College students give Boston an edge

By adamg on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 9:31am

Help Boston convince the Census Bureau we're really a bigger city - we break the 600,000 mark for first time in decades.

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Comments

A Sensible Compromise

By SwirlyGrrl on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 10:09am.

Students who live here year-round - like graduate students, married students, students in off-campus housing - should be counted. Dorm dwellers are a different story, as their "home of record" is likely elsewhere.

The demolition rate is interesting issue.

If the powers that be are torqued over losing a congressional seat, then Massachusetts should consider joining the 21st century and look at the reasons why people have left and not come back - and why they are flocking to other cities. Having lived in both places, you can't tell me that Portland, OR has grown 30% in ten years and is now larger than Boston because the weather is that much better! Like, maybe changing the way funding works so infrastructure is maintained, replaced, and built where it needs to be (rather than funded ad-hoc on a yearly basis)? Giving regional entities much stronger authority over housing and transportation and zoning?

People who are here are

By ShadyMilkMan on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 10:29am.

People who are here are always telling me why places like Portland are better... but your still here... I would be curious to see if a possible reason behind our having less people is that so many of our neighberhoods that used to be cramed with residents are now crammed with out of state students. Many of the old apartment buildings have given way to condo complexes that have less people per square foot then the apartments they replaced, and we have a substantial number of homes built prior to the 1950's and in many areas prior to the the turn of the 19th/20th centuries. How many areas have restrictive requirments on how many units you can have on a lot, and how many areas have minimum acreage zoning for even single family houses? You would be hard pressed to find, even in this soft market, any part of Boston that features rows of empty houses, so its not like we arent filling what we got! We are also much older then places like Portland that had the luxury of planning the majority of their city at a time when people didnt think 20 miles was an all day trip.

You are confusing Portland with Atlanta

By SwirlyGrrl on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 11:10am.

We are also much older then places like Portland that had the luxury of planning the majority of their city at a time when people didnt think 20 miles was an all day trip.

Portland was founded in the 1840s. Boston has burned at least a couple of times since then.

Part of what makes Portland attractive is that there has been an "urban growth boundary" for the city and surrounding area for 40 years, as part of comprehensive statewide land use planning.

Most of Portland proper was built out before WWII. My dad's house dates to 1895, as does his entire neighborhood. Large areas were built up in the 1920s and 1930s. Unlike Boston, however, there has been sensible design for where development went after 1970, when the further-out suburbs sprang up, complete with plans for roadways and public transit corridors, and for redevelopment as well. So when the Boston metropolitan area expanded post-war and through the end of the century, it sprawled out according to which town considered which people were most desirable and had enough money to buy snob-zoned land. Portland was contained and filled in according to a master plan designed to prevent "Californication".

Boston itself is attractive. That's why I live close in (6 miles), although I could do without buttheadded townies who act like they live in an isolated mountain hamlet that can't possibly need a rapid transit line than a community dependent on Boston that would be part of Boston if Boston were anywhere else.

What makes the area unattractive overall is how surrounding areas filled with sprawl development and then enshrined that sprawl as though God himself decreed it, driving up driving distances and housing costs to the breaking point. The lack of any regional ability to solve the resulting regional problems has put Boston on many a corporate and individual "no" list. Professionals who are unwilling to take slightly more pay for longer commutes and much higher housing costs than other areas are just the tip of the iceberg - working-class jobs also suffer because manufacturers and service centers won't locate where they have to pay high wages to offset the housing costs.

I don't really care if Boston is losing population and Massachusetts is losing population and the state loses another rep. That isn't due to students cramming in and not being counted - it is because you don't have families of seven plus grandma in every two bedroom floor of every triple decker. I just find it highly amusing that the same people who refuse to change the broken systems and are responsible for the policies that drive people away are desperately petitioning the census to just count differently, rather than actually solve the underlying problems.

(I'm still here because my husband has never lived elsewhere and relocating kids is a drag. I'll move in a heartbeat if my organization opens the Pacific Rim office that they are considering.)

I think you're severely

By Rob on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 1:08pm.

I think you're severely underestimating how old this city is relative to most non-east coast cities. The last big fire that decimated Boston was in 1872. That pre-dates the completion of the Back Bay and the subway!

Your solution of regionalization would be an improvement in some areas (consolidating school districts, police forces) and I concur that we need a more holistic approach to transportation funding. Regionalization has its problems too of course and can breed unaccountability (see: MBTA, MWRA).

Perpetuating a myth

By Gareth on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 1:33pm.

Why are you still perpetuating the myth that Boston's population is shrinking?

Yes, the population shrank from 1950 through 1980. But that's ancient history. Most cities were shrinking in that period. In the last three decades, the population has grown decade over decade for both the city of Boston and the Boston metro area every single decade, no matter if you count students or not. The difference the count makes is in the current total, but prior to the revision the count was still an increase over a decade ago. The state of Massachussets, meanwhile, has never lost population from one census to the next, not since 1790. It's just not growing as fast as those big empty Western states where you can whack up a new McMansion farm and a big box store anywhere you like. It'd probably grow faster if there weren't already people living most places instead of sagebrush.

The fact that people (such as yourself) continue to move to Boston from such benighted backwaters as Oregon is testimony to the fact that it's a very attractive city for medium-young professionals and highly educated snots from all over.

Good points

By Marc on Sat, 12/06/2008 - 11:59am.

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

city boundaries

By KLM on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 10:47am.

you also have to look at how different cities draw boundaries. in many places in the west, the entire inside of 128 (or maybe 495) would count as the city.

Correct, as in Jax, FL

By Sarcastic Sam on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 12:03pm.

Jacksonville FL's city boundaries equal the entire Duval County, FL. The entire county, is also the city in their case.

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who and the what now?

I always thought it was

By ShadyMilkMan on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 12:05pm.

I always thought it was funny that all of Suffolk county wasnt Boston, it just seems like it would make sense. Downtown Boston is right on the border of the city proper when it really should be the center.

That's partly because of annexation

By Sarcastic Sam on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 12:50pm.

Yeah, how many formerly-independent municipalities have been swallowed up by Boston: charlestown, hyde park, brighton, etc. It'd me much smaller and *maybe* less gerrymander shaped were it not for the annexations over the years.

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who and the what now?

Or it would be much less

By Rob on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 2:33pm.

Or it would be much less "gerrymander" shaped if Brookline had in fact been annexed by Boston in one of its many attempts to do so.

Yep, and a few other differences

By eeka on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 8:55pm.

Pretty much from, what, Ohio westward (?) there are unincoporated areas that aren't inside ANY city. And things like police departments and libraries and whatnot are much less dependent on cities and are more regionally based.

http://1smootshort.blogspot.com

Florida has lots of unincorporated areas too

By Sarcastic Sam on Tue, 12/09/2008 - 10:24am.

Gradually less and less so as their population 'splodes from ~~wussies~~ folks seeking warmer weather moving there from the North. But still lots of rural areas and some communities of people outside of city limits. They rely on County police forces.

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who and the what now?

Still Desirable but Expense Pushing Some Out

By JasonL on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 12:03pm.

Boston continues to be a very attractive city for creative, young professionals seeking a hip, intelligent, urban setting. This fact hasn’t changed over the years (it’s not like this is Cleveland or countless other dull American cities). One could argue that our population loss has been attributed to all of the blue-collar folks being priced out (perhaps due a lack of affordable housing stock)? There may be a little truth in Boston being an undesirable place due to crappy weather but I do think that point is exaggerated a bit too much.

Cleveland doesn't suck

By zbert on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 12:12pm.

you just have to pay attention to what's there -- symphony, arts, much easier access to concerts than you can get in larger cities, pro sports, and they do a version of Haymarket that's about 100x better than Boston's (permanent indoor venue open 4 days a week, and yes you need a car but the parking is free). check it out sometime.

Students

By pahkcah02 on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 1:55pm.

It sounds like Menino wants his population numbers to be as big as his ego. Counting college students as full time residents?? Is he absurd?? I went to UMass-Amherst and I've never read a single article about some Amherst pol with an overinflated sense of self-worth insisting that the 30,000 students in that town are part of the census population.

Corrupt Boston politicians, inadequate public transporation, high rents, crumbling infrastructure, subpar schools, rampant townie mentalities, and half-assed public services. Combine that with lousy weather, which the mayor can obviously do nothing about, and it really comes as no shock that young professionals are leaving Boston for the sunbelt. It would be considered a victory if the new population census is consistent with previous results.

Boston is a unique American city that is always going to attract a highly educated population. However, if the city was as great as the Mayor thinks it is then he wouldn't be desperate enough to pad his population stats with full time college students. If Mayor Menino would stop playing smoke-and-mirrors with the population numbers and instead channel that energy into actually improving the city then Boston might actually move into the 21st century. Let's not forget that people are naturally attracted to cities that aren't a complete hassle to live in.

"Boston: It's a wonderful place to visit but I certainly wouldn't want to live there."

Fail

By Gareth on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 2:19pm.

"it really comes as no shock that young professionals are leaving Boston for the sunbelt."

Educate yourself by looking up some stats. More people are moving to Boston than leaving Boston, and that's been the case for decades. Boston's population has grown in every census since 1980, qithout counting the students, and the population of Massachusetts has grown in every census since 1790. The political tactic of counting students who actually live here is more reasonable than Utah's trick of counting the "elders" out on mission abroad for two years.

If you really want to relocate to the sunbelt, feel free. Plenty of other people would like to live here. I hear the houses are getting cheap in Arizona.

I fully agree, I stand by my

By ShadyMilkMan on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 2:30pm.

I fully agree, I stand by my stand by responce to the emptying of Boston:

Find me the rows of empty houses/condos that would have to exist to prove that we were losing population. From where I stand I see people stuffed into every nook and cranny in every part of the city. In some areas basements with no windows are occupied by families even. If we were losing population we wouldnt have people paying 1,200 for studios on the extreme outskirts of town, regardless of how nice the building is.

Population Paradox

By SwirlyGrrl on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 2:47pm.

The Boston area is still losing a few people or stagnant if you count on the same basis as 1980 census methods. There may be more students living off campus and not in boarding houses and such, but there has been an exodus of people who born here in the 1960s and 1970s.

This is due, in part, to excessive housing costs. The cost of housing repels people who relocate, and it forces up wages for industry.If you can't find a job or somebody offers you a job in a place where you can afford a higher standard of living and a bigger house, you will probably move.

So how can the Metropolitan Statistical Area population be stagnant or losing population if we don't count the students, Shady? Well, you are right that most of the buildings are fully tenated. You are wrong that this means as many or more people as ever.

Why? Smaller families mean fewer people per unit.

When Boston was nudging 800,000 people at mid-century, people were living in multi-generational groupings in the same unit. They were living in those units in numbers far beyond what is often considered to be acceptable or even permitted today. It was not uncommon to find grandparents, parents, and kids under one roof in what would now be considered an acceptable apartment for a family of three or four or a couple. I know people whose families lived like this at that time, and they didn't think it odd at all. When the younger generation moved out of their parents homes in city with their young families, that's when the population began to drop.

I'd venture to say most

By Rob on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 3:06pm.

I'd venture to say most families left the city of Boston during the time period you're talking about because of the schools as part of white flight from the busing situation. Many families even now leave the city if their child does not get into a good elementary public school or Boston Latin for the 7th grade.

More fun with numbers

By Gareth on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 4:37pm.

The census, without Menino's attempts to cook the books, shows that the population of Boston, since the 80s, has increased every decade. You're still trying to obfuscate that matter by bringing up the students. They have nothing to do with it. So this stagnant or losing population idea? Exodus? Stop telling tall tales; you should know better. The idea that the population in MA or Boston is declining is just hysterical yellow journalism with no basis in fact.

At mid-century, when the triple-deckahs were full of multi-generational families instead of yuppie dinks, there were also few tall residential towers. The increase in towers and conversion of commercial property means the population density has increased in some places (e.g. waterfront) while it decreased in others. Also, most of Boston's population drain mid-century was because of the same phenomena that led almost all major cities in the US to lose population at that time, including, as others have noted, white flight. Today, Boston still has very high population density - among major cities, only NY, SF and CHI surpass it in the US.

Do you know what MSA, ZCTA, etc. are?

By SwirlyGrrl on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 4:59pm.

Have you looked at comparisons of how data was gathered, estimated, corrected, validated and the like for each of the decennial censuses? Have you ever tried to knit the data sets while correcting for the likely or estimated consequences of these changes so as to standardize to a specific year?

If so, you would know that the US Census has changed its approach from 1980 to 1990 to 2000, mostly due to known issues of urban undercount in past census data. They even tried to estimate in 2000, but got shot down by the court system. The consequences of this are that 1970 and 1980 data are likely UNDER counted, meaning there was ACTUAL population loss into 1990 and 2000 even if it looked flat because of increasingly concentrated efforts to survey problematic populations.

I once did a sensitivity analysis surrounding these changes and how the numbers compared, as I was working with data from three eras. The errors in the earlier years are as much as 5-8% of the total population going uncounted. I'd be interested to hear your experience with these data files and their methodologies, Gareth.

The estimates for non-decade years are not actual counts, and that seems to be what Menino is trying to change by getting students included and altering the assumed demolition rates. What that won't change is the decennial census, which must be an actual count because it is used to apportion representation as required in the US Constitution.

Suuuure you did

By Gareth on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 5:14pm.

And I'm really a Schnauser.

The number of times you claim to be the world's greatest expert in truly disparate things here leads many of us to doubt your veracity. I'm sure you had fun playing with some data sets and assumptions about population as part of a class project in college, but I doubt your results were terribly important, and I'd lay even odds your project had nothing to do with Boston.

If you have any links to a... reputable... source stating your theory, with, say, adjusted numbers for each decade, I'd be interested to read it. As you no doubt know, links to the actual census data indicating an increase from 80 to 90 to 00 to now are a google away. But the way you keep bringing up Menino's additional students in connection to your idee fixe about Boston's mysteriously shrinking population (in growing housing stock, no less!) is so disingenuous that I hope you'll excuse me if I don't tend to credit your other backup arguments for much. After all, I've heard them before about such a multitude of things...

This was part of my dissertation research

By SwirlyGrrl on Fri, 12/05/2008 - 5:18pm.

So yes, I have dealt with these issues in the real data, at least to the satisfaction of my dissertation committee (given the bad press on undercounts, they were surprised it wasn't higher).

This is why I say that Boston has been losing some population or has been pretty stagnant for a couple of decades (it isn't a huge change) - those undercounts for 1970 and 1980 are known, and the enhanced efforts for 1990 and 2000 are well documented.