As Deaths Outpace Births, Cities Adjust:
This city has passed a grim demographic milestone: More people are dying here than are being born.What demographers call a natural decrease has been occurring for years in tiny rural towns and in some retirement meccas in the South. But the phenomenon is relatively new in metropolitan areas in the Northeast, the Rust Belt of the Middle West and Appalachia.
Hospitals are closing obstetrics wards and converting them to acute care. Local governments and other social service providers are adjusting to the emergence of entire neighborhoods where the average age is soaring, and private foundations are awarding scholarships to retain students and attract new ones.
In Pittsburgh, public school enrollment plummeted from about 70,000 two decades ago to about 30,000 and continues shrinking by about 1,000 a year.
Here's the graphic that goes along with the article:
Remember that the idea that cities should even have endogenous natural increase is pretty new; in pre-modern public health conditions urban areas were population sinks because of high mortality rates. Their growth was driven by migration from the endless population reservoirs of the rural areas. This situation is different because of the lack fo replenishment. Looking at the map it seems like a good gauge of areas that young people would find boring; Curry county on the Oregon coast for example is very isolated by road from large urban areas
Humanities & Social Science
Comments
An interesting thing about Pittsburgh is that there are essentially no Latinos. My impression of Pittsburgh was that it was quiet, but not (yet?) dying.
The universities, particularly Pitt via UPMC but also CMU, are a driving force in the local economy.
Posted by: Neziha | May 18, 2008 12:06 AM
My mom's side of the family is from southeast Ohio, and every time I've visited there, it seemed in decay. As for Pittsburgh -- well, all I know about it is from the movie Wonder Boys, but there too it seemed doomed.
Posted by: agnostic | May 18, 2008 4:46 AM
Great article in the NYT. But the question is, why did the local economy become so unattractive? Why is there no replacement for the dwindling heavy industry? Leftish socialist economic policies perhaps? To strong unions in the past?
My guess is that young people are voting with their feet. The older generations, especially the babyboomers, were more concerned with their own future than with that of their children. Now their childrens generation is leaving for greener pastures and by doing so refusing to support the old ones.
In the last part of the article an academic says that Pittsburgh benefits of, for instance, Medicare dollars because of the retirees. I guess that when the babyboomers retire and Medicare becomes to expensive, rampant inflation will take care of that Pittsburgh "benefit". I believe a lot of american retirees already are in serious trouble because of the recent price hikes.
Posted by: Bert | May 18, 2008 5:49 AM
Most of the Rust Belt cities are dwindling: Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, and I think St. Louis. Basically if a city loses its major industry it has to reconstitute itself. Pittsburgh in 2030 will be a perfectly nice place, smaller than the Pittsburgh of 1960 and on most ways completely different. I've read more than one story in the last decade about how Pittsburgh is now a good place to live.
It's not really a sign of doom if a lot of people end up living in different places than they were born. The rural areas have been depopulating for decades. North Dakota's highest census count was 1930.
Posted by: John Emerson | May 18, 2008 11:17 AM
This is an interesting map, Razib. I think it says alot about where people are able to find work.
Posted by: Sandra Porter | May 18, 2008 1:32 PM
What shocks me is if we are having this problem why are American's so, afraid of people from other countries? This is a country of Immigrants after all the early settlers killed off the Native Americans therefore, we should be more respectful of people with different backgrounds. Instead, Americans have been treating people that come here from other countries as if they are going to steal America back!
Posted by: Kimmie | May 22, 2008 12:10 AM