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Population
Local government reports we’ve hit two million people in Clark County.
Clark County’s two millionth resident simply showed up sometime in the last three months, and no one — not even the milestone newcomer — noticed the difference.
However, a sidebar for the story revealed the methodology that government uses to forecast population:
The county’s annual population estimate is rooted in a simple formula: the total number of housing units times the occupancy rate (generally around 95 percent) times the number of people per household (about 2.5).
To get a better sense of how much housing is out there, eight members of Wardlaw’s staff spend several weeks each year counting rooftops in recent aerial photographs of developing portions of the valley.
We know that our occupancy rate is very low right now – that’s the mortgage crisis you hear about. We know school enrollments are less than projected, university enrollments are less than projected, unemployment is higher than the national average (and, thanks to making a cell phone a primary phone, a transient working family can move back home and still field those phone calls to keep the unemployment checks coming) and tax collections are down the sharpest in revenue streams relating to spending that accompanies moving into a home.
