A new report by Pattern for Progress finds that declining birth rates and outward migration are two key reasons behind the labor shortage in the Hudson Valley.
Pattern for Progress CEO Adam Bosch said the report was put together to better understand the hiring difficulties throughout the region and provide local leaders with actionable ideas.
“We have in hospitality, food, and tourism, serious shortages in the labor force; in warehousing and logistics, we have shortages; we have school districts putting up posting for teachers and only getting a small handful of applications where they used to get dozens in the past,” Bosch said in a May 11 video call.
“Employers are having a hard time finding people—that was one thing that we’ve heard time and time and time again, practically everywhere we went across the region last year.”
According to the report, in the past 20 years or so, birth rates in the region’s nine counties have been steadily on the decline, except for Orange, Rockland, and Sullivan.
Between 1997 and 2019, the region’s annual birth counts were down by 3,000, or 10 percent.
The above three counties are only able to buck the trend primarily because of their growing Orthodox Jewish communities, according to the report.
For example, for Orange County, birth rates in the Village of Kiryas Joel increased by 84 percent between 1997 and 2019, whereas all the other towns in the county saw double-digit drops.
Meanwhile, for the past 25 years, the region has seen more residents move out than move in, except for 2020, when the COVID-19 breakout brought an influx of people from the city, according to the report.
Between 1996 and 2021, the region lost a net of 134,505 residents due to outward migration.
Most people moved to nearby counties, such as Fairfield County in Connecticut, Bergen County in New Jersey, and Long Island Counties in New York, according to tax return data between 2020 and 2021.
Others moved south to South Carolina and Florida.
Data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau indicates that almost half of the people who left Hudson Valley did so out of housing-related reasons, according to the report.
For Orange County residents, the most popular destinations are New York City, Pike County in Pennsylvania, Bergen and Sussex County in New Jersey, and Horry County in South Carolina.
As a result, the prime-age labor pool of the region is shrinking, and employers are having a harder time finding workers, be they line cooks or nurses, according to the report.
The report also disputes the common belief that hiring difficulties arise out of the fact that more people don’t want to work in the current climate.
By early 2023, the percentage of working people out of the total New York population was 58 percent, a number that was comparable to the average rates since the 1970s, according to the report.
These demographic trends hurt not only company hiring but also school enrollment, health care systems, and volunteer-based services such as firefighters, the report says.
The No. 1 solution identified by the report to reverse the trend is to build up the housing stock so that fewer people will move out and more people get to move in.
Other solutions include reducing the overall tax burdens, spending more money on marketing the region, finding ways to keep local college students, and a rational immigration policy at the federal level.
“If you just simply look at this as a mathematics problem, we have a people shortage and there are people looking for a place to be,” Bosch said. “Every single [expert] we talked to about these data said they thought legal, well-organized immigration has a role to play in helping us solve our people shortage.”
Pattern for Progress is a Newburgh-based nonprofit that conducts objective research on Hudson Valley issues and provides actionable insights to local leaders, according to its website.
