A new study finds significant social, demographic and regional disparity associated with youth employment in Western Massachusetts. Mark Melnik, director of the UMass Donahue Institute, which released the study, talks about what findings most concern him.
READ THE STUDY: The Young Adult Labor Force in Massachusetts
Click the audio player above to hear New England Public Radio’s Carrie Healy discuss the study with the Donahue Institute’s Mark Melnik.
For the first time since the Great Recession ended in 2009, the numbers show that western Massachusetts is seeing a decline in individuals seeking food assistance.
In the Hampshire County hilltown of Huntington, on Thursdays in this church basement, waves of clients weave through pantry shelves choosing food items.
“I think on a regular basis we serve well over six hundred to seven hundred people in a in a month, easily,” says Kristan Faul, operational director at the pantry. “The region that we serve is the Gateway School District, basically; there’s actually seven towns that we serve, in general. But we do have some people around the area that do come from as far as Sandisfield or Otis to our food bank even though they’re almost 45 minutes to an hour away.”
There are hundreds of organizations like the Huntington Food Pantry across western Mass that provide food to people who need it. And the umbrella agency for these emergency food providers, the Food Bank of Western Massachusetts, provides the bulk of the food.
The number of people using pantries or feeding programs actually went down in the last year — by about 26,000 people. But the Food Bank’s executive director, Andrew Morehouse, says those who do still need emergency food — the hardest to employ, those with kids and the elderly — need it more often.
“We call that chronic emergency food assistance these are folks who are repeatedly running out of earned income or public benefits, whether it’s welfare payments, their SNAP benefits or Social Security in the case of an elder, and therefore can only rely on a bag of groceries from a local pantry.”
The raw numbers don’t explain why there’s an increase in frequent food pantry visitors in western Massachusetts, or the decrease in overall users. So I called Mark Melnik at the UMass Donahue Institute. He specializes in socio-economic issues.
“Economic indicators as they relate to Massachusetts have been generally positive,” Melnik says. “So we’ve seen robust job growth, decrease in poverty rate in general, increases in median household income and so on.”
But that economic recovery has been uneven, Melnik says. And that means the people who haven’t been helped by the recovery — but still face other rising costs (such as, Melnik says, the high costs of rent, heating homes), they need to access emergency food more and more.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misspelling Mark Melnik’s last name.
An economic forecast released this week by the New England Economic Partnership shows the 6-state region slowly recovering from the recession. Ross Gittell, vice president of the non-profit group, says the region’s economy will continue to grow at a modest 1.4 percent a year. Among the 6 states, he says Massachusetts and Vermont are improving the most in employment.
“Those are the only two states that have already recovered the jobs, or are very soon to recover the jobs lost in the recession.”
Gittell says New Hampshire, Connecticut and Maine will likely reach pre-recession employment levels in the next few years, but Rhode Island may not gain back jobs until after 2016. He says the region’s most robust industries in the coming years will be business services, leisure and hospitality, and health care, with some potential gains in advanced manufacturing.
Since the 2010 census, the Massachusetts population has grown by 1.5%, or nearly 100,000 people. That puts the state almost on par with population growth across the country. That’s an improvement over recent years of stagnant growth.
The number of people living in Massachusetts sagged in the middle of the last decade, primarily due to out-migration, with thousands of residents leaving the state for other parts of the country every year.
“That topped out at about 55,000 people in 2005, obviously showing some very slow growth years for Massachusetts around that period.”
That’s Susan Strate, the director of Population Estimates at the UMass Donohue Institute. Strate says an expensive housing market and a shortage of jobs made it tough for families and young people to justify remaining in the state.
“You could also have seen the snowbird effect, people moving to the west and to the south for different climates, and to some extent that still continues.”
Strate says the Massachusetts population did begin to bounce back in 2008 and 2009, but she says that was mainly due to the recession which forced many residents in the state and elsewhere to stay put rather than face the financial risk of moving. Strate says in recent years younger people have been moving to Massachusetts, something she says bodes well in a state where the median age continues to rise.
“It helps to offset what you would call an age dependency ratio, where people start to age out of the workforce and there’s nobody there to replace them.”
But Strate says its one thing to move to the state, it’s another to stay. She says academic institutions will continue to attract young people to massachusetts. but she adds the state needs to provide enough jobs and affordable housing to ensure they stay after graduation.