Note: This column was originally published on Substack here.
An interesting question came out of the map I released last week looking at school district enrollment across Upstate New York.
Well, there were two questions. But they’re inexplicably linked.
Why are families leaving — or getting smaller? And how long can taxpayers in school districts support costs designed for communities with significantly more children than they have today?
That second question is going to become increasingly difficult to ignore.
The short answer to the first is complicated. There isn’t one reason enrollment is falling across Upstate New York. Families are smaller. People have children later. Young adults leave and don’t always come back. Housing is expensive where it exists and nonexistent where it doesn’t. Jobs have moved or changed. Some communities have been dealing with population stagnation for decades. There are state and federal policies that have directly or indirectly undermined rural towns and villages, too.
There’s plenty of blame to go around — don’t get me wrong.
But blame isn’t a strategy. Communities can spend the next decade arguing about Albany, Washington, and every economic decision that brought us here. Some of those arguments will even be correct. None of them will build an apartment, open a day care center, put a family in a vacant house, or add a child to a kindergarten classroom, though.
That’s why the more useful question is this: What can communities actually control? Focus on that. Because there are things communities can do right now.
1. Say “yes” to the housing.
If a developer comes to your door and wants to build a housing tract, apartment complex, townhouses, or something in between, scrutinize the plan. Give real feedback. Make sure your infrastructure can support it. Negotiate where negotiation is appropriate.
But find a way to say yes.
The houses will sell. The apartments will rent. People will come. Maybe not all of them will have children. Maybe some will be retirees, single adults, or couples who never intend to have kids. That’s fine. We’re not engineering demographics here. We’re meeting demand.
One of the strangest features of the population conversation across Upstate New York is that communities will simultaneously worry about population decline and oppose the thing required to reverse it: Places for additional people to live. You can’t grow if there’s nowhere for anyone to go.
2. Fix your zoning.
Evaluate your zoning code and make tangible changes that objectively make it easier to build. You can’t complain that New York makes it “too hard” to build, develop property, or start businesses if your own community is actively making those same things harder.
And there are plenty of relatively easy places to start. Allow accessory dwelling units. Permit duplexes and small multifamily buildings in more places. Consider cottage courts and smaller lots. Reduce arbitrary parking requirements. Look at setbacks, minimum lot sizes, and density restrictions that might have made sense 40 years ago, but are now prevent the kind of incremental growth desperately needed.
Sure, not every project needs to be 150 apartments or a subdivision with 75 houses. In a village of a few thousand people, five new units matter. Ten or twenty do, too.
And if your feelings about “community character” are that strong, create something that actually has character. I hear all sorts of stuff about preserving community character in my travels and conversations with people from Upstate communities. But guess what? A lot of the places I drive through look exactly the same. The same wide roads. The same empty storefronts. The same underused parking lots. The same handful of buildings slowly deteriorating because nobody can figure out what the zoning allows them to become.
They’re just existing. And that somehow has turned into ‘character’.
Character comes from people using a place. Busy sidewalks, local businesses, housing choices, parks, architecture, events, and public spaces where people actually want to spend time. A zoning code that freezes a community in place doesn’t preserve character. Eventually, it can preserve decline.
3. Streamline permitting so things actually get done.
Earlier this year, I wrote about a proposal in Ithaca to allow developments of 12 or fewer units to go through administrative review rather than requiring a full planning or zoning board process. The exact threshold isn’t the point. The philosophy is.
Not every project needs months of hearings, multiple board appearances and thousands of dollars in professional fees before somebody can put a few apartments on a property. Review is important and standards matter. Neighbors deserve a process for legitimate concerns. But processes have a cost that matters.
If your population is a few thousand people and shrinking, eventually you’re not going to have to worry about “full review” because there won’t be much left to review. It might sound dramatic, but look at the enrollment numbers.
Some districts have lost 20%, 30% or more of their students since around the Great Recession. Those children didn’t disappear from one graduating class. They’re missing year after year after year.
At some point, that demographic reality moves beyond the school building.
4. Turn vacant buildings and upper floors into housing.
This is already happening across Upstate New York, but there’s still enormous potential. And I don’t necessarily mean taking the gigantic abandoned industrial complex on the edge of town and converting it into 200 apartments.
I’ve written before about why those projects often don’t pencil out. Many industrial buildings were never intended to become housing. Their dimensions, environmental problems, structural needs, and utility requirements can make redevelopment more expensive than simply building from the ground up.
I’m talking about the boring stuff: The second floor above the storefront, a vacant building with four apartments that could become six, or the former office that doesn’t need to remain an office forever.
Those projects aren’t going to generate ribbon cuttings with the governor. But, they can generate residents. And in communities losing population, incremental growth counts big time.
5. Solve the problems families encounter before they arrive.
Maybe your community is flush with child care options. Probably not. But maybe. Maybe you don’t have pressing problems with water, sewer, roads or broadband. Maybe you do.
Either way, communities should have a clear plan for how these things are going to be dealt with as demographics change. Child care is especially important because it’s one of the few problems that cuts across virtually every community.
If you’re trying to convince a 30-year-old couple to live in your village instead of somewhere else, whether they can find child care is not a side issue. It’s part of the housing decision. It’s part of the employment decision. It’s part of the decision about whether having another child is financially or logistically possible. Any community that meaningfully addresses child care access will stand out from the crowd because the problem is so widespread.
Infrastructure requires the same kind of forward thinking. A water system doesn’t become cheaper to operate because 15% fewer people live in town. Roads don’t get 15% shorter and sewer plants don’t magically shrink. Municipal buildings still need roofs. Fire trucks still have to be replaced. Policing still costs money, and often gets more expensive as the population shrinks.
Population decline is a taxpayer problem.
Someone recently said to me, “Well, for how much schools have shrunk, populations are still roughly the same in a lot of communities.” And for some that’s true. But it shouldn’t be particularly comforting.
After the 2008 recession, schools started talking about an enrollment cliff. They could see smaller classes moving through the system and understand what it meant for staffing, buildings and budgets. There’s a population cliff coming for communities where K-12 enrollment is 20% or 30% lower than it was around that time. It’s just not being named out loud.
The children missing from today’s classrooms are tomorrow’s missing 25- or 35-year-olds, homeowners, parents, business owners, and most importantly taxpayers.
6. Keep investing in walkable community centers and local businesses.
A lot of communities are already doing this, and they should keep doing it. Downtowns matter. Walkability matters. Parks, trails, restaurants, coffee shops, breweries, libraries, and any other third space you can think of matters.
Sometimes those things get dismissed as amenities — nice extras that don’t belong in a serious conversation about economic development. I think that gets the relationship backward.
People increasingly have choices about where they live. Even people who have to commute are making choices among communities within the same region. If two towns offer roughly the same housing price and commute, the place that feels alive has an advantage.
And these investments don’t just matter for residents. They bring visitors. Visitors spend money. Some come back. Some open businesses. Some eventually decide they’d like to live there.
Communities are the cumulative result of endless small decisions. Make more of those decisions point toward activity instead of the status quo.
7. Set actual growth targets and talk about them.
Lastly, communities should establish legitimate population, housing and economic growth targets. Not vague goals. Numbers.
How many housing units do you want permitted over the next five years? How many residents do you want to add? How many vacant storefronts do you want occupied? How many properties do you want returned to productive use? How much does the tax base need to grow to keep municipal services affordable?
Make those targets public. Make them part of the public campaigns, comprehensive plans, budget presentations, and board meetings. And then report on them.
Every person living in the community shouldn’t hear about population once a year during a State of the City or county update. They should understand the numbers, why they matter, and what their local government is doing to get moving the right direction.
Because this is ultimately where the school enrollment conversation leads. The map isn’t really about schools. Schools just happen to be one of the best places to see demographic change before it becomes obvious everywhere else.
A district can lose a quarter of its students before the broader community feels the impact. Eventually, though, those smaller generations mean fewer workers, homeowners, parents and taxpayers supporting infrastructure built for more people.
That’s why communities need to treat growth as something they actively pursue. There will always be forces they can’t control, but they control more than they admit.
Standing still is a choice, too.
Josh is a columnist and host of the In Focus podcast. He’s also the vice president of FingerLakes1.com, Inc. Have a question or want to get in touch? Send it to josh@fingerlakes1.com.