Chapter 9: A Peek into Canaan's Future

The common perception is that projections are simply estimates of future numbers. This is just one use. Projections also allow you to manage the future, or at least to see what the impact will be of managing the present. If you encourage more economic development, for example, or limit home-building, you will be influencing the future population, as well as housing and job growth.

Future Population Growth:

Population projections are a means of putting existing trends into visual images. For this reason, we have prepared more than one population projection. While each one is based on mathematical calculations, they represent different assumptions, that is, different ideas about what will happen in the future. We can choose a projection as our preferred one, and thereby judge the amount of housing and jobs necessary to "fulfill the prophecy."

One thing we could do is just use the projections developed by the State Planning Office. The office predicts that Maine will stay virtually stable in population over the next twenty years, gaining maybe 1 percent. All the growth will be accounted for by new births, since there will be more people moving out of the state than in. Using this projection, Canaan would gain very few people. But is it realistic? Not judging from the amount of homebuilding in town, even in the worst of the recession. It is the larger towns, like Pittsfield and Waterville, that are losing population. Somerset County as a whole is growing faster than the state average. It appears that Canaan will continue to grow faster than state estimates.

Just to show how confusing things can get, we have prepared three projections, all based on the statement that "Canaan is growing just about right." In other words, they all start from the trend of our population over the past 20 years. It's just a matter of how you measure it.

Projection 1 (Lowest) is a very conservative interpretation. It assumes that all the growth in town comes from "natural change": the difference between births and deaths. This is sort of the state's estimate, that future growth in Maine will not include migration. In the past ten years, Canaan recorded 208 births and 115 deaths, for a net increase of 93. If we add 93 people per decade, here is what the projection would look like:

Low Projection: 2010: 2,110 2020: 2,203

This projection, while suitable for comparison purposes, is not very realistic..

Projection 2 (moderate) says home-building is just about stable. We've averaged 20 homes per year between 1990 and 2000, and 17 during the 80's. If we average 18 homes per year, that would translate to about 50 new people per year, or 500 in ten years. If we continued adding 50 people per year, our population would look like this:

Moderate Projection: 2010: 2,517 2020: 3,017

A third possibility is that we would grow at the same percentage rate as we have been. Projection 3 (high) assumes continuing our current growth rate. Isn't that growth "about right?" We have been growing about three percent per year for twenty years now. Although the "percent rate" should slow down as the town gets larger, we haven't yet reached any physical reason to stop growing at that rate.

High Projection: 2010: 2,617 2020: 3,217

Which of these three sets of numbers are most accurate? For planning purposes we have selected the Moderate projection

But it is really a matter of how we choose. If we do nothing, any of the three estimates is likely, because outside forces control the growth rate, not local ones. Or, we could do something about it. If we controlled the amount of land available for development, or the number of houses, the low projection would be more likely; If we encourage more housing and commercial development, then the high projection becomes more likely. That is why we need to look not only at population projections, but housing and job projections as well.

Future Housing Demand:

Clearly we will need more houses for more population. And as the household size discussion in Chapter 2 indicated, we will need more houses even if we have no more population.

Actually, it is houses that govern the growth of a town, and population is just a reflection of that. "If you build it, they will come." A town that encourages new housing development will inevitably see a population boom. A town that controls the level of housing also controls the rate of population growth. If the town does nothing, developers will control the rate of housing: If they can sell every one they've got, they'll keep building more; If people aren't buying, they won't be building.

To illustrate this better, let's use the low, moderate, and high projections from the preceding section, but let's add two more. The first is a projection "in reverse": what would happen to the population if no more houses were built (except to replace losses). The second is a projection of housing need from only shrinking household size. The assumption we will make is that, starting with the 2000 household size of 2.6, households will continue to shrink on average 5 percent in the 2000's (to 2.47) and 3 percent in the 2010's (to 2.4).

The table below (9-1) summarizes the results..

2000 2010 2020

Assumption: Pop. Pop. New Houses Pop. New Houses

No Housing Growth 2017 1915 0 1861 0

No Population Growth 2017 2017 41 2017 65

Low Projection 2017 2110 79 2203 142

Moderate Projection 2017 2517 244 3017 482

High Projection 2017 2617 284 3217 565

Source: Kennebec Valley Council of Governments

The moderate projection selected for our housing projections envisions building 482 new houses in 20 years. Is that out of line? That's just 24 a year. We averaged 17 a year in the 1980's, and 20 per year so far in the 90's. Those figures probably would have been unthinkable in the 1960's, when they were building less than four houses per year.

Future Demand for Jobs:

The final major ingredient in growth is jobs. If we are not to have major unemployment, and if we are to maintain population and income growth, we need to see more jobs created. And just like the trends in housing, the trends in job growth are actually outpacing population. Consider the following:

In 1980, 70 percent of the men over age 16 were in the work force (working or looking for work). Only 42 percent of the women were. In 1990, the percentage of men in the work force had risen to 74 percent, but the percentage of women had jumped over 15 points to 57.6. By 2000 the percentage of men in the work force had dropped to 70 percent but women rose again to 59 percent. The bottom line is that the population may have grown in 2000 by 381, but the workforce grew by 207.about one job for every two new residents.

In 2000, Canaan had 423 residents aged 5-17, and 194 aged 55-65. That means that in the next ten years, almost two times as many residents will be entering working-age as entering retirement age. This will continue until after 2011, when the first baby boomers will retire.

Table 9-2 shows projections for workforce needs based on population projections from above. It includes the following assumptions:

The proportion of females in the workforce will continue to increase. In 2010, 62 percent of women will be in the workforce; In 2020, 65 percent will.

The proportion of men in the workforce will also increase, but mostly because there will be more men of working age.

There will be no significant change in unemployment rates, or in the type and wage rate of resident jobs.

2010 2020

Projection Population NEW Workforce Population NEW workforce

Low 2110 46 2203 93

Moderate 2517 250 3017 500

High 2617 300 3217 600

Source: Kennebec Valley Council of Governments

In every case, the projections call for one new job to be added for every two new residents. And, as in the discussion about needing more housing units simply to keep a stable population, we would also need to add more jobs just to keep the population we have. Even if we had no population growth at all, in 15 years we would be adding new people to the labor force.

In actuality, it will probably not be Canaan that adds jobs, but somewhere in the regional economy. But what would be the practical effect if job growth did not keep on track? Without income to drive the demand for housing in Canaan, population growth would shrink or disappear, and property values would stabilize or fall.

If new housing is built without jobs, it will weaken the regional economy by raising the unemployment rate and vacant housing rate, driving property values down. If jobs are created without housing, it would drive down wages at the same time as driving up housing prices. If neither housing nor jobs are created, it does not result in a stable population; It results in a gradual loss of population and vitality in the town.

Future Development Patterns:

Incidental to the creation of new housing and business is the location of those activities. This, too, we can predict from existing patterns of development. And like housing and the local economy, there are some things the town can do about it if we don't like the prospects. In fact, with development patterns, the town has more control than with any other aspect of growth.

Current development patterns are fairly obvious. For commercial development, Route 2 or Route 23 south are the preferred locations. As traffic continues to increase (daily traffic tends to grow at about twice the rate as population), more business will be attracted to Canaan. Unfortunately, some of this business will be attracted because Skowhegan and Pittsfield no longer have land left on their commercial strips. These are businesses looking for easy access onto a major road.

For commercial development, the most critical factor affecting the town is not necessarily design or land consumption; It is access onto the public roads. The more businesses locate on Route 2, the more access points will be created. This will slow traffic down and create hazardous left turns on the high speed highway. As Route 2 turns into a commercial strip, it is no longer a high speed highway, and it has congestion. There are several examples of this happening on Route 2 already, notably Farmington and Newport. Yes, those are larger than Canaan. But Canaan, too, will be larger ten and twenty years from now. We can look forward to Route 2 being busier and a more hazardous road to drive on.

What can the town do about it? Short of limiting local development, there is a means of ensuring a safer road in the future. We can control where they put their access points. In order to be safe, access points must be visible and they must be well separated. It would be a relatively easy thing to require, for example, single driveways into small businesses, good visibility in both directions from driveway entrances, or sharing entrances for multiple businesses.

Residential development patterns, too, are obvious. We are chewing up the existing road frontage at a respectable rate. And we are building more on gravel roads than paved ones, and more in the rural areas than the built up ones. It can be anticipated that, in ten or twenty years, nearly every road in town will have a house or mobile home every 200 feet on both sides its entire length.

This will have a big impact on several aspects of our lives. For one, it will be an access problem, just like commercial development on Route 2. How many of us have had to suddenly slow down when the car in front of us abruptly turned into his driveway? Multiply that by a house every 200 feet, and you get rural roads with a lot of stopping and turning. It also becomes an access problem for the back land. How many developers are leaving rights-of-way to their back parcels when they build up front? When all the frontage is built, we will need those back lots for further development. Will we be able to get to them? Or will it be so expensive to buy right-of-way that developers will look elsewhere, to the next rural town, and Canaan's growth will bottom out? Even if the land is undeveloped, farmers need access, too. In fact, there may be so much development in the rural areas that it won't be worth the hassle of dealing with local residents for farmers or timber cutters, either.

Finally, roadside development along the rural arteries will have a subtle impact on our perspective of Canaan, too. It is difficult to maintain the image of a small-town, rural lifestyle when all you can see driving down a country road is front yard after front yard.

Rural development itself is a public service issue. The trend is towards more houses, 20 or so per year, on gravel roads, outside of the village, away from centrally-located services. When we have another 200 or 400 houses in the rural area, and none in the village, are we going to be willing to pay that much more to pave more roads, run more school busses, provide better fire protection?

These are issues that the Town and the Planning Board will have to deal with over the next few years. Even if the Town chooses not to control development through regulation, there are many ways to persuade developers to do things with the good of the community at heart.