Another Mass Exodus!!

prescott said:
An article by Spaulding and Slye in the Globe contains an interesting response the exodus hype. The article points out many flaws in the study, or at least in the "Boston's in Big Trouble" garbage the media spewed as result.

My personal opinion is that the census study shows evidence of population shifts within the region and domestic out migration (nothing new there), but it's not that relevant when judging the health of Boston.

To single out one flaw, lets look at students and dorms. With somewhere on the order of 350,000 college students in the Boston area, students have quite an impact on population and housing.

Think about the recent real estate investment cycle in the urban core. Super-crappy housing, at least some of it previously occupied by students, has been renovated and converted to upscale condos. A reduction in density in these areas should be expected by this and does not represent a crisis of people leaving, but instead a potentially positive reduction in over-crowded housing in those areas, affordability issues aside.

As an example, take a chopped up two-family student housing dump, with the obligatory illegal, fire-trap "in-law" apartment in the basement. It might have seven, eight, maybe more, people living in it. Now renovate it to two high-quality condos occupied by professionals, empty-nesters, or whoever. Think there are still eight people in that house? I doubt it. Did enrollment drop in area colleges during the study period to offset the reduced density in that house? No. Did places like Somerville permit an equivalent increase in new residential units to offset the displaced former residents? Hardly. So where did the students go? They moved out of housing measured by the study (i.e. our previously lead-paint filled, asbestos laden, student ghetto house) and moved into housing that was not measured (perhaps to some of the 1,000s of new dorm rooms built in the last 5 years).

Ask anyone working in some of the industries supporting Boston's economy, Bio-Tech, Engineering, Medicine, etc. if they have a co-worker from somewhere other than the US. Why aren't these important contributors to Boston's economy included? They're here buying houses, spending wages, and contributing to the local economy right?

Here's a link to the article: http://www.spauldslye.com/news/2006.05.27_bgoped.html
Click to expand...

I was undfer the impression that students were not counted in a city's population as they are part time residents for the most part.
 
That Spaulding and Slye article is a great find but of course is not widely distributed. The local media loves to paint a doom and gloom scenario. For example, The Boston Business Journal just this week has an article about Massachusetts' brain drain.

http://boston.bizjournals.com/boston/stories/2006/06/26/story1.html

Lost in such a headline is the fact Massachusetts is still importing students, 6th in the nation. Would you call that a brain drain? They instead focus on the fact that the state is not importing as many as before.

These articles are not balanced in their reporting and really contributes to the negative perception fo the city and state.
 
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