Duluth’s population gets younger
May 11, 2011 at 7:00 pm in Duluth News Tribune
While the rest of the state ages, Duluth’s median age has fallen as more young professionals find careers here. Continue Reading
Duluth’s population gets younger
12 Comments
I’m sure the conservatives who like to complain about Duluth’s aging population and all the young people moving away because of the terrible DFL city administration will find some way to make this look bad….
Hot debate. What do you think?
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I am by no means a conservative but did you not read the article?
“Tony Barrett, professor of economics at the College of St. Scholastica, said the increase in college students accounts for a large portion of the median age increase.”
I think he meant median age decrease… but what you have is bunch of college students that don’t contribute nearly as much as a “professional” to the local economy. It’s better than a kick in the eye but a bunch of college students and service industry jobs won’t really boost the local economy. I would be interested to see what happened to the median age of the Duluth metro area. I suspect there wasn’t much ovarall change and during the housing boom most of the older, higher income professionals moved outside the city limits.
Another quote from the article that was kind of telling…
“In this community, it’s more about who you know rather than what you know.”
That tells me that overall not much has changed in Duluth.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
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“In the meantime, a sometimes-invisible trend began with young professionals moving to Duluth to take their “second jobs out of college.”
What about that? Isn’t it good that people are moving to Duluth to take higher up jobs than they had before? Jobs that they are probably likely to stay in for a while.
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“Local economists say the city has become a mini-hub for health care, engineering, architecture, legal, computer science, university, research and other high-tech businesses that need not just well-educated but experienced young professionals.”
What about that? You don’t think that all of those areas contributed significantly to Duluth’s younger population?
This article is literally loaded with things I could quote here to show you that the younger population is coming largely from jobs, not college students. Duluth has always been a “college town” and the number of college students has not really skyrocketed in the past 10 years.
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Seriously? Taking up their second job after college… Moving up from what the Burger King? Of course it’s a local hub… What other local hub is Duluth competing with? Ashland? Cloquet? Twig? If you think the increase in college students in Duluth in the last 10 years does not far outweigh the number of new professionals please pass whatever you are smoking.
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I think this is pretty easy to explain – UMD has grown by more than 4,000 students in the last 10 years. The overall population has stayed about the same…so, we have 4,000 people who left or died, to be replaced by 4,000 college aged people…so the median age of Duluth declines by a year or two.
I don’t know if I’d read too much into this. It’s nice to imagine lots of young professionals coming and starting families and all that, but I don’t really think that’s what’s happening…(look at school enrollments if you want to see evidence of families, not median ages…)
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I’m sure the liberals who like to pretend we live in Utopia will find some way to make this look good. Oh wait…
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Duluth still needs to gain a lot of good paying jobs in order to increase its population. We need a lot more young people to come here, work here, pay taxes here, stay here and start a family! The Twin Cities offers way too much in the way of jobs, culture and amenities to make it the destination of college graduates. Let’s keep the kids who walk off stage with their diplomas and leave the area.
Well-loved. Like or Dislike:
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I don’t think one of our goals, as a city, should be just to increase our population. What is wrong with a mid-size city? Clearly a few decades ago the shift was away from blue collar jobs to white collar jobs which typically pay more.
Duluth is a great place to live, we have so many cultural assets and, of course, our natural beauty is a huge draw for people. It seems education is the answer if you want to stay in Duluth…at least if you are educated in the right field.
We are fortunate to have three great colleges in the area turning out hundreds of graduates each year and because so many of them come from areas outside Duluth, it is not logical to expect to retain them all here.
I have long said that the real reason our population remains fairly stable is that so many young families choose to have fewer children…when I was young it was not uncommon for a family to have five or more children…now, the three child family is far less common.
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I think the shift has been from blue collar jobs to white collar and unemployed.
You grow or you die.
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Duluth needs to be over 100,000. The natural beauty of the place can only take us so far and it certainly doesn’t bring us high paying jobs. It brings us minimum wage tourism jobs and the main economic impact goes to a handful of families in this city. Bring in a good white or blue collar job source and lets start to build the city up. More people means more tax dollars. We will never be huge like the Twin Cities but we are too small right now.
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Here’s the thing. If anybody expects a lot of manufacturing type jobs coming to Duluth, they are going to be very disappointed. Duluth just isn’t a good place to have a manufacturing plant in general. It’s too far away from any major population areas. That means more transportation cost and longer lead times to get your products to market. Manufacturers want to reduce both if they expect to remain in the US and compete with China manufacturing. That’s why there are a lot of manufacturers that build their plants within an hour of major metro areas. Duluth is a bit too far from Minneapolis to make the city enticing. So, it makes sense to entice the jobs that are being brought in and are included in the article. Research, architecture, engineering. Those jobs don’t require shipping a product.
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Sounds like good news for Duluth. Congrats.
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