The number of jobs in Southeast Alaska continued its post-pandemic recovery last year. Yet, employers remain worried about filling job vacancies amid declining — and aging — population numbers.
“While jobs continue to grow in 2024, so do concerns about the lack of a sufficient workforce in the region,” according to the annual Southeast Alaska by the Numbers report.
“Compared to 2010, when the population was nearly identically sized, the region now has 1,700 more jobs and 5,600 fewer workforce-aged residents,” said the report, prepared by researcher Meilani Schijvens, of Juneau-based Rain Coast Data.
Schijvens, who has assembled the report since 2010, presented at Southeast Conference last month in Ketchikan.
Ranking the region’s challenges to economic development, Southeast business leaders “continue to identify housing as the top obstacle … with 61% of business leaders saying it is critically important to focus on housing over the next five years,” according to the report’s survey conducted this past spring.
“The housing shortage is deterring young families and workers from relocating to, or remaining in, the region.”
Half of businesses that responded to the survey said “finding better ways to attract and retain workforce-aged residents to the region is critically important.” In Wrangell, about 60% said “the need to attract young professionals over the next five years is critical.”
The population loss was consistent throughout Southeast from 2022 to 2023, with Wrangell, the Ketchikan and Haines boroughs, Hoonah and Skagway all dropping by 2% to 3%.
Wrangell has been in a steady population decline the past 20 years, with state projections putting the count at just under 1,400 by 2050, down from about 2,000 this year.
People who live in Wrangell are, on average, older than in the rest of the state. The community’s average age is almost 12 years older than the statewide number. The aging population is a Southeast-wide issue.
“Southeast continues to have the state’s oldest residents. Since 2010 — a year with a similar resident count to 2023 — the region lost more than 2,000 kids, while the 60-plus population grew by more than 7,000 older residents, from 17% of the overall population to 27%,” according to the Rain Coast Data report.
Across Southeast since 2010, “those of prime working age, aged 19 to 59, shrank by more than 5,600 residents. While many work well into their senior years, this demographic shift has resulted in a declining regional workforce.”
The total Southeast population has dropped by more than 3,000 in the past decade.
A component of the workforce shortage for the region is outmigration — more people leaving the state than moving in. “In 2023, nearly 800 more people moved away from Southeast Alaska than those who moved here, and deaths slightly outnumbered births. The majority of those who moved away left Alaska entirely.”
Statewide, Alaska has had 12 straight years of negative net migration. “This is not normal for us. It hasn’t happened before,” Dan Robinson, a research chief at the state Labor Department, said at an Anchorage forum last month. The longest prior streak was four years, he said.
Even with the challenges, Alaska Native organizations, tourism businesses, nonprofits and health care providers were the most positive about the economy moving into 2024, the annual Southeast report said.
“Communities with the most positive outlooks include Hoonah, Skagway and Ketchikan,” all heavily dependent on large cruise ship numbers. Business owners in Wrangell and Petersburg reported the most negative outlooks.
The largest category of job growth was in the tourism industry, adding more than 2,000 jobs from the spring 2022 survey to July 2024. Cruise ship passenger numbers set a record high in Southeast at almost 1.7 million last year.
Airline traffic was up, as were passenger loads on the state ferries, though ferry ridership in 2023 was less than half of the 2013 number.
And while tourism overall was up, 2023 was an economically down year for Southeast fisheries.
The value of last year’s catch totaled $508 million, down substantially from the 2022 harvest valued at $766 million, as prices crashed last summer amid an oversupplied market. The number of jobs in the seafood industry held steady in 2023, at about 3,600 fishers and processing plant workers, putting it third behind government jobs and the tourism industry.
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