EDITORIAL: With Alaska’s population forecast to decline, can we avoid economic disaster?

If you drive across the Rust Belt in the Lower 48, you’ll encounter them here and there: half-empty towns with schools and storefronts boarded up, waiting for an economic upswing that may never come. The feeling of a place with its best days in the rearview mirror is one of desperation: Without a plan to adapt to a changing world, the withering towns’ young people leave for places where jobs are more plentiful and opportunities are brighter. The older generation and those too poor or stubborn to relocate find themselves in a downward spiral of fewer services, declining value for their homes and the inescapable reality that in a generation or two, the place where they grew up may no longer exist.

Here in Alaska, our primary experience with that kind of grim outcome came more than a century ago, as gold rush boomtowns sprang into existence and disappeared almost as quickly, sometimes only a few years later. The luckiest of those boomtowns — Fairbanks, Nome, Juneau — developed enough of an economic base to sustain them once the rush was over, but many more exist only as footnotes in history books and dots on 120-year-old maps. And now, instead of the quick bloom and fade of a resource rush, Alaska is facing a new kind of economic headwind: the kind of slow decline those Lower 48 towns have been experiencing for decades.

The bad news is that the sort of diminishment Alaska’s demographers are now forecasting will be just as painful and desperate as it is in the Rust Belt: the “middle scenario” would have Alaska’s population shrink by about 2% in the next 25 years, while the “low scenario” would see Alaska lose some 150,000 residents, falling to population levels we haven’t seen since the early 1990s. Notably, even in the “middle scenario,” Anchorage’s population would drop by about 10%, a bitter pill to swallow for a municipality already struggling with outmigration and its economic effects. The domino effect of closing schools, lost business revenue and an aging population would leave the city feeling hollowed out in a way it hasn’t been in decades.

The good news is that the future hasn’t happened yet, and it’s within our power to prevent this kind of decline. And there’s at least a little bright news to suggest a better path is possible. New data from the Anchorage Economic Development Corp. indicates a construction boom is carrying the municipality to pre-pandemic jobs numbers. Tourism has also rebounded, providing some economic boost to take some of the sting out of declining activity in oil and gas.

And as for that oil production decline, there’s at least some hope that it will be gentler than feared, as long-awaited North Slope projects are finally coming online that could help maintain throughput in the trans-Alaska oil pipeline and contribute to the state’s bottom line.

The AEDC report also identified challenges that Alaska needs to address if we want to keep our economic recovery afloat: a labor shortage, too-high housing costs and the state’s perilous economic situation.

We have the tools to solve these problems — if our leaders can summon the political will. We need more options for affordable housing, a situation that can be aided by the Anchorage Assembly’s recently passed (though unfortunately watered-down) zoning reform measure. The Assembly and Mayor Suzanne LaFrance should keep monitoring the housing situation closely — no one measure is enough to turn the tide, and it will likely take a multi-pronged approach (such as the municipality’s earlier approval of accessory dwelling units and various private and public-private initiatives to develop more downtown housing) to see success. The new mayor should also make it a priority to reduce overly burdensome regulations to make it easier to build in Anchorage, so that we can regain the momentum that has been lost to the Mat-Su.

We also need more support for working families, particularly young ones — recent legislation to address Alaska’s serious child care shortage is helpful, but not enough to fix a structural and deep-rooted issue. Like housing, the child care deficit has multiple causes, from wage rates and a highly competitive labor market to a shortage of training and licensed facilities. And, as a recent study found, the true costs of child care are considerably higher than what state funding will cover. We need a robust economy unburdened by excess government intervention so that wages can rise and workers can afford to pay their child care providers a fair fee.

Finally, the state’s fiscal uncertainty is perhaps the single greatest factor that will determine whether Alaska follows the path of decline or charts a course to renewed prosperity. If legislators and the governor persist in stonewalling structural fiscal solutions in the name of paying out as large a Permanent Fund dividend as possible, they will not only be ignoring the need for a sustainable long-term plan, but also forcing deep cuts to services like public safety and education that are instrumental in maintaining Alaskans’ quality of life and outlook on raising their families here. Nobody moves to Alaska for the PFD; they come because of our wide-open spaces, natural beauty and rugged individualistic ethic. They will only stay if they can see opportunity on the horizon.

It’s campaign season, and no political party has a monopoly on responsible solutions to the serious challenges that will determine if Alaska grows or declines. Instead of letting candidates skate on red-meat rhetoric and cultural wedge issues, make them give you answers about how they plan to ensure that the sobering forecasts of Alaska’s population decline won’t come to pass. Pay attention to leaders who are talking about this issue and proposing solutions you support rather than trying to take Alaska back 100 years. Vote for problem solvers, not my-way-or-the-highway obstructionists. If we keep wasting time, we’ll find ourselves in 2050, wondering where Alaska’s “good old days” went — and realizing we may have squandered our only chance to keep them ahead of us.