Robert David Sullivan 2

Gallup deems Massachusetts the most liberal and most Democratic state

Gallup's newest polls have self-identified Democrats outnumbering self-identified Republicans here by 34 points, the largest gap in the US. The percentage of respondents calling themselves "liberal" (29 percent) is also the highest in the country (outside of the District of Columbia).

But all is not lost for those wanting to unseat Gov. Patrick next year: Even in Massachusetts, slightly more people (30 percent) identify themselves as "conservative."

Florida hits a population wall

The St. Petersburg Times's James Thorner reports an estimate that Florida has lost population for the first time since 1946:

Most economic forecasters expect Florida's population dip to be short-lived. Scott Brown, chief economist for Raymond James Financial in St. Petersburg, sees it as a one-year anomaly. But it's a stunning one in a state that has been so reliant on surging population.

"We used to say the growth industry in Florida has been growth, kind of as a joke," he said.

In a state with no income tax, state and local governments count heavily on migrating retirees to boost revenue and create jobs. In fact, the lack of an income tax is part of the allure.

The recession-fueled collapse of stock prices last year stopped some of that. Retirees wanting to move to Florida either couldn't sell their homes up north or lacked a mortgage down payment after investment accounts took a pounding.

"That engine shuts off and you wonder where you're going to raise funds. There's no state income tax you can tweak. You can cut, cut and cut till people get fed up," Brown said.

The estimate of a 50,000 drop in population from April 2008 to April 2009 comes from the University of Florida's Bureau of Economic and Business Research, which tracks building permits and the opening/closing of electric company accounts.

Mass. population rebounds, but Berkshires and Cape Cod continue to slide

Earlier this month, the Census Bureau released estimates for city and town populations as of July 2008, and there are some clear regional patterns in the Bay State, as the maps below show (click each to make bigger). Overall, Massachusetts is rebounding from population losses earlier in the decade, but the Berkshires, Cape Cod, and South Coast cities are still losing residents.

The top and bottom 10 in terms of growth, both by percentages and by actual numbers of residents, are listed below. You can get an Excel spreadsheet for all 351 communities here, and the Boston Globe has a list of all communities ranked by size here. North Reading's big jump in population last year followed the construction of 1,249 new housing units in 2007, partly due to its adoption of a Chapter 40R "smart growth" district. 

Fastest-growing communities, 2007-08, by %
NORTH READING: 24.19%
BERLIN: 6.02%
BEDFORD: 4.32%
REVERE: 3.83%
CHELSEA: 3.70%
WINTHROP: 3.62%
GROVELAND: 3.37%
HANCOCK: 3.25%
BRAINTREE: 2.87%
STOW: 2.64%

Florida calls Boston "thick" (in a nice way)

Sociologist Richard Florida is subbing at Andrew Sullivan's blog, and today he puts another brick in his monument to cool, creative, and gay-friendly cities like Boston. (Remember that these are relative terms.) In his post "Where College Grads Are Heading," he crows a little bit at the apparent reversals of fortune in newer Sun Belt cities like Phoenix. (I already kicked the Arizona city here.)

Florida writes that larger, more diverse, and established cities like Boston and New York will do better at attracting college grads in a bad economy because they're "thick," and he's not talking about accents:

The appeal of big cities stems from a simple economic fact -- they offer thicker labor markets with more robust job opportunities across a wide number of fields.

Getting ahead in your career today means more than picking the right first job. Corporate commitment has dwindled, job tenure has grown far shorter, and people switch jobs with much greater frequency. The average American changes their job once every three years; the average American under the age of 30 changes their job once a year.

In today's highly mobile and economically tumultuous times, career success also turns on picking a thick labor market which offers diverse and abundant job opportunities. For new grads, picking the most vibrant location is an important hedge against economic uncertainty and the risk of layoff.

All of this is speculative; we don't yet have much data on migratory patterns since last fall's economic crash. We'll see if "thickness" is still a draw if, say, the banking industry recovers and the city of Charlotte suddenly has tens of thousands of jobs to offer graduates.

I wrote about Florida's theories in CommonWealth in 2005; see the article here.

Ryan is top baby name in Mass. and nowhere else

Bay Staters insist that Ryan is the best name for a newborn boy, but the rest of the country is "meh" about the moniker.

The Social Security Administration has posted baby names by state for 2008 (go here for new and historical data), and Massachusetts was the only state where the Irish-flavored Ryan was on top. Nationally, Ryan finished 18th, and the top names were Jacob, Michael, and Ethan. As the map below shows, Michael was big in the Northeast, while Jacob was strong in the Midwest and northern New England, and Ethan was a mostly Western tag. William dominates the South but isn't wildly popular anywhere else, and Daniel was big in only the biggest state (California). Jayden was first in Florida, and Britney Spears may be an explanation.

 

There were fewer geographical oddities with girls' names.

Everything you wanted to know about dying in Massachusetts

After our characterization as a "gloom and doom" organization, I hesitate to post this, but last week the state Department of Public Health released its Massachusetts Death 2007 report, and it's got some fascinating data in it. (See the press release here, or download the whole thing here.) 

The bottom line is that the death rate hit a record low in Massachusetts in 2007 (704 deaths for every 100,000 people) and that life expectancy hit a record 80.2 years. (See? Positive news!)

For only the second year, cancer was the leading cause of death, having overtaken heart disease -- which had been the leading cause since it overtook infectious disease in the late 1920s. See the dramatic change in the Powerpoint slide below. (The big spike in infectious disease deaths in the early part of last century coincided with an influenza epidemic.)

As the slide below shows, most major causes of death are much less frequent in Massachusetts than in the United States as a whole -- with the curious exception of nephritis, which refers to kidney-related diseases.

Hard times for moving companies, bubble wrap manufacturers

The US Census Bureau announced yesterday that the percentage of Americans who changed residences last year was the lowest since the feds began keeping records in 1948. Only 11.9 percent of Americans moved to a different home in 2008 (see Page 3 of this PDF).

The New York Times has its take on the new data here.

Our most mobile year was 1965, when 20.7 percent of Americans switched addresses (many going from city neighborhoods to cul-de-sacs). In 2000, the percentage was 16.1 percent; it's been below 15 percent ever since.

State-level data is not available yet, but the Northeast was the most stable region last year; only 8.2 percent of residents were reportedly living in new homes. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean that Northeasterners were happiest with their lot (or lots). Falling home prices in this recently overpriced region may be making it harder for people to sell their homes and move elsewhere with the profits.

The slowdown in geographic mobility has had one big psychological effect in Massachusetts: We're no longer losing population. As I report in the Spring issue of CommonWealth magazine (released today), Massachusetts "was the only Northeastern state with a net migration gain in 2008 that also represented an improvement over 2003."

Student diversity rises fastest north and west of Boston

Classrooms are getting much more diverse in every Massachusetts county except Suffolk (Boston), and the Bay State is an outlier in several immigration trends -- particularly in our paucity of Mexican-born residents. Those are some of the more interesting points gleaned from the interactive map and charts that accompany a discussion about immigration in today's New York Times.

The map allows you to see immigration flows from specific counties over the past century. Not surprisingly, Boston has been a focal point for Irish immigrants for more than 100 years, even as the number of transplants from the Emerald Isle has steadily fallen. On the other hand, few Mexican immigrants have made it to the Hub even compared to other Northern cities such as Milwaukee and Seattle. Unfortunately, the map does not allow to track trends for several immigrant groups that have high concentrations in Massachusetts, such as Brazilians and Haitians.

The Times package also includes charts on the "diversity index" of school systems in every US county. (The term is defined as "the percent chance that two students selected at random would be members of a different ethnic group.") As of 2006, the diversity index at the national level was at 61. In Massachusetts, it was at 44, up from 28 in 1987. During that period, the diversity index went up in every Bay State county except Suffolk, where it stayed frozen at 69 (even as the percentage of non-Hispanic white students continued to fall, from 32 to 18). Springfield's Hampden County had the second highest score on the diversity index (57, up from 45).

Boston's successful Census challenge may not be such a surprise

The Daily News Tribune reports that the state "could stand to gain anywhere between $2.5 million and $5 million in federal funding" as a result of a coordinated effort to challenge Census Bureau estimates of city and town populations. Sixteen cities and towns successfully argued that residents were undercounted, and the Census Bureau agreed by adding 21,295 people to its 2007 estimates. (Boston's number was revised from 599,351 to 608,352. The most recent change was to Nantucket's total, up from 10,531 to 11,060.) 

But anti-sprawl academic Wendell Cox writes at NewGeography.com that the Census Bureau seems to grant upward adjustments to complaining cities as a matter of course:

St. Louis has successfully challenged the Bureau of the Census estimate of its population five of the seven years from 2001 to 2007 (the most recent estimate). The total of additions from census challenges adds up to 43,000 people. This is a not insubstantial 12.4 percent relative to the approximately 348,000 2000 Census count for the city.

New mobility data: New Jersey more attractive than California?

New Geography.com has posted a map and state-by-state data on American mobility -- specifically, the percentages of non-immigrants who live in the same state in which they were born. (Hat tip: Brainiac.)

 

A few observations:

California is clearly no longer much of a magnet for other Americans. Outside of immigrants, 72 percent of the people now living there were born there; that's the same number as in North Dakota. (And there are no songs titled "North Dakota, Here I Come!" or "North Dakota Dreamin.'") The comparable number in 1990 was 60 percent.