Talking straight about the exodus of young people from the North Country
Kids like Becca Johnson, from Rossie, New York, are leaving their small town worlds behind and choosing a much more urban life (Photo: Mark Scarlett)
Today NCPR launches an on-going series where we’ll be digging into all the complex questions that surround the issue of “brain drain” and the flight of young people and families from the North Country.
This has emerged as one of the most serious and contentious issues in our region. The issue drew national headlines earlier this month when Cornell University pointed to the loss of young people from Hamilton County in the Adirondacks.
The projections by Cornell’s Program on Applied Demographics also show the number of 30- to 39-year-old residents in the Adirondacks’ Hamilton County decreasing by mid-century to 160, down from 426 in 2010.
The number of 20- to 29-year-old residents will slip to 128 by 2040, down from 354 counted during the last census, according to the researchers.
The cause of this exodus has become a political football. Some local leaders in the Adirondack Park have pointed to environmental regulations and state land ownership as the culprit.
Some green advocates, meanwhile, have maintained that there’s no significant issue at all, suggesting that the greying of communities might not trigger serious impacts.
In this series, we’ll try to sort through the claims and get at the facts, to the degree possible.
Let me start this discussion by asking not for your opinion about the loss of young families from our region, but for your actual experience.
If you’re a parent, have you seen your kids move away? Does your neighborhood look greyer than it did twenty years ago? How about your church? Is your volunteer fire squad having a tough time finding young recruits?
How about school teachers? Are your class sizes dwindling? What are the trends for your school district in terms of enrollment?
I’d love to hear from folks chiming in inside the Adirondack blue line, and from In Boxers outside the Park. And I urge you all to check out this morning’s profile of Becca Johnson, a St. Lawrence County native who works now in Manhattan.
Her personal journey — and the experience of her family — I hope puts a human face on what is often seen as a political or statistical issue.
Comments welcome.
Tags: demographics, economy, vanishing youth, youth
Just for some perspective on young people leaving the NC. My parents and their siblings on my fathers side, 6 of them born in the tri lakes between 1918-1930. All left for college out of state. 4 left permanently taking jobs related to their college majors in law, education and finance. One returned after 20 yrs away to work as an employee of a small business, one went to work at a government job locally. So 2/3rds of the family left in the early to mid 40’s never to return. On my paternal side there were 6 siblings, none went to college, all stayed in the area and raised families surviving on low paying jobs(sometimes 2 jobs), again all born between 1924-1935. From my perspective it would seem like education is a major factor in where a lot of NC people ended up. This trend still seems true today, for myself who graduated HS in the 70’s, most of my classmates who went on to graduate college never returned and I watch as my childrens classmates just recently graduated are following the same pattern.
This is a bit of a ramble, but I’ve been holding it in for a while now :) I moved back up here from my husband’s hometown after the birth of my first baby. I wanted him to grow up near his grandparents, who have been here since the late 80’s. That was six years ago. I will be leaving the NC again when school gets out at the end of June. In the interest of keeping things civil, I don’t want to name the town I live in. However, I do want to note that though it is close to the Adirondacks, the culture is very different than that of, say, Saranac Lake. In secret, I call it a beautiful hole. Yes, the landscape is gorgeous, but not enough to cancel out the nepotism, abuse and supported incompetence we’ve experienced here in terms of our worklives. The former poster was correct. Where I live, and again, I’m not saying it’s this way all over the NC, who you know is more important to getting and keeping a job than your skills and experience. It would be easy to just write this off by thinking that my husband and I must just be very unpleasant people, but really we’re not. And I should add that we’re both well educated. It is just incredibly hard to get a fair shake here if you’re an outsider (which, amazingly after twenty some odd years, I still am). The problem of good, fulfilling work combined with the fact that we have to drive about an hour to sit in a bookstore or see a movie… Well, to be blunt, it’s just not worth staying here. Now the interesting thing about our situation is that the town we are moving to (kind of in the mid-south) is roughly the same size as the town we live in here. Very rural and very (I should note that it’s my husbands hometown) welcoming. It also has a city of about 30k within a 20 min drive. Taxes and fees of all kinds are low. There’s also a university, a performing arts center, bike lanes and a multi-trail running park, a bookstore, a stadium seating movie theater, rock climbing and bouldering, kayaking/white water rafting, hiking, national forests and reeeaaallyy excellent mexican food. We will make enough with the job my hubby landed (within two weeks of getting back there) that I can stay home and take care of our kids and start the small farm we’ve wanted for so long. The best part, my parents are going to follow soon after. So you see, there is nothing (aside from some really dear friends and, of course, NPR) that makes me regret leaving.
I think that nepotism, favoritism, and “who you know” being more important than “what you know”, while most certainly has more than its fair share of truth, and is perhaps somewhat more prevalent due to the scarcity of job opportunity in the North Country, is also nothing unique to the North Country, or to the few large employers here (Alcoa, NYPA, the universities, etc.). You do find that everywhere. But I also think a lot of it, like most things in life, boils down to timing. You can pound the pavement, and your head against the wall, but it usually comes down to simply being at the right place at the right time.
But Best of Wishes, Alison, to you and your family in your upcoming move. Maybe having been up here 20 years now, it’s just time for a change for you.
I do think nepotism becomes more pronounced when there are fewer jobs in a particular region.
There just is not economic growth here compared to most other rural areas in the country. The fact is we live in a poverty filled area, that is why as Allison points out we have a lot of nice “holes”.
I am not sure I know the answer I do know it goes far beyond being more “youth friendly”.