Editor’s note: This commentary is by Matthew Hoffman, of East Dummerston, a rural sociologist with a focus on natural resource management and rural community development, who works in economics and sociology department at the University of Southern Maine.
[L]ast summer, Gov. Phil Scott made national news by signing a bill that will pay out-of-staters $10,000 if they move to Vermont while working remotely at their out-of-state jobs. This Remote Worker Grant Program began accepting applications in January. Scott is not the only one interested in attracting more people to Vermont – increasing the population is also a key goal of the Southeastern Vermont Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy.
Many Vermonters, however, are alarmed at the idea of bringing more people into the state and the kind of impact this might have on the landscape and community character. During the last half of the 20th century, Vermont lost two million acres of farmland to development. What is especially interesting though, is that the degree of development is not directly tied to the amount of population growth. During the 1980s, for example, Vermont’s population grew by less than 10 percent, while the amount of developed land increased by more than 25 percent. The amount of newly developed land per new resident at this time was more than twice the national average — higher than in either New Hampshire or Colorado. While the rate of land development slackened somewhat during the 1990s, it continued to exceed that of population growth, with the total amount of developed land increasing by 60 percent between 1982 and 2003, even as the population grew by only 19 percent during roughly the same period. Thus landscape destruction is more a function of bad planning than of population growth per se.
Do Vermonters benefit from population growth? In his commentary on Feb. 3, Vermont naturalist Jim Andrews rebutted the idea that population growth lowers taxes, offering evidence from Addison County. The research that Deb Brighton has carried out for the Vermont League of Cities and Towns supports Jim’s conclusions, making it clear that taxes on the average-value house are actually highest in towns that have experienced the most population growth and which have the largest tax bases. This is because these towns are burdened with providing services to a larger population. Of course, the per-resident cost of service provision will vary depending on the quality of land use planning, with compact village centers requiring less expense per resident than a dispersed settlement pattern.
While it is clear on the face of it that population growth doesn’t eliminate poverty — if you are unsure on this point, make a tour of American cities — pro-growth rhetoric has always been central to American politics at the city and state level. While this is partly due to confusion about the relationship between population and taxes, it is mostly because many in the business community benefit from population growth and the concomitant increase in shoppers, newspaper subscriptions, property values, new construction, and clients of all kinds. In other words, population growth creates opportunities for some people to profit, even when it doesn’t improve the economy as a whole or community well-being in general.
That said, there are rural communities that suffer from too small a population. When the population sinks to the point that there are too few shoppers to keep the local store open, too few students to run the local school cost effectively, too few animal owners to keep a vet in business, and so forth, there can be a cascading loss of services that sends the community into a downward spiral as it becomes harder to attract and retain residents in a place with few amenities or jobs, and harder to attract businesses to a place with few customers.
There is also an element of sense in Scott’s desire to attract residents with out-of-state income. Reports by Headwaters Economics highlight the fact that investment and retirement income are the largest and fastest growing types of income in the western U.S. The important thing to note is that these incomes arrive in the west, along with small-business owners who can move their companies anywhere, as part of a phenomenon known as amenity migration — people and capital moving to places of high natural amenity in order to enjoy a high quality of life.
The lesson is that if we want to attract people to Vermont, the best way to do it is by protecting those things that make Vermont special, along with those public services that contribute to a high quality of life anywhere. This means protecting the natural beauty and ecological integrity of the landscape; supporting our tradition of small-scale farming and forestry; investing in high-quality and not overly centralized public schools; and ensuring that land use planning creates vibrant town centers while protecting the countryside. If we can do this, people will move here without having to be paid to, and we will be prepared to maximize the benefit and minimize the costs of increasing the population.
