County gets migration boost

By Steve Mocarsky smocarsky@timesleader.comStaff Writer

Some might think the horror experienced by those who lived within sight of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, would be motivation enough to move somewhere farther away, someplace safer.

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A quick glance at migration data certainly might suggest just that.

More than 10,000 New Yorkers moved to Luzerne County between 1990 and 2008, nearly three quarters of them between 2001 and 2008, according to a report by the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton-based Institute for Public Policy and Economic Development.

Over the same 18-year period, nearly 9,200 New Jersey residents moved to Luzerne County, and 61 percent of them came here between 2000 and 2008, the report states.

Some former New York residents interviewed over the last several years have told Times Leader reporters that 9/11 was a factor in their decision to move to Luzerne County. Many others pointed to other factors.

Teri Ooms, executive director of the institute, believes it was those other factors that brought people here.

“What we believe caused the movement was not 9/11, but more what the institute calls the westward migration,” Ooms said in a recent interview.

Ooms concedes there is no specific research into reasons for the migration of which she is aware. But a closer look at the migration trends suggests that it was really the cost of living that drove New Yorkers and New Jersey residents to uproot and move west, she said.

“People started leaving New York in the early ’90s and moving to New Jersey. The impetus was the cost of living – specifically housing,” Ooms said.

But then as housing prices began to rise in New Jersey, both New York and New Jersey residents began moving to the “outer rings” of Pennsylvania – the Poconos – in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Ooms said.

By 2002, those outer rings expanded and more of Northeastern Pennsylvania became home to the migrating Easterners through 2008.

“Then the recession hit. And while migration here was still positive, it was not as great,” Ooms said.

Luzerne and Lackawanna counties are now on that outer rim of migration that Ooms doesn’t expect to extend much if any farther west, given the two-hour or longer commute for people who live here but still work in New York or New Jersey.

Ooms said data from the Internal Revenue Service shows that those migrating here were mostly from two economic classes – low- to moderate-income people who usually rent homes and middle- to upper middle-income earners, who can buy homes here in the $300,000 range that would sell in New York and New Jersey for $1 million or more.

Those who rent usually end up taking jobs here in the retail and manufacturing industries. But for the higher-income migrants, Ooms said, the area is seeing “sales leakage.”

“There are folks here who continue to commute and earn very good wages there,” Ooms said, but buying gasoline and food on their journey to and from work takes money from Northeastern Pennsylvania’s economy. “They also don’t have the free time to engage in the community because they’re spending 12, 14, 16 hours between work and their commute.”

One of the goals of the institute is to provide data that will help area economic and educational leaders develop strategies to promote the creation of better-paying jobs that will attract those former out-of-state residents to work locally. “Over time, the commute will get tiring, so people are going to look for work closer to home,” she said.

Ooms said she and others at the institute were excited last year after completing their reports on the migration trends.

“From the moment the institute opened (in 2004), there had just been talk about people leaving the area. ‘Why stay here? It’s a dying region,’ people would say. I didn’t think it was so. This area has weathered a lot of storms – the decline of coal, the decline of textiles. So it’s definitely been a region that has been able to sustain itself. … We didn’t think the region was shrinking and we set out to prove it,” Ooms said.

The migration data from the IRS as well as 2010 Census figures gave Ooms and her staff the proof they were looking for.

“There are more people migrating in than leaving. Even when factoring in birth rate and death rate, migration is more important. We believed there were more people migrating in than out and I think we proved it,” Ooms said.