Tom Sgouros of RI Policy Reporter acclaim takes a look at census data which shows that in 2008, Rhode Island along with Michigan, were the only states with a net loss in population. As with many of his analyses, I don’t argue the numbers with Tom but his inferences of those numbers. He writes:

So, it seemed worth turning over some rocks. I looked some at the components of the changes: births, deaths, migration. One interesting thing is that our "natural" growth rate (i.e. not counting migration) is lower than many other places. For example, in 2007 we had 12 births per thousand people and so did the metropolitan Boston area. (The detailed numbers for 2008 aren't available yet.) But they only had 7.8 deaths per thousand people, while we had 9.3. Ours is an older population than in many other states.

From this are we to infer that a large part of our population decrease has been caused by our relatively older population? That would make sense if deaths outpaced births in Rhode Island. However, they don’t and net population increase from births between 7/1/07 to 7/1/08 is 3,456. So our death rate while higher than Metro Boston and elsewhere has no bearings on our overall net population decrease.

So where is our net decrease coming from? Sgouros tries to make the connection to affordable housing.

In other words, the more expensive the housing in a town, the more likely those schools are to have fewer kids today than in 2004. Our population loss is as likely to be an affordable housing issue as it is anything else.

He comes to conclude that because we don’t have affordable housing in RI more people are leaving our state versus leaving other states. This sounds plausible until you look at other New England states and remember none of the other New England states had a net drop in population. The New England Public Policy Center published a report in Jan 2007 noting the percentage of low income families spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing. It would seem the higher this number is the more expensive - relative to each state - it is to rent within that particular state.

The numbers are intriguing and suggest the opposite of what Sgouros argues. There were 69 percent of low income RI renters spending at least 30 percent of their income on rent. That’s a very large number, however it’s smaller in comparison to the 74 percent  by other New England states and 83 percent average nationwide. Thus, Sgouros inference falls flat against readily available data. There just is no correlation between affordable housing and falling population rates in Rhode Island.

Ok, so why is our population declining? I’ve decided to take a stab at this and plan to post my findings in the coming weeks. Here are a few of my working theories:

§        Decreased job opportunities: Essentially, we’re losing too many jobs and thus people are simply unable to afford to live here because there are no jobs.

§        Untenable tax rates: Personal and property tax rates are too high causing people to cross borders seeking tax shelter elsewhere.

§        Better bang for the buck: Similar job opportunities and tax structure but better benefits in other states. Consider it like this, if in two states you had to pay $20.00 a month for healthcare, but in one state your co-pay was $100 for an emergency room visit while the other charged only $25.00, if this type of ‘savings’ was across the board it might entice you to leave your current state, all things being equal.

If you have any other ideas that you believe could also be contributing factors, please let me know.