Budget Committee - July 16, 2025   7/16/2025

We're calling the City Council Budget Committee to order.

I don't think we need an attendance, do we?

OK. We'll do an attendance for the day.

Avdi, would you like to call on council members for attendance?

Chair Yang is excused.

Council Member Johnson?

And Council Member Johnson has entered the room, so I believe that is six present, one excused.

Perfect.

Thank you.

So today we are having a presentation by the state demographer, so we're going to welcome up Dr. Susan Bauer.

and we'll hear about the latest population trends in St Paul that's using the 2020 census data.

Susan Bauer is the Minnesota State Demographer and directs the Minnesota State Demographic Center.

Susan became the State Demographer in February of 2012 and in that capacity she travels the state talking with Minnesotans about the new social and economic realities that are brought about by recent demographic shifts.

Susan's work applies an understanding of demographic trends to changes in a range of areas including the state's economy and workforce, education, health, immigration, and rural population changes.

Welcome, thank you so much for being here.

One of the connecting points that we just had, and then I'll let you kick it off.

is our debt capacity presentation.

One of the many ways that we are graded is looking at the wellness of our population, how educated we are, what our wages are, what our households look like.

So it's perfect timing to have the state demographer come present.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you for having me here.

It's great to be here.

I will share with you today some information about the city of St. Paul specifically and also some information about the state in the US.

Because part of the power of demographics is that when we look at these bigger trends that are impacting

all of us outside of a particular city or county or even state we can really get a picture for what the future will look like and so with your permission I'll toggle between the city and the state but really it's to provide larger context for what we can expect in the future when I move up to those higher levels of geography.

My experience and expertise specifically is in population dynamics, how the state is growing, births, deaths, migration, make that up.

And so I will explain to you kind of what we expect based on what we've seen with those trends.

I also have a lot of access to data, so if there is something that you're not seeing here today, that would be of particular value to you.

I'm happy to follow up with additional information.

But to start, I'll talk about the population growth of St Paul and the Twin Cities.

So we're looking here at a map of the cities within the Twin Cities metro.

We're kind of zoomed in on the Twin Cities metro here.

And what we can see are where there are darker cities mapped there.

There's been a higher growth rate between 2010 and 2020.

and I'm looking back to that decade because we have a very clear view on what happened there.

It gets a lot murkier which I'll show you in a minute after 2020.

The last decade, the 2010s, were really a period of high growth for St. Paul.

We'll look at what that looks like in a minute.

But historically, very rapid growth, both for Minneapolis and St. Paul.

9% over the course of the decade for St. Paul, 12% for Minneapolis.

after many years of much slower growth or even declines.

The high areas of growth that we saw in the center cities of Minneapolis and St Paul last decade was also a phenomenon that happened across the US, across metros in the US, a really kind of period of very rapid growth in center cities.

And so that is something that we experienced here in the Twin Cities as well.

What we began to see toward the end of the

2010s nationally is dissipated growth in the center cities.

That movement out towards suburban areas began.

We didn't quite see that during the last decade, but it looks like we may be seeing some of that now.

I'm curious about nominal changes.

If five people move to a really small community, that's going to be a huge percentage increase.

Whereas if five people move to St. Paul, you don't even notice.

Yeah, great question.

Thank you.

What we saw last decade was a tremendous increase in terms of rate and numbers in the center cities.

And we're also seeing kind of along the edges of the metro a large numeric increase.

So I would say it's kind of

the edges and the very center cities that we saw.

And now, which we'll see here in a moment, we're seeing kind of a leveling off of that growth in St Paul.

Same with Minneapolis as well, so not as much growth as we saw last decade.

If we look back to 1950 even, we can see this historical trend line for the total population of St Paul and in

2010, the St Paul population reached the levels that it had last seen in the 1970s.

So it had been a very long time since it had kind of reached that just above the 310,000 mark.

And you can see again that period between 2010 and 2020 where that increased rate of growth occurred.

What we're seeing now since that time is a leveling off.

I mentioned that nationally that's happening in urban areas, kind of this dissipation of growth out toward suburban areas.

We're seeing it here now in Minnesota as well.

There's slightly different estimates for Met Council or Census, but both agree, the US Census Bureau, but

City Council, and the City Council.

Both sets of estimates of the population since the last census agree that the growth rate is not what it had been prior to 2010.

And, again, this is part of a national trend.

Oftentimes I see this in the state as well and for many cities that many people tend to look inward and say what is it about our city that is no longer growing at the

It has to do with building patterns but it also has to do with a larger demographic context that I'll share with you in a moment as well.

So feel free to look inward but also there are plenty of contexts outside of you that are shaping these growth trends.

The important thing to note is that rapid growth really appears to have leveled off in the last few years.

We're seeing less growth across the Twin Cities and so in the next slide we're looking here

At each of the metro counties and the seven county metropolitan area as a whole and in each decade from the 1990s to 2024 we're seeing from almost every urban county here much lower growth than we've seen in the past and in particular in the last four years we're seeing very little growth

on the City Council.

in Ramsey County, in Hennepin County.

So they largely agree that the numbers are lower, the growth numbers are lower, but the Census Bureau has it as in terms of a negative population change.

So what's happening?

Why are we seeing this lower level of growth?

These are the bigger demographic contexts that I was talking about.

We don't often think about births and deaths as fueling population change, but it really is the engine of growth.

Our brains tend to think straight to migration.

Who's moving to a place?

Who's moving away from a place?

But underlying all that change related to migration are the number of births and number of deaths.

and when you have a county or a state or even a city that is older or aging, it's much harder to grow from births and population losses are greater because of deaths.

You have more people in the high mortality age groups.

So think of kind of our demographic context as just kind of a blanket dampening growth just because we are an older state, we're older counties,

And in this context where we have fewer births, we have more deaths, migration becomes a much more important piece of growth overall.

For Ramsey County, as we're seeing here, there's been a net loss of domestic migration, meaning people are moving out of Ramsey County.

to other places in the state or in the US, more so than they're moving in.

But there's been a net increase in people because of international migration.

I sure would show you the St Paul numbers if I had them, but we don't get them at the city level, we get them at the county level, so that's why I'm sharing these numbers with you here.

So for Ramsey County, that 10,000 population that's lost is really

It is partly a story of domestic migration loss, but also we're seeing less and less growth just because of births over deaths.

Sorry to talk about death so early in the morning, but it's part of my charm.

So what we're seeing for the state overall is less and less, when we project forward, less and less natural increase going forward.

These are state numbers now and we expect that moving into the future by the late 2040s that we will not grow because of our own natural change, our own internal momentum.

Any growth that the state does have will need to come from people moving here from other states or from other countries.

That's just where we are today.

That's our population dynamics and Ramsey County fits into that and St. Paul.

Thanks, Chair.

How does that compare, Dr. Brower, to the country as a whole and to other states?

Is that just a lot of baby boomers and that kind of nationally?

So.

of the U.S.

from other places in the US and some areas have higher levels of international immigration from other areas around the globe.

And so to the extent that we feel the impact of aging and of this demographic change really hinges on whether or not we have kind of healthy inflows from other states and from other countries.

The Midwest and the Northeast of the U.S. tends to have less migration in.

We tend to be net exporters of people to the Southwest and to Western states, Southern states.

That's just been the case.

It's just part of kind of where we are on the map.

And so it's not unusual.

I will say Minnesota does a little bit better in terms of growth than elsewhere.

but I will say kind of specific for Ramsey County and even for St Paul what we have been seeing in recent years has been kind of lower levels of growth for urban counties and for cities across the board.

Again aging is impacting all of that but it's a question of how much is migration making up that difference.

and it really varies depending on if you're looking at a city, a county or if you're in the Midwest or the Southwest of the United States.

Okay, so I want to talk a little bit now just about population aging and this really has

A major milestone that was recently met is that we have more older adults in our state than we have school-aged children ages 5 to 17 and the reason that I'm picking these two age groups is because they tend to be

the age groups that receive the most public services in the form of K-12 education, in the form of health, long term, I'm sorry, I'm a hand talker, long term services and supports.

And so it's a major, well you can see that it's been occurring kind of slowly over time and then the aging trend picked up in 2010 as the baby boomers reached age 65.

it's really kind of a major milestone not only demographically but in terms of public budgets as we see more pressures all around for the groups that tend to receive public services the most.

I have a question for this slide

Would you say what's contributing to the high population of baby boomers is, are we in a world where they are aging longer than in terms of the 1950s or 60s and 70s?

Are people just aging longer now?

And if you could talk about some of those factors.

Yes they are living a little bit longer due to a number of factors.

including access to healthcare, but also kind of socioeconomic factors that extend life expectancy.

But I'd say the reason that we're seeing this now is not just because of an increase in life expectancy, it's just because that cohort is just so big and they're reaching age 65 at this point.

And so that's how we know that they will continue to age for the rest of this decade up to 2030.

And then we see a leveling off as the next cohort, Generation X, starts to reach those ages.

There's just not as many of them, so we'll see that population level off a little bit.

We do stay a relatively older state into the foreseeable future.

That doesn't turn around.

So one of the things that can help us get our brains around where we are with respect to

The aging of the baby boomers and how it impacts public budgets, our economy, is to think about just where are the baby boomers right now in their lives.

The first baby boomer turned age 65 in 2011, so they started to reach that retirement age now over a decade ago.

Almost 15 years ago, we started to see more retirements

and we started to feel an impact on our labor force, on our workforce.

You know, 20 years ago people were not thinking about labor force shortages at all.

In fact, they would kind of think that you were nuts if you were going to be talking about labor force shortages.

No, that's not something that we have experienced.

Looking at the last 15 years or so, we've continued to see those retirements build up until 2029 until the last of the baby boomers reach age 65.

So that's really, thank you so much, that's really been a period of, the impact of aging has been around workforce growth and I know the bonding agencies, this is something that they certainly look at.

How is your labor force growing?

And this is an impact that is important for really all states that are experiencing the aging of the baby boomers.

Again, we feel it more severely than some other states and some other areas just because we don't have the same levels of in-migration that other places do.

Chair Johnson.

Thank you.

I appreciate it, Council Vice President.

And thank you so much for being here as well to just kind of go through some of the population in depth since we are

at the later stages of the impact pace for workforce.

Could you just highlight some of the things that we, I guess, have seen in the last couple decades?

Because I just noticed now that we have pretty much five or a little under five years left, I think, from the workforce piece of impact.

Absolutely, thank you for that question.

The biggest impact is that our workforce just isn't growing at the pace that it has in the past.

And that's because the baby boomers are moving into retirement and we are not having enough children to, the birth rate isn't high enough to make up kind of for those losses.

So when we make our projections out for

Our labor force growth going into the future, we're seeing very little growth.

It's just almost the same number of workers that we have today for the next 10 years, for the next 20 years.

And that's a very different economic and labor force context than we've seen in the past.

It has lots of implications, lots of tentacles.

and the

or whether it's someone in a higher tech, higher skilled type job in healthcare, people have been having a hard time in Minnesota, employers have been having a hard time across the board finding workers to fill and they've had to find new ways to fill those gaps.

So I would say that specifically that workforce impact is

Council,

to recruit people from elsewhere.

That's kind of the new context, new in the last 10 years that we didn't see 20 years ago at all.

It wasn't on employers' radars to be thinking, how do we find people in other states and get them here to work?

Thank you so much.

We don't have a shortage of water.

So what's coming is, I think, what people have thought about in terms of aging.

And in terms of public budget, this is really important because the health of the state budget and even the federal budget hinges on our ability to provide K-12 education, to provide health care, long-term care services,

and so as the baby boomers move into this older age group, we will begin to feel kind of a reshuffling in budget pressures all around because there's more people in these age groups to demand these services.

Yes, I know this is St. Paul.

It is the context in which St. Paul sits, so I just wanted to be clear that as we're seeing those kind of state level budget pressures, that's the impact.

Now with aging in St. Paul,

St. Paul is a relatively young city compared to the U.S.

So we're looking at the age structure of St. Paul compared to the U.S. but also compared to Minnesota.

And you can see kind of the weight or the concentration of people at the lower

Just know that when we're talking about the impact of population aging on St Paul

it's not necessarily coming from within that we'll see so many more seniors, so much aging happening within St Paul that may happen to a degree but it's really going to be the impact of aging outside in budget pressures and so forth outside that will have I think the greater impact on the city is just kind of the aging that's happening outside of the city in particular.

Compared to

other another city Minneapolis compared to Ramsey County again you can see here if we look at the child's population about 23 percent St Paul's a little bit younger than Minneapolis is and if we look at another measure of that just the percentage of older adults you can see a lower percentage there as well so again that just speaks to the fact that yes

Aging is happening to all of us.

It's happening in St. Paul, but especially outside of St. Paul within Minnesota, within the U.S. is where some of those impacts will flow through the budgeting process to cities and individuals.

I just wanted to give you a visual too of kind of how St. Paul children, where they live, the size of them relative to other nearby cities.

So we're looking here at a map

the size of the circle represents how many children there are in each city under the age of 18 and the dots the color of the dot represents the percentage of that city that is a child so for the very darkest circles you're seeing a higher proportion of those areas are children it tends to be the

suburban cities that are growing very rapidly, that have new housing developments where younger families are moving too, kind of on the edges of the metro.

Minneapolis and St Paul have a slightly older population than some of those suburban cities, but you can see how many children relative to all the other suburban cities are in Minneapolis and St Paul.

So just a visual representation of

The number of children here compared to other metro cities.

Finally I want to talk about increases in changes in diversity, increases with respect to racial and ethnic groups.

Here I'll start at the state and then drill down to St. Paul.

We can see that there has been an increase among populations of color or black indigenous people of color by populations in the state of Minnesota that really picked up in the 1990s.

And we've seen that carry through today.

So while the native or indigenous American Indian population has not grown as rapidly because it hasn't had kind of the same benefit of international immigration,

We've seen a tremendous amount of growth for other major racial groups including black or African-American, Hispanic or Latino, and Asian.

We've also seen a big increase in people reporting multiple races, as you can see here.

One of the questions that was proposed to me in a pre-meeting here was, has St. Paul reached the point at which

50% of the population belongs to a BIPOC group.

And looking at the numbers, I would say in reality, my answer is yes.

However, the numbers are not quite showing that yet.

So this is an average of 2019 to 2023.

And we're seeing 49.4% of St Paul residents are people of color.

It's really likely higher than that due to kind of

non-response bias due to sampling error, that kind of thing.

But if we're just to look at the numbers coming out of the Census Bureau, this is what they're showing as of the most recent number.

And I'm sure that as we continue to move a couple of years in time, that will increase a little bit more.

So about 152,000 residents of St. Paul belong to a BIPOC group.

and you can see that the largest groups are by far Asian residents of St Paul and black or African American as well.

And you can see kind of I've sorted here just the largest BIPOC groups by city.

Minneapolis is a little bit higher on the list than St Paul, followed by Brooklyn Park, Rochester, Bloomington.

Some of the largest groups there.

I will say that 11% of people who self-identify as BIPOC live in the city of St. Paul.

11% of the state's BIPOC population lives in St. Paul.

So a significant proportion, 1 in 10, live in the city of St. Paul.

Very large number there.

St. Paul has the largest

Asian population of any city.

We can see that kind of glancing down the column here.

54,970 is the latest estimate and the second largest population for black or African American, Hispanic and multiracial residents.

One of the reasons we know that the state and the city will continue to become more diverse into the future is not only because of migration fueling an increase in diversity, but also because as we get younger and younger, we have greater diversity.

You can see that 75% of

Children in St Paul belong to a BIPOC group are children of color And you can see that too even you know going 15 and younger that's about the percentage so The vast majority as those children age into the older groups will continue to see kind of greater diversity at the older ages and will continue to see kind of that proportion likely spread out as diverse as

investing in our youth programming, investing early.

We had a presentation from the St Paul Children's Collaborative not long ago about some of the outcomes they're seeing with youth.

And it just really strikes me, looking at the slide, that when we're talking about equity, any time we're investing in our youngest people, that is inherently equity, just given the way that the demographics shake out.

Thank you.

So I've been talking so far about racial and ethnic diversity with respect to birthplace.

Of course, St. Paul is very diverse as well.

Close to 20% of residents of St. Paul are foreign born, so it's 18% as of the most recent numbers, or one in five.

That's about twice the rate of the state overall.

You can see that the largest proportion come from an Asian country, from an African country, or from a country in Latin America.

I want to share with you now some of the numbers coming out of the 2020 Census.

You have a handout with the full list.

I just gave a sample here of the top

but I think these are numbers that are buried deep in the Census Bureau site and so people don't always see them.

What I've shared with you today are numbers that are detailed race groups alone or in combination, meaning if someone said that they were German and Irish for example, they would appear in both groups.

So it's a count of people who, of anyone who named that particular detailed group.

These numbers are not perfect, but they're the best that we have.

Thank you.

And I see questions from Chair Johnson and Council Member Joe.

OK.

I couldn't help myself.

First notable note, do we still use the term born born in 2025 for our data sets for this?

Just out of curiosity.

Can you tell us a little bit why?

You know, it's a term that has not, in terms of demographics and data collection, it is one that has not yet changed in circles, I guess, that are, I would say like data collection, federal government circles yet.

So if it sounds wrong to your ears, I'm glad to hear that.

that does not include people who were

Give me an example of what other black or African-American not specified would be.

Because at first I thought maybe that was Somali or Ethiopian, but then I realized that they are specified in the largest piece.

So that means that it wasn't specified by the individual filling out the form.

So it may include Somali, it may include Ethiopian, but they maybe would have checked the kind of major black or African American box that was at the top of the form.

I wish I had an example to show you if they checked the major group but did not fill in anything more detailed.

there were some detailed check boxes that they could have selected including for example African-American as we see here but if they didn't check one of those boxes and they didn't fill anything in then we would see them in that other not specified and while that doesn't give us a sense of who those folks are it gives us a sense of how much kind of

Councilmember Just

Yeah.

So the 2020 census was the first time that this detailed race was collected.

This is the first time that it's published.

We do have other surveys that ask things that are similar.

And so we have some historical data, but they're not exactly comparable.

From the surveys, we can go back to questions about ancestry and birthplace, for example, and kind of get as close as we can to constructing something like this.

But this is the first time for all groups that this detailed information was collected.

Yeah.

Thanks, Chair Kim.

I was just going to echo those points because I think some of the data points we're seeing, for example, like country of birth is sort of a knowable or theoretically more knowable fact versus these self-reported pieces.

I, as someone who's very obviously white, was looking at sort of comically how people are identifying the specificity versus broadly.

Because if I were to break down the percentages of my, like,

you know country heritage it would be all these little slivers and so I would for sure just put white because it's not but like my wife's family so identifies as Croatian even though they're like eight percent Croatian and so they for sure mark Croatian and it tells you something and tells you nothing it's just kind of like yeah almost familial identity on part on part of these versus so it's it was interesting to see all the specificity because it does give people the freedom to sort of

That's right.

These numbers are, they're not as kind of precise as any one individual would like them to be probably, but they are kind of the most specific numbers that we have on detailed race groups, which I know is of particular interest to policymakers and to individual groups.

Nonprofits, there's a lot of interest in kind of having a better sense of the great diversity that we have in the state and in the city, but when we really drill in we see it's pretty messy.

You have the full list in front of you for St. Paul and you can see it in its full.

full glory there but it does represent as I said the most the most detailed numbers but not as kind of probably specific as you would like in some areas but it's what we have.

This is not in your packet I just added it I wanted to let you know that the Census Bureau also published those detailed numbers by census tract and so you can see maps that you never could see before and I can provide this

and City Council.

and there's this level of detail for each of those groups that you see on that list there.

So if you wanted to look specifically at the Hmong population in St Paul, the African-American population in St Paul, you can look at it according to these census tracts.

So I just wanted you to know.

It's there, I can point you to it and it's something that not a lot of people know is there.

Those are the remarks that I've prepared for you today.

I'm happy to answer questions and to speak more.

I did add some additional data if you'd like to speak about them.

Yeah, I think there's three additional slides.

Would folks like to just hear some brief comments from the doctor around the poverty status, looks like housing units, transportation?

Yeah, absolutely.

So about 14% of St. Paul residents live in poverty.

And what I will say about the poverty line is it's very, very low.

When I look at the poverty line and compare it to cost of living calculators and to try to get some sense of what living in poverty means, you need to almost double the poverty population to get to a population that's just meeting basic needs.

So in this case, we would be, you know, if the poverty line's at 100%, we'd be at about 28% that's meeting, just meeting basic needs.

in terms of St Paul residents overall.

That's higher, about one and a half times higher than for Minnesota overall, so more poverty here and also higher poverty among children, which is a typical kind of age pattern that we tend to see.

Sorry, we've got a few questions.

Thanks Chair.

I can speak to change over time in Minnesota, but I don't have the St Paul numbers.

I would expect that it would follow a little bit higher.

And so what we saw was higher poverty rates after the Great Recession that came down up until the pandemic.

We saw an increase in poverty there, and then it's come down again since that time.

but there was an increase during

detailed information for major race groups at the state level.

It's published at the city level as well, and I'm happy to provide a follow-up data table with that for you.

What we tend to see is higher poverty rates, as you're well aware, among Hispanic or Latino, black or African American residents.

and some Southeast Asian populations as well.

We have a report called the Economic Status of Minnesotans on our site that breaks down poverty rates by those specific detailed groups.

So if you want to see some of that more detailed difference, we can't provide that at the city level, but it's at the state level.

What we can provide at the city level is the major race groups by the city level, and I'd be happy to follow up with that.

Thank you.

In terms of transportation to work, I just wanted to note that in St. Paul about 20% of residents in this dataset 2023 are working from home.

That's a number that of course has changed quite a bit in the last decade.

That's pretty close to the statewide average, the metro average, just a little bit lower than both of those, but it's all around 20%.

and that number used to be around 5% before the pandemic.

So we've really seen an increase that hasn't quite come down yet, still a large proportion working at home, but of course the vast majority are driving alone to work as you can see here.

You can see kind of the whole distribution of how people get to work if they are St. Paul residents here.

And then finally, I think what stands out in terms of St. Paul's

kind of housing structure, units and occupancy is just kind of the large share of multi-unit housing relative to other places.

So you can see close to 50% of St Paul's housing units are part of a multi-unit building.

But that proportion is about 30% for the Twin Cities Metro and just a quarter for the state overall.

of the state.

We also see kind of more renters.

There's 52% owner-occupied is the recent estimate here.

It's about 72% for the state overall.

So with those multi-unit buildings, many of them are rental units and so you see that higher rate of rental housing as well.

I don't see any additional questions.

Just deep gratitude for the information.

Yeah, we really appreciate it.

Sounds like there's a few follow-ups that our office can follow up on to make sure questions are being answered.

And with that, the Finance and Budget Committee of the St Paul City Council is adjourned.