Population animation

An amazing animation that captures population growth by state. It looks like California passes New York at 1961.

2020 Census woes

The Washington Post recently ran a headline that said The 2020 Census is in deep trouble. And, explained the opinion piece, the stakes could be high:

It is already woefully underfunded, understaffed, underappreciated and behind schedule. But it will determine, in a major way, the future of our political parties, if not our democracy.

The nominee to run the 2020 Census has just been withdrawn.

Recently, more than 160 mayors sent a letter to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross confronting him with the realities of the situation. Citylab reports that the letter raises serious concerns while pointing out that the census is a constitutionally mandated activity that has been proudly undertaken since 1790. Of course, in the dynamic landscape of this administration, there are questions regarding whether Ross will still be around in 2020.

If we wait long, it will simply be too late to fix it. It takes years for Bureau to staff up and build the necessary infrastructure for the decennial census. What can be done? Should states intervene? Or will lawsuits by groups like the NAACP help?  Keep watching.

(In the meantime, explore TIGERweb)

Population pyramids

Although I think that population pyramids are most interesting when made for smaller communities, the website, World Population Pyramids, lets you see them for most countries around the world, from 1950-2030. I found the graphs for Vietnam, which has undergone dramatic change during that period, to be fascinating. While many are so symetrical as to make you question whether they measure male and female distinctly, Qatar had fairly lopsided results.

I wish we had this for US counties.

Is it a trend, innovation, or fad?

Bloomberg reports that the fastest growing area in the US has no kids or crime. The place they are talking about is The Villages in Florida near Ocala.

This isn't a new trend. In 2008, Andrew Blechman's Leisureville looked at the phenomena of retirement communities with a particularly close examination of The Villages. The NYTimes review of his book suggested that he had some less than kind words about the community-building interests of participants in this trend:

Blechman, the father of a young child, descends with a point of view. Retirement utopias, which first appeared in Arizona in the 1950s, are made possible by court decisions allowing segregation by age, where comparable segregation by race or religion would shock the conscience. Retirees like the Andersons leave towns that spend 55 percent of their budgets on the school system for subdivisions where the money goes to adult self-indulgence. As Blechman says, the resulting so-called life can’t “hide the fact that these communities are based on a selfish and fraudulent premise” and that Americans pay “the high societal price of this exclusionary lifestyle.”

But is this a just a fad? As the baby boomers start reaching their retirement years, they are discovering that it might be difficult to jump on this bandwagon. Last year Emily Badger wondered whether Boomers will be able to sell their houses and move to golfistans. She quotes Arthur C. Nelson who said that 77% of the demand for new construction of suburban single-family homes was driven by white baby boomers. But as they reach an age where driving is dangerous, mowing is a hassle, and where urban minorities are the new majority, the market might be different. She quotes him saying:

“My suspicion,” Nelson says, “is that many hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of those households in the 2020s to 2030 and beyond will simply give up the house and walk away.”

And now we are seeing that crushing student debt and a love for cities are reinforcing the trend with the Millenials delaying home ownership and trending towards living in downtowns and urban hubs where they live with friends and rent longer than the Boomers were expecting.

The next decade could be very interesting. Especially if there is another housing collapse looming in the distance.