In case it has escaped your attention, America and Indiana are changing. Some of us cheer while others jeer; some of those changes are rapid while other are languid. Tradition, or stubbornness, keeps Indiana from changing as rapidly as the rest of the nation.
According to the latest (2017) Census reports from the American Community Survey, the number of households in the U.S. grew by 4.4 percent between 2011 and 2017; Indiana added only 3.7 percent. Nonetheless, that’s more than 90,000 additional households.
We don’t think in terms of households. Normally, we talk about the number of persons and the population, but households have different implications for a community, and its economy, than population alone.
Households subscribe to newspapers and magazines. The number of households, more than the population, is a determinant of water, sewer and fire infrastructure. Households buy washing machines, dryers, air conditioners, de-humidifiers and coffee pots. Clearly, the number, ages and preferences of individuals in a household have added implications for consumption. A teen in the house will easily change the number of autos and the cost of insurance.
In 2011, 66.5 percent of Hoosier households were families, just a bit over the national average of 66.2 percent. We ranked 18th in that metric behind Utah’s 74.9 percent. But just six years later, our 64.9 percent was now lower than the U.S. average of 65.5 percent, ranked 22nd, trailing Utah’s 74.1 percent.
What do all those numbers show? Family units are a declining share of U.S. households. Non-family households, from 2011 to 2017, were ascending nationally, growing by 6.5 percent — twice the growth rate for families. In Indiana, the difference was even greater. Non-family units grew by 8.7 percent while Hoosier family households grew by only 1.1 percent.
When we look at the median income of households, there is one consistent point every Hoosier voter and elected official needs to recall: income is lower in Indiana than in the U.S. regardless of how we breakdown living arrangements. PLEASE, don’t give me that old line: it’s less costly to live in Indiana and that justifies lower wages. NO. Lower wages in Indiana reduce the sale and rental prices for housing. People pay what they can afford.
And it got worse between 2011 and 2017. In 2011, the median income of all Indiana households, families and non-families, black, Hispanic, white, male or female head of household, was $4,604 less than the national median income. In 2017, that gap increased to $6,155.
Adjusting for inflation does not do much for closing the gap.
If it is our goal to improve the economic well-being of our citizens and their communities, we need to keep Hoosier families together more than attracting unattached workers from elsewhere. The delusions of many economic development groups are focused on the twin fads of our times: fancy factories and mysterious millennials.