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From Governing’s August 1989 issue
How We Spent the 1980s: A Pre-Census Look at a Changing America BY ROB GURWITT
On the edge of downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, a half mile from the marble dome of the state capitol, stands one of the most striking outposts of demographic change anywhere in America.
It hardly seems remarkable at first: a public housing project with a single brick high-rise and a collection of boxy apartments in tired browns and greens, scattered over a small hillside. On a warm day in late spring, young children play in the tiny yards that border the apartments, and an old woman stands watching the occasional car pass by. A few hundred yards away, traffic shuffles into a freeway construction zone.
This is no ordinary urban backwater, though. Most of the children who come spilling out of the school buses that pull up in mid-afternoon are the first in their families to go to school — any kind of school. Few of the people driving through the neighborhood had even seen a car 10 years ago. The old women, with cloth coils resting on their heads and delicately traced traditional clothing on their backs, could have stepped out of a Southeast Asian village.
Which, in fact, they did. There are almost 300 families living at Mount Airy Homes, as this project is called, and more than 90 percent of them are Hmong refugees from the hills of Laos. They are part of a small flood of Hmong who have arrived in St. Paul over the course of this decade. They represent a single piece of compelling evidence about how dramatically the face of America has changed in the nine years since the last census.
During the 1980s, the United States has become more deeply multi-ethnic and culturally diverse, as Asians of all nationalities have moved into Fresno and Salt Lake City, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle, Honolulu and Providence, while from the south Mexicans, Haitians, Salvadorans and other Central Americans have streamed, legally and illegally, over the border.
That tidal wave of immigrants is only the most dramatic manifestation of how unsettled this country’s human landscape is. The landscape has also been shifting in other, subtler ways over the past 10 years, even in a comparatively placid corner of the Midwest. A few miles west of Mount Airy Homes, in Minneapolis, race relations and racial issues have taken on new currency as the city’s minority population grows beyond its traditionally minuscule dimensions. Older suburbs along Minneapolis’ borders, worried about the aging of their populations, are struggling to attract young families just when the numbers of young people moving into the housing market may be declining. Meanwhile, to the south, 10 miles down the freeway that passes by Mount Airy Homes, a tier of new suburbs around the town of Eagan tries to come to terms with stunning growth.
Similar shifts are changing the character of central cities and their suburbs all across the country. And as they do, they are creating issues that will preoccupy local policy makers for years to come. The first chance to gauge these changes fully and accurately won’t come until well after next year’s decennial census is taken. Although some preliminary numbers should be out by the end of 1990, detailed results will not be available until 1991 or 1992.
Still, even before the census is completed, it’s possible to answer some crucial questions. The U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey gives generally reliable information about population shifts at the national and regional levels. Local and state officials who want to follow their changing communities use birth and death statistics, school enrollment information, driver’s license transfers for people moving into the state, construction permits and occasional surveys to get a notion of what’s happening on their turf. Listening to them, looking around at a variety of neighborhoods and communities, one can piece together clues to what the census is likely to reveal.
For those purposes, the Minneapolis-St. Paul area is a good place to start — because it isn’t unique, and has been changing at about the same pace as the country as a whole. The area’s estimated 9.3 percent growth between 1980 and 1987 put it smack in the middle of the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the country. That is nowhere near Phoenix’s dramatic 29.8 percent population burst, but also quite a contrast to Pittsburgh’s 5.2 percent decline. Equally important, more is known about the Twin Cities in this decade than about most places, because the Minnesota demographer’s office and the Metropolitan Council in St. Paul are among the most knowledgeable agencies in the country about their own citizens.
t the time of the 1980 census, the Hmong were a minor curiosity in St. Paul. Although they had started to arrive in the city a couple of years before, they were still a sidelight to the somewhat heavier, and better publicized, influx of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees that had begun in 1975. In all, the last census turned up about 5,300 Asians and Pacific Islanders living in the city, a bare 2 percent of the population.
In the intervening nine years, the Hmong have fallen full weight on the city’s consciousness. According to the state refugee assistance division, there are now 9,500 Hmong living in St. Paul and surrounding Ramsey County, with another 5,500 elsewhere in the state. Southeast Asians as a whole form an estimated 5.5 percent of the city’s population. Asian children, most of them Hmong, have become the St. Paul school system’s largest single minority group, making up 16.4 percent of its student body. That proportion is likely to rise. One of every four kindergartners in the public schools next year, says George Latimer, St. Paul’s mayor, will be Hmong.
The arrival of the Hmong in Minnesota is part of a broader expansion of American cultural diversity during the 1980s. In a one-year period during 1986-87, Southeast Asians accounted for more than 60 percent of the country’s legal immigrants, and between 1975 and 1986 some 846,000 entered the country. The 1980 census counted some 3.5 million Asian Americans; according to the Population Reference Bureau, a private research group in Washington, D.C., next year’s head count will find upwards of 6.5 million. And recent projections of the Hispanic population show it climbing to 21 million, from the 15 million counted by the last census.
If there is one particular target for people arriving from abroad, it is California. In 1986 and 1987 alone, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, that state drew 330,000 legal immigrants, followed by New York with 224,000, Texas with 84,000 and Illinois with 52,000. At the time of the 1980 census, California was 19 percent Hispanic and 7 percent Asian. Next year, the state’s Population Research Unit forecasts, the state will be 25 percent Hispanic and 10 percent Asian.
California’s formidable growth is fueled in large part by people arriving from abroad. Each year, according to the Population Research Unit, the state nets 300,000 migrants, of whom 200,000 are legal or illegal immigrants. The rest come from elsewhere in the United States. A decade ago, the stream was split evenly between domestic and foreign migrants; 20 years ago, when some 250,000 people were moving into the state, 70 percent of them came from other states in the United States.
In Minnesota’s case, because the state has been so thoroughly white and ethnically European — whites made up 96.6 percent of the population in 1980 — the large numbers of Hmong are bound to have a significant effect. The manners and values brought by Norwegians, Swedes, Germans and Poles worked their way fairly easily into the American mainstream. That has not been the case with a people arriving from the secluded hills of Laos who have had little contact with the West, let alone with cities, modern conveniences or winter.
Oddly, the Hmong presence has been muted among the public at large. To be sure, the telephone book has taken on a more musical quality, with the columns of Pedersons and Jensens joined by names such as Bling Ying Xiong and Mai Vang — along with 169 other Xiongs and 292 other Vangs. But 90 percent of St. Paul’s Hmong live in traditional public housing complexes. As a result, says Amy Crawford, Mayor Latimer’s liaison to the Southeast Asian community, “they’re self-contained, and not integrated into homes in the neighborhoods in the way that other financially disadvantaged or people of color are.” Hmong make up more than three-fourths of the residents of St. Paul’s four public housing projects.
Where the impact of the Hmong has unquestionably been felt is among the public officials who have to deal with them. English language programs for school-age children as well as adults have become a staple of the public school curriculum. A heavy percentage of the Hmong population is dependent on public funds, in the form of refugee and general assistance, along with Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The city’s police force now has six Hmong officers.
This influx of people from a radically different background, many unable to speak English, has posed an unfamiliar set of challenges for the city. Latimer wants St. Paul to approach them with a sort of institutionalized Midwestern good will: “We need to deal directly with that community on their terms, through their organizations and culture,” he says. “We need to upgrade all of our local services to respond to cultural differences.” For city employees who deal directly with the Hmong, the concerns are more down to earth. The city housing authority, for example, insists on good housekeeping by its tenants; it even inspects the homes of applicants. Erik-Paul Sallmen, the authority’s rental administrator, points out that Hmong notions of cleanliness don’t always measure up. “We know about Mr. Clean and scrub brushes and vacuum cleaners,” he says. “In Laos, you can do quite well with a broom.” Since that does not meet St. Paul standards, the city has produced a Hmong-language videotape on housecleaning, American style.
The makeover of the city’s public housing population did not, of course, happen overnight, nor was it painless. Blacks, Indians, Hispanics and poor whites lived in the projects before the Hmong arrived, and the growth of the Hmong population aroused tension among old-timers, who began to accuse the city of playing favorites.
“There’s a tremendous difference between the way blacks and Asians are perceived,” says Art Treadwell, a human services planner for Ramsey County. “Blacks are more aggressive, overt and demonstrative in their behavior patterns, which generally is met with a low tolerance level. Southeast Asians are the opposite: They’re very protective of the family, they’re quiet. In a public housing situation, where you have several groups vying for space, when the fingers get pointed, they don’t get pointed at the people who are minding their own business.” Sallmen, although he calls the Hmong “a boon” to the housing authority, denies that there was any official policy to stuff the projects with them at the expense of blacks. “By their sheer volume, they basically took over the waiting list,” he says.
till, it raises the question of what happened to the blacks who used to make up a majority of the residents at Mount Airy and similar public projects. Some, suggests Treadwell, wound up on the streets; others may have found different publicly financed housing. Still others moved to Minneapolis.
Certainly that city, like St. Paul, is losing its overwhelmingly white complexion. In Minneapolis, though, many of the immigrants are black, and come from within the United States. In 1980, the city was 7.6 percent black. Though there are no reliable figures for the city’s current racial makeup, its public schools gained about 3,500 black students between 1980 and 1987, pulling the proportion of blacks in the system from 19 percent at the beginning of the decade to 28.4 percent in 1987.
The rise in Minneapolis’ black population has sparked a debate over where the new residents are coming from, and why. Dick Heath, the city’s acting planning director, puts it this way: “There’s a host of reasons why we’ve seen growth in the minority poor, and the one you pick tends to be a sign of your political philosophy. If you’re liberal, you say it’s for a job; if you’re conservative, it’s for the welfare benefits.” Heath reports that the city’s AFDC population grew about 4 percent a year between 1982 and 1986. School board statistics on entries into the system show contingents coming from Chicago, Gary, St. Louis and East St. Louis, all of them Midwestern cities with large concentrations of poor blacks. In the first half of the 1988-89 school year, a full fifth of the transfers into the Minneapolis public schools came from those four cities.
On the other hand, Chicago and St. Louis have large white populations; some of the people moving to Minneapolis from those cities in the past decade clearly were white. But if the notion of poor blacks migrating from faded inner cities to less bleak communities is plausible to many, it contradicts experts’ wisdom about the migration patterns of the poor. “The common assumption is that the underclass in inner city areas is non-mobile,” says Reynolds Farley of the Census Bureau. “They lack the skills to get good jobs, and are reluctant to move if they’re already getting transfer payments.” At the same time, Farley has used 1980 census data to document the movement of educated blacks from one region of the country to another in response to the urgings of the job market. Blacks may be coming to Minneapolis for the same reason. That is the interpretation that Ramsey County’s Art Treadwell and others attach to the increase in the black population of the Twin Cities. “The black middle class [here] is growing,” Treadwell says, “and of the growth in the absolute numbers of blacks in the last 10 years, a significant portion is as a result of jobs and other educational opportunities.” If there has been a shift of inner city blacks from older Rust Belt cities to less traditionally black areas, it might be expected to show up in other cities besides Minneapolis. It has. Milwaukee is another place where the black population has grown. A special census taken in 1985 showed that since 1980, its black population had increased by 5 percent (to 155,000), while the white population had dropped by 27,000. But it’s not clear how much of the black growth was due to natural increase and how much to migration. Even so, the increase has touched off a debate as to whether one of the causes of the growth is Wisconsin’s relatively generous welfare benefits.
Elsewhere, there is mixed evidence for black migration to heavily white Midwestern cities. In Omaha, a 1985 city-planning study showed a 41 percent growth in the area’s minority population since 1980, but its results are looked on with some suspicion by other planners. In Des Moines, public school enrollment has consistently been a little more than 11 percent black throughout the decade.
The 1980s have marked a decade of continued growth for metropolitan America in general. The last census hinted that such growth might be leveling off, as rural areas actually grew faster than metropolitan areas during the 1970s. The 1980s have reversed that short-lived trend. Metropolitan population grew 8.5 percent between 1980 and 1987, according to Census Bureau estimates, compared with an increase of only 4.1 percent in non-metropolitan areas.
But the metropolitan growth has been virtually all suburban; most central cities, especially in the Northeast and Midwest, have been fortunate to hold even. Since its peak in 1950, Minneapolis has been losing population, from 521,000 that year to 371,000 in 1980. According to Heath, the rate of loss slackened after 1978, but “there’s a little uneasiness as to whether it hasn’t begun to steepen again in the last few years.” Nationally, the most recent Census Bureau survey showed central cities losing about a million people altogether between early 1986 and early 1987, and Midwestern cities as a whole lost 1.4 percent of their population between 1980 and 1986. Western and Southern cities, on the other hand, grew faster than the national population growth rate, in part through annexations.
Officials in both Minneapolis and St. Paul are worried that the people who are moving out are disproportionately white and comfortably off. The census that will be taken in 1990, says Ken Ford of the St. Paul Planning Office, “will probably show that we still have a solid middle class, but a larger population below the poverty level and greater polarization in income between the city and the suburbs, as well as within the city.” Just outside the borders of Minneapolis, in the city’s inner suburbs that were settled just after World War II, there is a different problem. Planners there are not concerned about people leaving. What they worry about is too many people staying.
In Brooklyn Center, a city of 30,000 that sits astride Minneapolis’ northwest corner, a recent survey of residents found the median age to be 43.9 years, well above the national figure of about 33 and somewhat higher than in other inner ring communities. As newer suburbs fill up with young couples who have moved out from the city, older towns like Brooklyn Center and its neighbors are finding that the housing stock that might help them compete for this fresh blood isn’t emptying out as fast as they would like.
“Most of the issues we’re facing now are about redevelopment,” says City Manager Jerry Splinter. It’s the older section of town, in the southeast, that most concerns Splinter and others. This is a neighborhood of closely spaced, World War II-era duplexes and somewhat newer ramblers, with small lawns, tidy gardens and flags flying from poles over the front doors. Aluminum fishing boats with small outboard motors sit on trailers in the driveways, and on a few garages there are worn basketball backboards missing both hoop and net, a sure sign of children grown up and moved out. Here and there, tiny garages with peeling sea-foam green or chalk-blue paint lean crazily, next to almost equally ramshackle houses.
“Those are the kind of structures that should be removed,” says Phil Cohen, a former Brooklyn Center mayor, on a drive through the southeast neighborhood. The city has embarked on an ambitious program to try to keep up its older housing stock through strict enforcement of maintenance codes or, if all else fails, buying houses and either rehabilitating them or knocking them down and starting afresh. “If we did nothing, 10 years from now we’d have a deteriorating community that we could do nothing about,” says Cohen.
To a great extent, the decline in Brooklyn Center’s housing stock can be traced to the aging of the homeowners themselves. “We’re looking at the possibility that as ‘empty nesters’ get older, they can’t take care of their houses as well,” says Splinter. Moreover, adds development coordinator Brad Hoffman, a concentration of older residents in a large section of a city can have other consequences: “As those people dominate a neighborhood, it leads to the death of the school district,” he says.
All of this makes it increasingly difficult for the city to attract new home buyers and businesses, but Brooklyn Center is determined not to lose out in the metropolitan area competition for both. Its solution has been to find ways to finance new condominiums and apartments for senior citizens along the edges of the old neighborhood, giving them a place to move where upkeep isn’t an issue and the familiar comforts of home — churches, doctors, stores and clubs — don’t have to change. The strategy seems to be working. Younger families are moving into some of the vacated homes, attracted by low prices that, in the older parts of Brooklyn Center, average around $70,000 a house, which is roughly $5,000 to $15,000 less than prices farther out.
But one demographic fact may stall such plans, in Brooklyn Center and elsewhere. As the general population grows older, the number of young couples looking for the starter homes that the Brooklyn Centers of the country have to offer is going to drop.
That may be happening already in St. Paul, where the rate of absentee owners renting out their houses is rising. There is some speculation that they are homeowners who have traded up to larger houses but are having trouble finding young couples to buy their old houses.
It is not just Brooklyn Center and St. Paul that are aging, of course; it is the country as a whole. In 1980, according to the Census Bureau, the U.S median age was 30 years. In 1990, it will be 33. And as that number continues to go up, it will force some difficult problems on the communities that are growing older.
In the suburb of Prairie Village, Kansas, a part of the Kansas City metropolitan area, City Manager Barbara Vernon is confronting the combination of age and affluence. Prairie Village is a community with a strong cohort of wealthy, well-educated and aging citizens. It has a strong housing code enforcement program and rising property taxes, twin pressures that Vernon worries may prove too much of a burden for some elderly residents.
The lone retirement facility proposed for the community is expected to have an entry fee of more than $100,000 and monthly charges of between $1,200 and $2,000, which will put it out of the reach of all but the rich. A county nutrition program for the elderly and a city-administered grant designed to help senior citizens maintain their property will take some of the pressure off, but it is not clear how much they will help in the long run. “At this point, it does not appear that we are forcing seniors out of their homes,” says Vernon. But she adds that the future is uncertain.
A thousand miles east, in the lush boroughs of the Main Line outside Philadelphia, the elderly population is getting larger with each passing year. “People are living out their lives in what you and I would call mansions and estates,” says Charles Guttenplan, director of planning for Lower Merion Township, which takes in a sizable number of Main Line communities. Those who leave home are moving into well-appointed “life-care” communities in the area.
For Guttenplan and his colleagues, the concern is not so much the well-to-do as it is the middle-income elderly, of whom the area has a large number as well. These people have too much money to qualify for the township’s one low-income project, and, as a result, a special task force has proposed several options, including zoning changes that would allow parts of houses to be converted to apartments for elderly family members.
While Brooklyn Center and many of its contemporaries are worrying about how to attract new home buyers, Eagan and the communities around it are trying to figure out what to do with them all. In 1980, about 20,700 people lived in this suburb on the Twin Cities’ southern edge. Its population has more than doubled since then, and it is expected to have almost 48,000 residents by the beginning of next year.
This is instantly familiar territory to anyone who has lived on the fringes of a metropolitan area. Fertile, rolling land with patches of forest separates coiled subdivisions of subdued homes in tan and gray. Swimming pools fill up the backyards, and four-wheel-drives and boats — bigger and newer than in Brooklyn Center — sit in the driveways. If there is a town center, it’s the giant shopping mall sitting near the north-south highway that opened the area up for growth. Location and suburban amenities have made Eagan one of the fastest-growing communities in the metropolitan area.
Eagan’s attractiveness to residents at the higher end of the income scale is only going to intensify in the near future. “Once a community gets hot, then everyone else wants to build there,” says City Manager Tom Hedges. “It’s become so expensive, what with land prices, that no one can afford to build starters.” So while the median house price in the area is about $98,000, the houses being built now tend to go for upwards of $200,000.
Regardless of who moves in, the city has to scramble to provide services. It is trying to figure out what level of service it must maintain to do its job properly. “If you’ve consistently been providing snow removal within 10 hours, and then 3,000 people move into new homes, can you still do it all within 10 hours?” asks Hedges.
At the beginning of the decade, a bare handful of softball teams used a scattering of municipal parks and ball fields in Eagan. Now there are 185 softball teams for adults and another 220 youth teams of various sorts for which the city has to provide space. “Every time we see a green space, we look it over and ask ourselves whether we could get a soccer field or a ball field in there,” says Ken Vraa, Eagan’s director of parks and recreation.
Probably the greatest impact is being felt in the local schools. There are between 1,100 and 1,200 additional students each year entering the Rosemount district, which takes in about a third of Eagan and a sprawl of other booming suburban towns. That about equals one new high school’s worth of pupils a year, and the district has been struggling to keep up. It is opening a new middle school and a new high school in the fall, and will soon break ground on two more elementary schools. “I don’t know how long this can continue,” says JoAnne Ellison, the school district’s demographer. “Even opening the two elementaries, that’ll only last us about two years.” This is a fertile area in more than one sense. The Huggies cartons piled at the end of driveways on trash day are testimony to the fact that the district is going to have to keep building schools for a while. There are some 18,000 children spread throughout the school system, and already another 9,300 pre-schoolers who will be entering it in the next four or five years.
Demographics will only compound the situation in the 1990s. Ellison has found in her surveys that, contrary to what she had expected, the starter homes in the area are bringing in few children; instead, childless young couples are buying those houses, using two incomes to pay the mortgage and postponing children for a while. The houses attracting families with children are in the higher price range. And since those are the ones now being built in the areas open to development, the school-age population may increase at an even faster rate in the 1990s.
It is tempting in the face of such numbers to think of growth as a community’s destiny. Certainly Eagan expects to keep growing: Hedges believes that it has the potential to reach between 80,000 and 100,000 residents by the end of the century, although the planning department anticipates that it will peak at around 70,000.
But where growth is based on an expanding economy, there is nothing inevitable about it, as Houston discovered earlier this decade and Denver appears to be finding out now. The Denver area grew rapidly between 1980 and 1985, but in the past few years the rate has dropped dramatically, hampered by a recession caused by the collapse of the oil and gas industries, a shakeout in high-technology businesses, and agricultural problems.
The drop in the rate of growth comes despite Denver’s attractiveness as a location. The twin blessings of sunshine and mountains had given local boosters a deep-seated faith that people would flock there no matter what. But as one Colorado official puts it, “In the last few years, a lot more people have left Denver than moved here. Now, the mountains haven’t moved farther away, and the sun isn’t shining any less; it has to do with the ability of a metropolitan area to support its people.” Denver’s situation is a reminder that the grand sweep of numbers measuring growth and decline over a decade can hide the most interesting local stories. The 1990 census will show, for example, that suburban Aurora, just east of Denver, grew at an astounding pace during the 1980s. What it will not show is that in the past year or so, Aurora may actually have lost population. By the same token, knowing that metropolitan San Diego grew 23 percent between 1980 and 1987 may be less important than knowing that the northern part of the county was attracting middle-class home buyers from more expensive Orange and Riverside counties, while the south was drawing Hispanic and Asian immigrants who couldn’t afford to live anywhere else in the area.
The demographer’s art — and the policy maker’s burden — lies in discerning the subtleties behind the big numbers. It is an art, because the demographer who pursues the numbers imaginatively creates meaning. It is a burden, because every change affects the community in which it occurs, and public officials have to deal with the results.
Streams of Hmong displace others in need of public housing. A rising black population forces officials in what used to be an overwhelmingly white city to deal with racial tension for the first time. Older people who elect to hold on to their houses as long as possible may bring about the decline of a school district. The most important point is sometimes buried in the statistical tables: Demographics is ultimately about politics. Or, as St. Paul Planning Director Peggy Reichert puts it, “The minute you start talking about numbers, it’s good news or bad news to someone.”
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