City-size boost in people

Bismarck (N.D.) Tribune: The U.S. Census Bureau people tell us that North Dakota is growing in population. There’s no surprise in that. People living here can feel it in the traffic, rising home prices and new retail and housing developments.

Working the numbers tells how North Dakota is growing. The Census Bureau recently released figures for 2013 that show about 18,000 people migrated to the state. The increase can largely be attributed to the Bakken oil boom. However, these are not transient workers; they have come to the state and have at least begun to set down roots. Whether they stay depends upon a variety of things, perhaps of which the most important is the price of oil.

To put that into perspective, 18,000 people is nearly the population of Mandan. That means these new residents would require the services and infrastructure of a community the size of the state’s seventh-largest city if they all moved en masse to some point on the North Dakota prairie. Instead, they are spread across the state, with a majority in the western counties.

For the record, the estimated North Dakota population on July 1, 2013, was 723,393 residents — a high-water mark for the state and a reversal of the out-migration trend that frustrated the state in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s. That’s something to celebrate.