Wanted - More People!
Today, Hattiesburg’s city limits cross 54 square miles between Forrest and Lamar counties. This represents dramatic growth over the past 40 years, when Hattiesburg consisted of closer to 20 square miles. Our population growth during that period has been notable, but it has not kept up percentage wise, growing about 19% from 40,829 in 1980 to 48,730 in 2020. It would be interesting to figure out whether that 1980 version of Hattiesburg had more or less people today, but unfortunately, our friends at the Census Bureau do not make that calculation for me. However, looking at 1) the empty lots in many sections of older Hattiesburg that used to have houses and 2) the dramatic growth in subdivisions and apartment complexes in newer sections of Hattiesburg make it obvious that our growth has been on the edges, rather than the core.
This phenomenon continues. As part of the Hub City Transit Master Plan our region produced last year, Neel-Schaffer mapped the change in households (i.e. population) as part of a traffic analysis. Most of the negative growth (white) or the slow growth (yellow) is inside the city limits. The darker colors representing higher growth corridors are mostly not in Hattiesburg’s city limits.
Why does this matter? Declining population density makes city services harder and more expensive to provide. Police officers and firefighters can only drive so fast even with lights and sirens blaring and therefore we need more of them (and stations) to have the same response times and coverage. The cost to install and maintain roads, sewers, water lines and other infrastructure varies mostly by linear mile installed, even if the number of users per linear mile goes down. You know what else it does? It makes traffic worse - all those people on the edges are still largely driving an increasing distance to shop, work or get medical treatment in Hattiesburg proper. We should celebrate the progress we have made to start to reverse this trend over the past few years, whether that is new construction like Preservation Crossing or addressing underlying issues like improving HPSD’s ratings from a ‘D’ to an ‘A’, and focus efforts to grow our city’s population density.
