In 2016, I was in the middle of a project at the Urban Institute for the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation when the election results came in. The foundation had asked Urban to provide the context for its next strategic plan, charting and projecting the past and possible future trends in the population and economies of the six Great Lakes states where it focuses its investments: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.
Given the dominant narratives we’d encountered in the first months of the research, the election results probably shouldn’t have surprised us so much. We read and heard a lot about loss, about the people who had moved away and the businesses that had closed, moved south, or offshored. The desire to do something that would bring these people and businesses back to the Great Lakes states was palpable. At the time, I even saw this theme on advertising placards in the Metro, where Columbus was pitching itself as a great place for millennials to move. Meanwhile, the election’s presidential winner was promising to bring back manufacturing jobs.
We also commonly heard the “You’ll be back” theme long before I saw Hamilton: As climate change makes most of the rest of the U.S. unlivable because of drought, heat waves, hurricanes, and sea-level rise, they’ll come back. “We’ve got the water.” (Having grown up in New Mexico, I thought often of the adage coined somewhere west of the 100th meridian: Water flows uphill to money.) The slogan that came to mind reflecting this theme was: America’s Last Resort.
We worked hard to come up with evidence to shift away from these two narratives, both of which focus on loss and the expectations of a future that will only return to past glory at everyone else’s expense. We wrote up the results of that analysis in reports you can dig into from this landing page.
The data showed, hiding in plain sight, a more positive narrative—at least where population is concerned. Population doesn’t drop or stagnate only because people (and businesses) move out. Rather, births, deaths, in-migration, and out-migration are all at play in any place’s population change. It’s true that about 750,000 people moved from the Great Lakes states to other states from 2007 to 2015, but over 500,000 people moved in from other states, plus nearly 250,000 from outside the U.S. (We also estimated that around 100,000 people had moved out of the U.S. from these six states every year, but such estimates are pretty squishy because of data limitations.)
Overshadowing the migration that dominates the popular narrative, though, over 600,000 babies were born annually in the Great Lakes states, enough to balance the domestic net migration and to foster growth when international migration is factored in.
Extending the trend in these six states, we estimated that not until after 2030 would deaths outpace births—absent policies to stem the outflow and increase the inflow.
Of course it’s always awkward to bring mortality into the conversation, but those 600,000 babies born every year were like magic. Imagine Ohio Stadium practically at capacity, with all of its 100,000+ seats filled with a parent and a baby in arms. Every two months, every year until 2040, a new group of 100,000 babies.
Now imagine if we invested the creativity, funding, and concentrated effort to allow every single one of those babies and their families to enjoy good health, educational opportunity, and economic security. Imagine a Great Lakes region that became, as my colleague Erika Poethig said, the best place in America to raise a family. Now that would be a place to move to—and it would be a great place to stay, and to start a business. Not as a last resort, but as a top choice.
Urban’s deep expertise allowed us to include some of the nation’s foremost researchers on every stage of the life course on our team, yielding five briefs on evidence-based approaches to improving the lives of kids and their families. We also wrote a synthesis of this work. This project changed the way I think about the Great Lakes. It also brings home to me, as Congress debates two forms of infrastructure, that human-centered investments will have a much greater return on investment than new bridges and highways that often fuel sprawl even in regions that aren’t growing. Probably more than transit too.
Most of all, this project persuaded me that all our attention to newcomers and the brain drain keeps us from seeing and supporting the people who don’t migrate, whether because they don’t want to or because they can’t.