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Editor's Notes

• #3: I want to start by talking about something other than housing, to highlight why it is so critically important to address the region’s housing needs. Over the coming decades, the Baby Boomers (born between 1945 and 1970) will be reaching retirement age, depleting the supply of our region’s most critical asset: a skilled, well-educated workforce. By 2030, nearly one million workers now over the age of 40—39% of all workers in the region—will have left the labor force. If current rates of births and migration continue, the current population of young adults is barely sufficient to fill the positions vacated by retiring Baby Boomers, much less provide the labor force needed for robust economic growth. I’d like to start with one of the preeminent challenges facing the region’s long-term economic fortune: labor force availability. MAPC recently developed population projections for the region which indicate that the region may not have enough workers to support a growing economy if current trends continue, and I’ll explain why. Over the coming decades, the Baby Boomers (born between 1945 and 1970) will be reaching retirement age, depleting the supply of our region’s most critical asset: a skilled, well-educated workforce. By 2030, nearly one million workers now over the age of 40—39% of all workers in the region—will have left the labor force. The current population of young adults is barely sufficient to fill the positions vacated by retiring Baby Boomers, much less provide the labor force needed for robust economic growth. Metro Boston attracts a large number of young adults to our colleges and universities, but we have a hard time retaining them as they age into their 30s and 40s. If those migration trends continue, the total labor force may grow by less than 1% over the next three decades. As a result, retaining more young workers through moderately priced housing, amenities, and livabilty is a critical precondition for economic growth.
• #4: If the region stems the loss of population to other states and achieves a small net inflow (as the Stronger Region Scenario anticipates), the labor force could grow by 175,000 over the next 30 years, an increase of almost 7%.
• #5: A detailed understanding of the dynamics of migration into and out of the region is fundamentally important to forecasting the region’s future population. Approximately 97,000 people move into the region each year from other states, whereas an average of 103,000 people move out each year to other states. The loss of population represented by the difference between these two figures is termed net domestic outmigration and averaged 6,200 people per year from 2007 – 2011. The region also experiences net outmigration to other regions in Massachusetts, at the rate of about 4,400 people per year. These figures fluctuate from year to year based on economic conditions, but over a ten year period the result is a net loss of 100,000 people to other states or other parts of Massachusetts. The patterns vary by age as we. This chart shows the net migration over two ten year periods (1990 - 2000 and 2000 – 2010) based on the age of the cohort at the end of the decade. It shows that Metro Boston gained a significant number of people who are now between the ages of 15 and 29, but our population of school age kids and everybody over the age of 30 is smaller than it would be with no migration. If these trends continue, the region is likely to grow 2.1% per decade over the next thirty years, compared to 3.5% in the 2000s and more than 6% in the 1990s.
• #8: About half of multifamily housing demand for new households will be provided by units freed up by downsizing or outmigrating seniors.