Out-migration of young people is threatening the health of Upstate New York, the New York Times in an article chronicling the population losses in Upstate New York.
“From 1990 to 2004, the number of 25-to-34-year-old residents in the 52 counties north of Rockland and Putnam declined by more than 25 percent,” the June 13 story by Times reporter Sam Roberts said. “In 13 counties that include cities like Buffalo, Syracuse and Binghamton, the population of young adults fell by more than 30 percent. In Tioga County, part of Appalachia in New York's Southern Tier, 42 percent fewer young adults were counted in 2004 than in 1990.”
The loss of young people is the “worse kind of loss,” Public Policy Institute President David Shaffer told the Times. “"You don't just magically make it up with new births," he said. "These are the people who are starting careers, starting families, buying homes."
The story noted that New York City’s population, and the population in five neighboring suburban counties, the population of 18-44 year olds increases 1.5 percent in the late 1990s. During the same time period, Upstate’s population in that age bracket declined by 10 percent.
The overall growth in Upstate New York during that period was the third slowest rate in the nation, behind only West Virginia and North Dakota, the paper said.
“Population growth upstate might have lagged even more but for the influx of 21,000 prison inmates, who accounted for 30 percent of new residents,” the story said. “During the first half of the current decade, the pace of depopulation actually increased in many places.”
The Times’ story included profiled a former Business Council employee, Melissa O’Brien, who left the state in 1996 after her husband, Matthew, found it difficult to find suitable employment.
“Matthew O'Brien, a graduate of Siena College in Loudonville, N.Y., was 26 when he left his home in Troy, just northeast of Albany, a decade ago for a better job offer down South,” the Times reported.
"I guess if I look back and think of the people I went to high school with, they all kind of went away to college, and that might have been a steppingstone to building a career," Mr. O'Brien said. "Not a lot did come back."
Melissa, who served as a meeting planner, writer and newsletter editor for The Business Council, now lives in Florida with Matthew and their two children.
The report did include the stories of some young people who had decided to stay in New York, including Laura Jeanne Hammond. The twenty-six-year-old University of Missouri graduate returned to Rochester in 2001 where she was hired as managing editor of Next Step Magazine
"My friends escaped to New York City for a life of poverty and I bought a house and started a family," Hammond told the Times.
Hammond may be one of a few people that returned home after college. The paper notes that “from 1990 to 2004, all but one of the state's 62 counties recorded a decline in 25-to-34-year-olds, ranging from 1 percent in Manhattan to 42 percent in Tioga.”
Only Tompkins County saw an increase in 25-35 year-olds.
"Make no mistake: this is not business as usual," Robert G. Wilmers, the chairman of M & T Bank in Buffalo, said at a 2006 shareholders’ meeting. "The magnitude and duration of population loss among the young is unprecedented in our history. There has never been a previous 10-year period in the history of the upstate region when there has been any decline in this most vital portion of our population."