The eight counties that straddle Michigan’s Saginaw Bay have been in a population tailspin for years.
From 2014 to 2024, the region’s eight counties lost an estimated 20,000 people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, including many of the young adults that area leaders hoped would revitalize places like Saginaw and Bay City.
The keys to reversing that trend are high-paying jobs and quality of life improvements, local officials told The Detroit News.
“I would say that we’re turning things around,” said Bay County Executive Jim Barcia, a Democratic former congressman who represented Michigan’s Fifth District in the U.S. House from 1993 to 2003.
Barcia acknowledged the region’s population struggles, but struck an optimistic tone about its future.
“The most important thing that we can do will be to create employment, careers, good-paying jobs with good benefits and lasting careers where somebody can plan to work 20 or 30 years and retire,” he said.
Which counties lost the most people?
In 2014, Saginaw County had a population of nearly 200,000 people.
Ten years later, it had lost more than 9,000 residents, or 5% of its total population. Isabella County lost fewer people — about 6,000 — but that accounted for 8% of the county’s population, which now has about 64,500 residents.
Three counties in the region ended that 10-year period with slightly higher populations, but none gained more than 500 people.
The sustained population loss in the Great Lakes Bay Region mirrored many communities across Michigan, said Mark Skidmore, a Michigan State University economics professor who has studied population loss in cities across the United States.
“But the key (factor) is just the change with globalization and how a lot of that manufacturing left Michigan and went abroad to Mexico and to Asia and elsewhere,” Skidmore said.
The decline in employment opportunities forced many people to leave to find work elsewhere. Those who left tended to be higher-income, since they had more mobility, the professor said.
“And so as those people leave, the less mobile, those who live in poverty, are more likely to stay,” Skidmore said.
The Bay Region’s median household income of around $60,000 is still around 20% lower than the level for the state, where the median household income was $72,875 in 2024.
Over several decades, those trends resulted in excess housing stock and a shrinking tax base, which left less money for key infrastructure needs, such as roads and wastewater treatment.
When Skidmore analyzed population data from 2000 to 2020, he found that more than half of all Michigan communities shrank during that period.
In most cases, Skidmore said the population loss was linked to the deindustrialization that ravaged the manufacturing and automotive industries that powered Michigan’s economy for most of the 20th century.
Shrinking universities factor into trend
Declining enrollment at the region’s major universities, Central Michigan University and Saginaw Valley State University, likely played a role in the overall population loss, Skidmore said.
Enrollment at the two institutions declined by a combined 15,560 students from fall 2014 to fall 2024, according to annual data published by the Michigan Association of State Universities.
“In (the) region, I think that the decline in the population of those two universities is a really significant factor in the overall decline,” Skidmore said.
Census data shows that 20- to 24-year-olds accounted for more than a quarter of the population loss in Saginaw County, home to Saginaw Valley State, and 62% of the decline in Isabella County, where Central Michigan is located.
Students who graduate from those universities don’t necessarily stay in the region after they earn their degrees, either. Talented local graduates might be lured away to higher-paying jobs in big cities like Detroit, Grand Rapids or Chicago.
Skidmore said this issue affects many smaller cities in the Midwest. Communities like Mount Pleasant or Bay City invest in education, but lack the jobs and amenities of larger metropolitan areas.
CMU tries to keep graduates local by promoting mid-Michigan employers to students through partnerships with regional economic development groups and local businesses, said Erica O’Toole, director of the career development center at CMU.
“They’re looking for (job) opportunities, that’s going to be the first thing. The second is cost of living,” O’Toole said, noting that university officials emphasize to students that the Bay Region’s cost of living is lower than other areas.
“At our career fairs, we are going to have people from all over Michigan, because some of the big employers that work with us in Detroit.”
Officials focus on investment, quality of life
Barcia said Bay County has attracted significant private investment in recent years, including major industrial projects by companies like Consumers Energy, which announced in March that it will spend $2 billion on a natural gas-powered plant and a solar field in the region.
According to Barcia, the county has added about 900 new full-time jobs in the last two years, especially in sectors like advanced manufacturing, where local workers employed by South Korea-based microchip manufacturer SK Siltron can make $50 an hour or more.
The county’s wage distribution could use a boost. Inflation wiped out any gains in the median annual earnings for a full-time worker in Bay County from the five-year period ending in 2019 to the five-year period ending in 2024, according to Census Bureau data.
“It is critical that we grow our population going forward, but we have been focused on growing our tax base and expanding the career opportunities,” Barcia said.
Bay County aims to attract half a billion dollars in new capital investment and 600 new jobs from 2025 through 2027, according to an investment prospectus created by Bay Future, an economic development group based in the county.
Barcia, who sits on Bay Future’s Board of Directors, told The News he hoped that the appeal of higher-paying jobs would prevent young residents from being “lured” away by career opportunities in the Grand Rapids area or the Detroit suburbs.
Tom Miller, president of Saginaw Future, an economic development non-profit in Saginaw County, agreed with Barcia.
“Population trends are clearly a priority for communities across the region and the state, and we understand this is a multi‑faceted issue influenced by many factors,” he wrote in an email.
“From our vantage point, strong job opportunities are one important piece of that broader conversation,” Miller wrote. “Competitive, well‑paying jobs help communities retain residents and attract new talent over time, alongside other quality‑of‑life considerations.”
Barcia emphasized the natural resources of the Saginaw Bay, a newly renovated public pool, county parks and the Bay County Civic Arena, which hosts hockey games.
One of the region’s challenges, the Bay County executive said, is getting that message out to Michigan residents from other parts of the state.
He said he wants visitors to see the “available jobs, recreational opportunities, a low cost of living, relatively low tax rates and relatively low crime rates here in Bay County.”
The goal is to reach people who “were familiar with Bay City, Bay County, but never really got off (Interstate 75) to stop in and see what we had to offer,” Barcia said.
bwarren@detroitnews.com
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Michigan’s Bay region looks to turn around population loss
Reporting by Ben Warren, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
