Note to Rural Legislators: All Your Base are Belong to Us

I’ve been singing the “Idaho is Urban” song for many years now, whether it was my “This Urban Idaho” article, or my “Myths of Idaho” presentation at Ignite Boise 1. Then all of a sudden this week we get not one but TWO articles confirming what all of us who don’t serve in the legislature already know: urbanization in Idaho and the U.S. is a continuing trend.

An article in the Statesman discussed what 2009 Census data revealed:

The latest U.S. Census figures released last week estimated that 23 rural Idaho counties had more people moving out than moving in during a 12-month period ending in June 2009. That’s the largest number of counties recording out-migration since 26 of the state’s 44 counties experienced the same trend between mid-2000 and mid-2001, the last major recession.

The figures, released by the Idaho Department of Labor, show more than 3,200 people moved out of those counties. Statewide, the data show the Gem State’s population increased by nearly 19,000, or 1.2 percent, making Idaho 12th strongest nationwide. Of that population increase, 29 percent was in Ada County; 13.6 percent in Canyon County, and 13 percent in Kootenai County.

As we learned from the Brookings Mountain Monitor report last week, this is fairly typical. One of the reasons that the smaller cities in the Intermountain West appear to leading the region out of the recession is because they are “exporting” their unemployment. Thus, when times get tough in rural areas, unemployed workers move to population centers to find work, and the unemployment rate in the rural areas goes down.

But not only are people moving out of the hinterland to the city, within the city they are moving closer to the core. For the second year in a row, the EPA has found that housing starts in urban areas are increasing. You can read the updated report for 2010 at the EPA’s website.

Attention Idaho Legislators: learn it, know it, live it - the few remaining souls in the hinterlands have left, and they are in our cities. Said another way, all your base are belong to us.