.
This is so even though over the last decade our city has spent tens of millions of dollars (it is hard to get an exact figure) building or maintaining all sorts of things downtown. Promoters promised this would attract people — sports stadiums, convention centers, luxury hotels and apartment complexes, river walks, shopping complexes, plus attached parking garages galore.
By now you would think we would be shoulder to shoulder with happy urban dwellers. We are not. Most times of the day downtown feels more like an architectural exhibit than a metropolitan experience. And considering the fanciness of the surroundings, there has been a surprising number of turnovers in shops and office space.
But maybe it’s just me. Maybe those few hundred new residents are just the tip of the demographic iceberg, the first of the shopping-mad yuppies arriving to help pay off those bonds and deferred taxes. Maybe when Covid subsides, the economic seeds will fully bloom. And I hear that the county population increased; maybe they came to be near the shopping and the fun.
But it’s maybe, maybe, maybe, Nobody seems to know — that is, nobody with objective, independent assessment willing to speak up. The real estate folks tell us sales are great. The bankers say banking is robust. The eco-devo teams are boosterish. City officials are buoyed. Ribbon-cuttings are multiplying like topsy. Liquor sales are up.
Hmmm. A friend of this foundation, the economist Eric Schansberg, is in the habit of applying a three-question test to such discussions: Compared with what? At what cost? On whose authority? So I asked a friend at City Hall if the data from traffic counters or a similar objective measurement were available for the last decade or so. He is looking into it.
Yet, it seems that if we are spending all those millions there should be demonstrable progress to even the most inexpert eye. That is especially true when you are using public funding mechanisms.
There should be a lot of new people here. There aren’t.
It’s almost as if there were sound reasons that little of this “development” is the result of free-market private investment — the kind based on people using their own money at their own risk on the informed expectation that there would be a descent return.
It’s almost as if those in the private sector guessed that prospects here, however reasonable, would not justifying those millions in concrete, rebar and attorney fees — all paid up front — that our city government volunteered. Nor did they see how increasing the future tax burden and reducing bonding capacity would help matters.
It’s almost as if they guessed right. — tcl
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