Latest census
To boil down the latest census report, everywhere is losing out, except the college towns and big cities which seem to be picking up all the immigrants. Birth rates are down. Immigration is replacing some, in some places, like big northern cities. Most places are getting emptier.I thought about this as I took my dog for a walk to downtown Galesburg tonight. Galesburg is in many ways a typical town, midwestern, not really a college town, small, working-class. It's getting emptier. Downtown is quiet and seems to be getting quieter. It's spring and kids should be out there, where are the kids? Well, there are a few, but as there become fewer, they're less likely to go out there looking for each other.
What happened is that we've gotten used to a maximum of two kids in families, and lots of people aren't having families. So there aren't people with three or four, to cancel out all the people with zero. If you have two kids, you can expect one of them to have two kids too; the other won't. Nobody will have three or four. There will be a lot fewer kids after a while.
It's partly the pandemic - where people met each other for years, all those places were closed for a couple of years. That will probably put a dent in population numbers and that gap will work its way up the system. But already colleges are closing. They're looking at numbers of kids coming up the pike and noticing, they just aren't there. There will be a lot fewer every year.
What does this mean in practical terms? For a town like Galesburg, a pretty empty downtown. It was suffering anyway. But with no families, and the families there are have cars, and big homes, and lots of internet, these people aren't coming to town. With an increasingly divided population rich/poor, the haves are staying home figuring all the have-nots are hanging out downtown. True or not, it's a reason to avoid downtown. People move out to the burbs, then choose to stay out there on weekends - what does town have that they need? Most of what people need is on the internet. A few stores downtown do a lively business, but nobody goes to watch the people; the people are gone.
The cities and college towns' strength is that they're friendly to diversity. Many of the young people are non-white, or a mix, and don't want to live in redneck places. They're attracted to college towns when they raise their families because of the good education and generally positive environment. You can't blame them for skipping over towns that have an increasingly shrinking tax base - not growing, just crumbling. That seems to be a vast swath of middle America, even the South, which was growing quickly and modernizing, last I checked.
The idea of fewer and fewer kids creeps me out. I have a brother, an environmentalist, who believes that that's what we need - a lot fewer people. Yes, it will give the earth a break. Agriculture can take a breath. Maybe the deer or the bears will come back, if there are enough wild spaces. We don't actually need all these buildings that these downtowns have.
Do we?
posted by tom @ 8:40 PM
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