Good news – labor will be valuable.
Bad news – most new jobs will be in the field of wiping the asses of old fucks.
Delaware’s Population Consortium approved the state’s 2022 population projections Thursday – projections that counties, municipalities and school districts are required to use for planning and budgeting purposes.
This year’s projections — both for 2022 and for the coming decades — pose several challenges for city governments and the state as a whole.
UD’s Center for Applied Demography and Survey Research projects a dramatic shift in the ratio of working-age adults to seniors in Delaware over the next three decades.
Center Director Ed Ratledge says the number of new births appears on track to remain flat for the foreseeable future, while the population over the age of 65 is vastly outpacing both births and in-migration of working-age people.
“The population from 0 to19, which is where your new labor force is going to come from, is going to grow by 4,000 from 2020 to 2050,” he said. “At the same time, the over-65 crowd grows by almost 90,000.”
Overall, UD researchers expect the state’s population to begin declining by 2050, with only slow growth in the intervening decades. In-migration is the key driver of Delaware’s population growth, but that migration is disproportionately concentrated in Sussex County and includes retirees.
But some at Thursday’s Consortium meeting were skeptical about the accuracy of local-level population estimates from the 2021 American Community Survey.
In a related Story – At least we keep building homes far away from any services.
The preliminary site plan for the Paradise Meadows cluster subdivision on Cave Neck Road near Milton was unanimously approved Nov. 17 by Sussex County Planning & Zoning Commission.
