The county grew by 1.02 percent, or 4,400 residents, to hit a total population of 435,600 residents as of April 1, according to recently released state estimates.
That’s even slower than the 1.65 percent in April 2009, which had been a 25-year low. The last time the growth rate was lower than this year was April 1984, when it bottomed out at 0.8 percent.
The estimates show a drastic slowdown for the recession-bedraggled area, which saw massive growth in the early part of the decade. Those boom days have helped Clark County sustain its ranking as the second-fastest growing county in the state over the last 10 years, with 26.4 percent overall growth.
But it’s not like Southwest Washington is being left in the dust: The state’s total population went up by just under 1 percent, to 6,733,250. King and Thurston counties both grew faster (1.26 percent and 1.13 percent, respectively), but Snohomish was behind Clark at .97 of a percent.
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And Vancouver, added 1,000 people to hit 165,500 people, and continue to hold the title of “fourth largest city in Washington.”
“This flatness is tied to the current recession,” state chief demographer Yi Zhao said. “Given the recession we have, I would say the county’s still holding.”
Zhao said that population numbers have historically bounced around with the nation’s fortune — slowing in the early ’70s and ’80s, and surging during the late ’90s and middle part of this decade. For example, the county lost 0.4 of a percent of its population in 1970 and had grown by 2.85 percent between April 2006 and April 2007.
“This will get better with the economy, that’s for sure,” Zhao said. “How soon and how fast we’ll be crawling up depends.”
The population estimates are how the state allots funding, she said. The estimates are based off unemployment rates, home sales and building, school enrollment figures and various other markers such as voter and auto registrations, the demographer said. They will be updated early next year with the official 2010 census numbers.
Scott Bailey, a regional economist with the Washington Employment Security Department, said that Clark County has grown larger, and so will not have such impressive percentage changes as it did in the past.
Still, during this economy, a bad housing market has kept people from buying or selling homes, making growth stagnant, Bailey said.
“It’s hard to buy and sell a house,” he said. “For those who want to sell and move to Clark County, it’s difficult to do, and vice versa.”
Population change is separated into births, deaths and net migration, with births and deaths fairly steady, Bailey said. Net migration, or people moving in and people moving out, was still positive at 1,858, but down from 3,688 last year and 8,000 to 10,000 in the boom years, he said. Still, this year’s figure is the lowest net migration since 1987.
Bailey said that young people in their 20s to mid-30s will be the bellwethers of which areas are recovering most quickly, as they are more mobile and able to move to where jobs are located.
