Art Woolf is a columnist for VTDigger. He recently retired as an associate professor of economics at the University of Vermont.
Although the main focus of everyone’s attention these days is on COVID-19, the state and federal governments are still collecting and releasing data that provide insight on underlying and longer-term trends important to an understanding of the Vermont economy. The Census Bureau just released information that gives us a better picture of what’s happening to populations in each of Vermont’s 14 counties.
Since 2010, Vermont’s population has declined by about 2,000 people. That decline happened in most of the state, with 10 of the state’s counties losing population over the last nine years. The only counties with more residents than were counted in the 2010 Census were all in northwestern Vermont — Chittenden, Franklin, Lamoille, and Grand Isle.
We now know why those changes occurred. For one, eight of the 10 counties with declining populations experienced more deaths than births — what demographers call the “natural rate of population increase,” or in this case, the natural rate of decrease. That includes all four southern Vermont counties (Bennington, Rutland, Windham and Windsor) and the three Northeast Kingdom counties (Caledonia, Essex and Orleans).
That is a very troubling sign for the long-term demographic and population health of those counties. Deaths will continue to outnumber births in those counties, and indeed for the state as a whole.
Mathematically, it means those counties, and Vermont, will continue to age, and age faster than the nation. Demographically, it means fewer students in schools, more people over 65, and fewer people in their prime working ages.
Economically, it means it will be more difficult for businesses and other employers in those counties to find workers to replace retirees and for new businesses to grow and prosper. And since older people use more health care resources than younger people, those counties will have more need for physicians, other health care professionals, and beds in assisted living centers.
That deaths outnumber births is not necessarily a problem for an economy if it is compensated by migration of people from outside of the state, or county, into the region. But Vermont has experienced a net out-migration of people over the past nine years — more Vermonters moving out of state than people moving in from other states — as have 11 counties.
The only counties where more people moved in than moved out were Grand Isle, Lamoille and Orleans. And they had a combined net gain of only 600 people, an almost trivial positive number. It might as well be zero. All the other counties experienced a combined net out-migration of 11,500 people since 2010.
Even in Chittenden County, the county with the largest population and fastest growth in the state, 2,300 more people left than moved in. In Rutland County, with a population less than half of Chittenden, net out-migration was almost equal to Chittenden County’s level.
The only other source of population change is immigration, and except for Caledonia, every county added some immigrants over the past nine years. However, most immigrants — nearly three-quarters of the 7,500 people who moved into Vermont from other nations — moved into Chittenden County.
The 2020 Census numbers will give us the actual population counts in each county, and the state, but they are not likely to change the basic story: Vermont’s population is stagnant, the four southern counties and Northeast Kingdom are losing people, and only a few counties, primarily Chittenden, Franklin and Lamoille, are seeing any significant growth. But even in Vermont’s fastest growing counties, the population is growing more slowly than the U.S.
Will the COVID-19 pandemic change any of this? With people stuck at home for weeks, might there be more births nine months from now? Despite stories about this happening, it does not appear to be true. Will people rethink the desirability of living in large cities because it’s easier for diseases to spread? Again, I find this unlikely. Diseases and plagues spread through major cities in Europe in the Middle Ages and in Europe and the U.S. in the 18th and 19th centuries — and during the Spanish flu of 1918-1919. But people continued to flock to urban areas
