The Outstater
Delineating ‘Growth
OUR MAYOR likes to tout her city as being one of the fastest “growing’ in the state. The scare quotes are to alert you that growth needs some definition. The mayor is talking demographically, that is, her city is increasing in the raw number of people. That is the wrong metric, it will be argued here.
For many of our newly arrived are low-income. My assistant Grok says that a majority may fall below the federal poverty level, some well below. In addition to those wandering into the county from the surrounding rural areas looking for work, a whopping 12 percent of its incoming population is now persons who have been in the U.S. less than five years.
That means it will be some time before they can be considered net investors. Rather, initially, they are dependents of one sort or another, a draw on social and civic services. Strugglers, breaking even.
There is nothing wrong with that. We want to be a community that welcomes strangers, that helps those in need, provides opportunity. Our mayor is big on reaching out to the under-privileged, the homeless even. She recently sponsored a weekend seminar on immigration with the emphasis not on protecting her citizens from any criminal action by illegal immigrants but on how the newly arrived could avoid trouble with Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Again, it is a fair question whether that should be a primary focus, something we confuse with “growth” or a projection of increasing prosperity, of success.
There is an alternative focus, also demographic but one that nobody in officialdom seems eager to dial in. Are we losing our legacy families, the stock if human capital that built the city now so attractive to those newly arriving?
Indeed, a segment of the newly arrived in any community is not counted as such, e.g., simply the children of its established citizens having grown to adulthood and looking for a career and a life of their own. It would be good, most of us agree, if they found that in their home town.
I wonder if that is happening — happening at least as it did a few decades ago, or happening in relation to the large numbers coming from the faraway. Rather, the most promising of the indigenous young seem to be fleeing.
Nobody at City Hall keeps track of that, as I said, so let’s look at it from a different angle. Christian virtue and church attendance, whether it is fashionable to say, correlate positively with what is considered a prosperous community, a high-trust society. It would be a good sign, economically and sociologically, if a sizable number of the newly arrived fit that description.
They won’t, according to Ryan Burge, a social scientist. Burge, speaking recently in Indianapolis, says each successive birth cohort is less religiously active than the previous one. The best news he has is that Gen Z men are secularizing slower than young women are.
I see all of that in my city, once known as “the City of Churches.” The multi-generational legacy families seem to take up fewer pews each year. The new bunch at City Hall doesn’t seem to have much interest in this demographic, beneficiary of white privilege as it is said to be. At best, it is taken for granted, a societal given.
Big mistake. — tcl
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