Beyond Red & Blue

Is Boston mostly white again?

Ever since the 2000 Census showed that Boston's non-Hispanic whites had dipped ever-so-slightly below 50 percent of the total population, there was been a lot of talk about the symbolism of being a "majority minority city" and what that means for politics and the business community. But the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that demographic trends are reversing:

In [many large] cities, whites are still leaving, but more blacks are moving out. Boston lost about 6,000 black residents between 2000 and 2006, but only about 3,000 whites. In 2006, whites accounted for 50.2% of the city's population, up from 49.5% in 2000. That's the first increase in roughly a century.

Conor Dougherty writes that "white flight" in such cities as Atlanta and Washington, DC, may have come to an end, and there may now be a "black flight" to the suburbs.

Worcester goes from winner to loser; Lowell does the reverse

Here's a follow-up map to the one showing population changes in Massachusetts from 2006 to 2007. This one highlights which cities and towns moved from the "gaining population" to "losing population" column, or vice versa, in the latest Census Bureau estimates.

Note that a lot of Boston's closer suburbs, especially to the north and west, gained population after losses earlier in the decade (or, perhaps more accurately, gained housing units, since new construction pretty much guarantees new residents). In contrast, several communities in Worcester County and south of Boston stopped growing. The five largest communities to shift to the "gaining" category were Lowell, Newton, Framingham, Malden, and Arlington. The five largest communities that moved to the "loss" column were Worcester, Medford (ha!), Revere, Methuen, and Salem.

Danvers tops population growth; Chelsea comes in last

Today's Boston Globe has the latest town-by-town Census figures here. Below is how things look on the map, with most of the growth from 2006 to 2007 in the outer suburbs. (Danvers grew fastest overall; Billerica had the biggest growth among communities of more than 30,000.) Both ends of the state -- the Berkshires and Cape Cod -- lost residents.

Births vs. deaths

The Census Bureau recently published county-by-county data on population changes from 2006 to 2007 (see previous post), giving us lots of opportunities for cartographical noodling. The two maps below (one a close-up of the Northeast) compare the number of births recorded by county last year with the number of deaths recorded in the same time period. Some of the larger counties at one extreme or the other are highlighted.

In most of the country, there were more than enough births to offset deaths, but there are large patches where the opposite is true. Some of the counties in this category are retiree magnets (Florida), but most are small, rural areas that are apparently not hospitable for young families for various reasons (no jobs? no affordable housing?). These counties are concentrated in the Great Plains states and the Appalachia region.

Much of the West and South are in the opposite situation. But families are not necessarily swarming to the great open spaces. The birth-death ratio is highest in counties close to major cities, including Denver, Salt Lake City, and Washington, DC.

More maps to come, with a less ghoulish bent...

What's the matter with Kansas now?

USA Today has a cool set of maps based on county-by-county population trends from 2000 through 2007. The most striking thing is that Kansas and other Great Plains states are losing people by every measure: raw population change, "natural increase" (births over deaths), migration to and from other states, and international immigration.

Massachusetts is still growing in large part because of immigration.

UPDATE: The new Census data indicate that two counties in Massachusetts have lost population since 2000: Barnstable (because deaths outnumbered births by almost 6,000) and Berkshire (because about 3,500 more Americans moved out than moved in).

As for the rest, six counties have gone up in population primarily because births outnumbered deaths (Bristol, Essex, Nantucket, Norfolk, Plymouth, and Worcester), and the other six have gone up primarily because of an influx of international immigrants (Dukes, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, Middlesex, and Suffolk).

Pew's Religious Census

In other demographic news, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life today released its massive U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, which is based on 35,000 respondents from every conceivable affiliation. Pew tells us that 0.4 percent of the US population belongs to the Church of God Cleveland Tennessee, and 0.3 percent belongs to the Unitarian (Universalist) church. (Wiccans are in the "less than 0.3 percent" catch-all category.)

Massachusetts and Connecticut/Rhode Island (the latter two states are counted as one) stand out as the most Catholic in the US, with 43 percent of the adult population in that church. (Click here to get neat maps that allow you to see the breakdown for each state, or see the table on page 100 of the full report.) But the Catholic Church seems to be changing rapidly. For one thing, it's getting smaller: 31 percent of adults say they were raised Catholic, but only 24 percent say they now consider themselves Catholic. (Conversely, only 7 percent of adults say they were raised without any religious instruction, but 16 percent now say they are unaffiliated with any church.) At the same time, it's becoming more Hispanic: 85 percent of all Catholics over the age of 70 are non-Hispanic white, but only 47 percent of Catholics between 18 and 29 are in that category -- with 45 percent identifying themselves as Hispanic.

Besides membership numbers, the report has data on educational attainment, marital status, and the number of children typically raised by children in each religious group. The US Census doesn't touch this stuff, so the Pew report is probably the closest thing to an accurate reading of religion in America.

Baby boomers may be knocking off too early

USA Today's Sandra Block writes that Baby Boomers may be making a big mistake by retiring at 62, the first year they're eligible for Social Security benefits:

...millions of the oldest boomers may be about to make a colossal error — one that would be magnified by their record-setting longevity.

Over time, taking benefits early could mean a smaller payout, hefty taxes on their retirement savings and a heightened risk of outliving their money. In fact, the roughly 50% of the oldest boomers who the Social Security Administration estimates will tap their benefits starting this year will absorb a permanent 25% cut in benefits.

A 2004 MassINC study, The Graying of Massachusetts, warned of precisely this problem: "Many Massachusetts workers will face a stark choice in the coming years: Retire later or retire with less money." Read the report, as well as a transcript of a panel discussion of the topic, here.

The geography of cremation

This map is a little macabre, but the extent of the regional differences is surprising to me. In September, the Cremation Association of North America published a report in which it estimated that a record 33.53 percent of all deaths in the US "resulted" in cremation. (In 1990, the rate was only 17 percent.) But as seen on the map below, the state-level rates vary widely, from 10.9 percent in Mississippi (about where the US as a whole was in 1981) to 66.9 percent in Hawaii. Religious attitudes probably account for much of the difference; cremation rates are relatively low in the Southern Bible Belt (and in Mormon Utah, where the rate is 23 percent) and high in Western states where churchgoing is less frequent.

The CANA predicts continued growth, but there may be a ceiling to the popularity of cremation. According to a chart in the same report, the cremation rate hit 70 percent in Great Britain in 1992, but it's leveled off since then and is only at 72 percent now.

Here's a Web site that can kill an afternoon

Hundreds of Top 101 lists of cities, counties, and zip codes ranked by demographic, economic, and even meteorological factors. Here are a few in which a Bay State community made the No. 1 slot:

Northampton: Top 101 cities with the largest percentage of likely lesbian couples (counted as self-reported female-female unmarried-partner households) (population 5,000+)

Middleton: Top 101 cities with the lowest number of burglaries in 2006 per 10,000 residents (population 5,000+)

Brockton: Top 101 cities with the highest average wind speeds (population 50,000+)

Cambridge: Top 101 cities with the biggest local government salary and wages expenses per resident in 2004 in $ (population 10,000+)

Bliss Corner (actually, part of Dartmouth): Top 101 cities with the most residents born in Portugal (population 500+)

Has Burlington saved the Bay State's bacon?

Last December, the US Census Bureau estimated that Massachusetts had gained residents in 2006, after being the only state to lose population in both of the previous years. This summer, we got some more specifics, as the Census Bureau released data for all 351 cities and towns in the state, and I was suprised to learn that it was not the southeastern part of Massachusetts that turned things around. In fact, Cape Cod, which had been growing faster than the state as a whole for several decades, lost some 1,300 residents from 2005 to 2006, and is now at its lowest population level since the beginning of the decade. This is only an estimate, of course, and it's entirely possible that Cape Cod is still gaining people as a result of legal and illegal immigrants, students, and other groups that are often undercounted between complete censuses. But it's still remarkable that Cape Cod, and the southeast in general, is no longer driving population growth here.

Below are four maps that show geographic patterns in population change in Massachusetts. First, we see that last year's uptick in population was strongest in a scattered assortment of suburbs in all directions (save dead east) from Boston, but the adjoining towns of Burlington and Billerica registered the biggest jumps. Meanwhile, 160 of the state's 351 communities still lost population, which was slightly up from the 156 that lost population from 2004 to 2005.

The map below shows raw numbers rather than percentages, and the three biggest gainers (Burlington, Billerica, and Revere) grew by more people than the state did as a whole. Cambridge was the only other community to add more than 1,000 residents; that all four communites lie north of Boston goes against the perception that urban sprawl is mostly affecting newer suburbs to the south and west of the capital city. Boston itself is estimated to have lost almost 6,000 people last year, but the Census Bureau has admitted that it undercounted the city's population during the first half of the decade, so it could be off again.

The two maps below show the changes from 2000 to 2006, and the usual growth suspects (the Cape and Islands, MetroWest, South Shore) are more prominent here. We'll have to wait until next year to see if they pick up again, something that may depend on home prices and on zoning decisions by local governments.