David Robinson: For business, growing population is a game changer

Since the 1970s, local businesses have had to know how to get by in a shrinking market. That meant stealing customers from the competition or expanding into new markets.

Now they can learn what it’s like to be in a market that’s growing. More customers. More spending. More opportunities. And perhaps just as important, a chance to shed the perception that the Buffalo Niagara region is in a perpetual decline.

“Perception is huge, and this definitely helps the perception because our population is increasing instead of decreasing,” said Timothy Glass, the state Labor Department’s regional economist in Buffalo.

But image is only a small part of the sea change that comes from a rising population.

For half a century, Buffalo Niagara businesses have had to learn how to live with less.

Stores had fewer customers from one year to the next. Any time a new business opened that served local consumers, the only way for them to survive was to steal customers away from their competitors.

Businesses have scrambled for years to find enough workers – and companies that considered moving here often worried that there wouldn’t be enough people for them to build out their workforce – a trend that the Covid-19 pandemic only made worse.

Housing prices lagged because there was a glut of homes for sale as people moved away.

And with decades of decline came the perception that Buffalo Niagara was a region in decline. Young people moved away in droves to places that were growing fast and where it was easier to find a good job.

The rising population could turn all that on its head. Here’s how.

The pie is getting bigger. More people means more spending. And more spending means more chances for new businesses to get started, and for existing ones to grow.

“We definitely benefit from having more people,” said Julie Anna Golebiewski, a Canisius College economist. “We are going to be able to consume more and prop up local businesses.”

That’s good news for anyone opening a restaurant or a dry cleaner or a fitness center. A bigger pie means that some of their customers can come from a pool of new consumers – more than 31,000 of them across the Buffalo Niagara region.

“We have businesses that are coming here and will want to come here because of the rising population,” Glass said.

Urban areas are where the action is. The region’s population is following the jobs.

Jobs have been on the upswing in the Buffalo Niagara region, not counting pandemic-related declines. Jobs have been disappearing across Western New York’s rural counties.

So people are leaving those rural areas, and they’re moving to the urban centers where employment opportunities are more plentiful.

The population of Western New York’s six rural counties dropped by 4.6% over the decade. Even Niagara County’s population fell by 1.8%. Only Erie County – with its 3.8% jump in population – had more people in 2020 than it did in 2010.

“It’s also possible that preferences are changing,” Golebiewski said. “People want to be closer to entertainment and other activities.”

In the long run, that’s good for the Buffalo Niagara region, where the nationwide boom in restaurants, breweries and urban apartments was late arriving but has steadily gained momentum.

We’re still pretty gray. The people in the Buffalo Niagara region still are older, on average, than they are across the country. About 20% of the population here is under the age of 18. Nationwide, it’s 22%.

Keeping young people here has long been a big problem, and there was some preliminary census data in the mid-2010s that indicated that the Buffalo Niagara region had reversed the long decline in the population of younger adults.

The new census data doesn’t break down the local population by age, but when those figures come out, they will go a long way to show how well the region is doing to retain its young people and give the college students who come here a reason to stay after graduation.

Golebiewski is hopeful. “I think a good portion of that growth is concentrated in the younger population,” she said. “They’ve been more successful in finding employment locally. For a long time, they had a difficult time doing that and had to go to the big urban centers to find the type of employment they were looking for.”

But not everything is rosy.

We’re not keeping up with the Joneses. Our population growth is just about half as fast as the rest of the country. That means other places still have more opportunities for people to find jobs and for businesses to build a customer base.

“We’re growing at a slower rate, so we’re not tapping into the full potential because we’re not attracting new residents to the same extent as other places in the U.S.,” Golebiewski said.

But by upstate New York standards, we’re going pretty good. Erie County’s population growth was almost double the 2% increase in Rochester’s Monroe County and Syracuse’s Onondaga County. It was even a little better than Albany County’s 3.5% gain.

Still, Glass says the most important point is not the growth rate, but that Buffalo Niagara is growing again, reversing decades of decline.

“Historically, it’s always good to compare Buffalo to Buffalo,” Glass said. “We’re growing – and that’s a positive.”

Especially after five decades of decline.