Planning Decisions, Inc.

THE BOTTOM LINE FROM CHUCK LAWTON

Changing Patterns of Mobility

Published Saturday December 8, 2007

Last week I noted that the aging of Maine’s population involves more significant changes in our social structure than simply the inescapable fact of everyone getting a year older. Another interesting fact revealed by an examination of demographic data is our increasing mobility.

In 2006, the Bureau of the Census estimated Maine’s population at slightly more than 1.3 million. Of these, the census estimated that approximately 1.1 million or just over 85 percent lived in the same house as in 2005. For the nation as a whole, just over 83 percent of the population lived in the same house as in the previous year. Thus by this measure, Maine had a slightly more geographically stable population than the national average.

But this overall stability masks significant and growing mobility within our population. The census also noted that over 150,000 people, or 11.5 percent of our total population, lived in a different house within Maine in 2006 than they had occupied in 2005. While this total was slightly less than the national intra-state movement of 13.5 percent, it marked a significant increase from Maine’s 2002 rate of 7.7 percent and a vastly greater increase in intra-state migration than was true for the nation as a whole. Between 2002 and 2006, the number of intra-state migrants in Maine increased by over 56 percent (from approximately 96,000 to over 151,000) compared to an increase of only 18 percent for the nation as a whole. In short, census estimates indicate that there is a much more rapid increase in movement within Maine than is true for the nation as a whole. How much of this movement represents job seekers leaving rural areas and rim county towns in search of employment in southern Maine, how much represents sprawling suburbanites moving from towns and cities into the neighboring countryside and how much represents people—perhaps retirees—moving to outlying areas cannot be determined from these data alone, but it is clear that more of us are moving around now than did a few years ago.

Another aspect of our mobility is revealed by examining data on place of birth. In 2006, the census estimated that approximately 860,000 Maine residents were born in Maine. This represented about 65 percent of our total population, well above the national average of 59 percent born in their state of current residence. At first blush, this represents another example of our greater relative geographical stability. The major reason for this discrepancy from the national average, however, is because so few of us were born abroad. In 2006, the census estimated that just over 42,000 Maine residents were born abroad. This amounted to only 3.2 percent of our total population, far below the national average of 12.5 percent. Not surprisingly, given our distance from the nation’s southern borders where international immigration—legal and illegal—is so much greater an issue (and also, perhaps, because of our seasonal climate changes), Maine has not been a destination for a great many migrants from abroad.

If we exclude the foreign born, however, our greater relative stability disappears. In 2006 just over 420,000 of us were born outside of Maine, but within the U.S.—internal domestic migrants in other words. These people represented approximately 33 percent of our total population, virtually the same as the national average. In 2002, by contrast, only 30 percent of Maine residents had been born outside Maine but in the U.S., well below the national average that was the same 33 percent. In other words, by this measure of mobility—the number of people born in the U.S. but outside their state of current residence—Maine is growing more rapidly than the national average.

Again, these survey data alone say nothing about the composition of this increase. How many of these “out-of-staters” are retirees, how many are workers coming to take new jobs and how many are the children (or other dependents) of these immigrants we cannot tell. Nor can we tell (at lease from these data alone) how many people born in Maine are now resident in other states. What we do know, however, is that these people represent a growing share of our total population and will thus play a growing role in determining our future economic and social destiny whatever it may be. It behooves us, therefore, to pay increasing attention to this matter of increasing geographic mobility.

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