Mainers on the move

There’s a joke going around Buffalo, N.Y., a city that has lost a substantial portion of its population in the 1990s. The New York Times recently reported the joke this way: One way to tell you’re from Buffalo is that half of your friends have moved to Charlotte, N.C., and the other half went to Raleigh. Now here’s the Maine twist on that joke: Three of this state’s largest five cities not only have had larger population drops than Buffalo, according to a Census Bureau report last week, but they rank among the 10 biggest losers in the nation.

Whether the former residents of Lewiston, Bangor and Auburn went south to North Carolina or only as far south as Cumberland County is unclear, but the problem is something more than just people leaving the city for nearby suburbs. All cities in Maine have lost population that way; the Census Bureau, however, looked at a city’s metropolitan area. Bangor’s city population fell 33,181 in 1990 to 30,500 in 98; its metropolitan area dropped from 91,629 at the beginning of the decade to 87,001 eight years later, a loss of 5.1 percent. Lewiston-Auburn had similar population reductions.

The reasons for these declines are complex and not at all unique to Maine — it is a problem the North grapples with as the southern portion of the nation wonders where to put all the new arrivals. But it is evident that some parts of Maine have an acute case of sprawl, while others aren’t simply spreading out, they’re evaporating. Maine needs a comprehensive policy to directly address these population losses before dwindling communities no longer are able to support themselves.

The problem can be seen in shifting school populations, which are growing in Southern Maine and falling in Northern Maine. The changes may reflect job opportunities for parents, a disparity that state government has examined before, but, whatever the cause, the result in much of the state is closed schools, towns that struggle to cover costs and maintain their identities.

Changing this pattern means more than hoping that residents reverse the trend toward smaller families — though the number of U.S. births in ’98 rose for the first time since ’90, Maine hit historic lows. Instead, it means providing opportunity through job training and the nuts and bolts of commerce — highways and rails, high-tech wires and fuel choices that will allow businesses to relocate and remain competitive in some of the last places with real unemployment rates left in the New England. Providing opportunity for business growth is Maine’s best chance to let its children remain in their hometowns.

If we don’t, the problem is not going to be the traditional difficulty of turning two Maines into one Maine, it will be to keep one Maine from becoming half Maine.