State growth during '90s beats baby boom

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- The baby boom was big in Missouri. But with arrivals of senior citizens, Hispanics and other newcomers during the 1990s, Missouri's millennium boom was bigger.

The state recorded its largest decennial population growth of the 20th century between 1990 and 2000, 9.3 percent, an increase fueled more by migration than births and deaths.

The Baby Boom decade of the 1950s saw 9.2 percent statewide population growth, when births outstripped any other decade.

But state demographer Ryan Burson estimated that 286,000 Missouri residents moved into the state during the '90s, contrasted with about 210,000 net gain in population due to births and deaths.

"In a sense, this in-migration has a lot in common with Missouri's growth in the 1800s, which was due more to westward expansion than births and deaths," Burson said.

The '90s migration was notable for senior citizens retiring to the Ozarks region and for Hispanics settling in rural areas, raising their ranks in some county headcounts by hundreds of percentage points.

All of this gave Missouri a total resident population of 5,595,211 in the U.S. Census headcount as of April 2000. The U.S. population was 281,421,906, up 13.1 percent over the decade.

Hispanic population up

Missouri remains an overwhelmingly white state -- 84.9 percent of residents -- and blacks remain the second-largest minority group, 11.2 percent.

But Missouri's Hispanic population nearly doubled during the 1990s, to 118,592, or 2.1 percent of the total state population.

Fifty-six Missouri counties had Hispanic population growth exceeding 100 percent, an Associated Press analysis found.

The greatest percentage rise in Hispanics -- 2,164.3 percent -- was in Sullivan County, where poultry and livestock plants employ hundreds. The census showed 28 Hispanics in the county in 1990, a number that expanded to 634 last year.

Hispanic was considered an ethnicity by the census, meaning Hispanics can be of any race. Nationally, the Hispanic population jumped by 58 percent over the last decade.

"You simply find a lot of people of Hispanic descent agreeing that Missouri and the Midwest are great places to live," said Ricardo Olivares, youth development manager for the Guadalupe Center, a Kansas City-based center for Hispanic culture, education and assistance.

Olivares pointed to demand for laborers in Missouri's booming livestock and poultry packing industries, and a quiet lifestyle "that is quite a contrast from big cities in California and Texas."

More senior citizens

Senior citizens cited generally lower taxes, milder climate and quiet lifestyles as reasons for migrating to Missouri in retirement. And the silver-haired arrivals helped the Ozarks record a striking population boom. For example, the fastest-growing of Missouri's 114 counties was Christian County, in the Ozarks between Springfield and Branson, with a 66.3 percent increase to 54,285 residents in 2000.

Kansas City continued to outpace St. Louis as Missouri's most populous city with 441,545 residents, up 1.5 percent since 1990. St. Louis kept up a half-century population erosion, losing 12.2 percent of its residents since 1990, to 348,189 in 2000.

Meanwhile, counties forming an arc around shrinking St. Louis experienced dramatic growth; St. Charles County boomed by 33.3 percent and had the largest numerical population jump among all counties, from 212,907 residents in 1990 to 283,883 in 2000.

In the far northwest corner of Missouri, Atchison County had the largest percentage loss of population, 13.8 percent.

The Census Bureau estimated that 11.5 percent of Missourians -- 621,429 -- were living below the federal poverty level in 2000, one percentage point beneath the national figure.

The Missouri population increase was 478,138 people over the 1990 census, growth which assured the state held onto its nine seats in Congress.