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Originally Posted by Marvland
There are over 6,000 new rental units under construction or in true pipeline in Salt Lake County alone. That's over 25 % above the 10-year mean. Millennials and Gen Y are much more likely to rent, not be married or have kids. That is what is driving our growth. They typically don't spend on housing, but spend money on travel, food, beverage, recreation and music. That is the population we are adding and I would argue SHOULD be adding. The "golden goose" target market for multifamily is the 28 year old professional female for a reason.
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Oh I absolutely agree - but Millennials and Gen Yers in Utah are NOT the same as the national average - they are less likely to rent, more likely to be married and have kids then their national counterparts. Utah has a HUGE young population, which isn't surprising, since they are the youngest state in the country - and yet their numbers don't necessarily show that. There's going to always be development - even rust belt cities who lose population yearly see new development spring up. But how many non-apartment housing units are going up? My guess is it's more than triple what we're seeing with apartments.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Marvland
I'm telling you now that just because our net influx rate does not include huge families, the sky is not falling. In fact, our high internal replenishment rate is an absolute anomaly that will give us a long-term demographic advantage that no other metro has. We are not in a secret depression in Utah. As I've said before, previous demographic markers are not as useful any more. The population has changed. Living habits have changed. The data from the '80's isn't really applicable without taking into account changing living habits. An incoming working professional will spend more than twice that of an incoming family in cultural amenities per capita.
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I don't think the sky is falling, but we've got to reverse such an unbalanced trend or no, I hate to break it to you, there won't be a long-term advantage. I already mapped out the problems with Utah's current system - from education to healthcare - and those will only worsen the more our population continues to expand without any true taxable base. So, we've got a lot of hands in the pot and not near the level of equal replenishment - and that doesn't get into the fact that there were recent studies that suggested, on the whole,
Utah loses more people than they gain, especially compared to other western states. That means, while a great deal of people born in Utah stay in Utah, a lot aren't - and we're not replacing them at near the rate we should be in the end. We're replacing 24 year olds who are relocating to Seattle with 24 month year olds. That's not an even balance.
You're kind of seeing this phenomenon on the national level with Social Security, but in a reversed kinda way - there's more people collecting and less people paying into it than a generation ago. The similarity with Utah is that a huge chunk of our population is not in the workforce, which means they're not paying any local taxes, they're not creating new jobs, they're not bringing in any type of income whatsoever - either because they're too young or a full-time college student. When they become of age, are ready to enter the workforce,
That shifts the burden to those who do work, or it forces the state to find other avenues to raise taxes because we now have that flat tax, which means there's an even amount of tax investment across the board - so, with the richest of the rich paying a same percentage of their income as someone who's making $20,000 a year (which would be much smaller than in some other state). So, they make up for it by cutting social programs, not expanding medicaid to lower-income residents, who have grown a lot as a percentage of our population over the years, fight to invest in education, which means we have larger class sizes with our larger families, and then the legislature proposes even
bigger cuts to education.
They cut and cut to find that budget surplus Utah lawmakers are so happy to tout - but then give the governor a raise. They then shift the tax burden to those who purchase liquor or drive their car or smoke cigarettes.
Our schools are not good anymore. We used to be the top state for education and we're not anymore. It's a direct connection to our growth. We have too many children and not enough to tax payers to help bolster the overall costs it takes.
Hell, look at the cuts we've seen with DABC - the government is receiving record profits from liquor sales and yet turn around and cut funding, which then forces employees out of jobs, stores to close, and then we wonder why no one wants to live in Utah who wasn't already born here?
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So, as I've said, our lack of raw population increase means next to nothing. I really don't care that a massive influx of poor families in St Louis are moving to Denver. We are adding less population, but the population we are adding makes and spends more.
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It absolutely means something - it means people who aren't born in Utah don't want to live in Utah. That's a pretty big something.
Also, I doubt it's the poor people from St. Louis who's fueling Denver's growth. Moreover, it's just not true that we're adding people who make and spend more - we're adding babies. They make nothing and they spend nothing.
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