Rod Stevens recently posted several charts on Bainbridge Island demographics along with his comments and interpretation of what the charts might mean.
"Who are we as a community? The answer to this question affects not only our image of our image of ourselves but the priorities we set for public services and how we connect the community to itself.
Recently I had cause to look at the U.S. Census statistics for the island and the numbers are interesting. They show that we are much more of a “move to” place than we might have thought, that two-thirds of the households here do not have children in them, and that most of the population growth the last decade has come from those over 60."
Bainbridge Island Population Growth
The population of the island has about doubled over the last 30 years. Today there are about 23,000 people living here, compared to just 12,300 in 1980. The chart shows the growth in different age groups over the last 30 years in absolute numbers of people per age group. Notice a couple of things about these lines:
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For all but seniors, growth has flat-lined over the last ten years.
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The number of kids under 5 and younger adults 18 to 34 has actually gone down steadily since 1990, even as the overall population grew. This is not a good place to find a young mate.
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There are now more seniors than school children. Those over 60 account for 90 percent of the overall population growth the last ten years. This growth in the seniors population is split half between those 60 and 65 and half those over 65.
Even during the peak years of growth, 1980 to 2000, the number of those aged 35 to 59 grew faster than the number of children.
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Middle Aged People
Let’s look more closely at the middle-age people. Here’s a comparison of local population shares with the state and county, with the y-axis being the percentage of total of each place’s population. Notice the under-representation among those 35 to 39, continuing the shortage of those in their 20’s and 30’s. Basically people don’t begin to move here in large numbers until they are in their 40s. They simply cannot afford to buy. This is a move-up market where most people come from either California or Seattle. If they’re coming from Seattle, they’re trading urban life against school quality, where the total of six years of private school tuition there for two kids can easily run $150,000 or more. Our two largest age cohorts are 45 to 50 and 50 to 54.
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Children
The statistics for children track the adult trends. We are light on the early years and heavy on the middle and high school years. This shows one stereotype here is wrong- not all kids are not growing up together from their earliest years in school. Many are moving into the school system in their middle years and then spending six or eight years on the island before they go away to college. They may think of themselves as coming from Bainbridge, but the reality is that for the first 40 years of their lives, they will have spent only six or eight years here.
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School Enrollment
This move-to quality is reflected in the greater enrollment in upper grades. So is the peaking of middle and high school enrollment in 2005, which reflects earlier immigration by families with younger kids. If those families had kept coming in the same numbers, these lines might have stayed flat.
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