Why your kids can’t afford to stay

You’ve been to the party. Folding tables in somebody’s garage, a sheet cake from Carrs, a kid you watched grow up standing there in a hoodie saying the job’s in Boise, or Bozeman, or Phoenix, and they’ll be back to visit every summer. Everybody hugs. Everybody says how exciting it is. And driving home you and your wife go quiet, because that’s the fourth one this year.

We have gotten so used to that party that we treat it like weather. Kids leave, salmon run, winter comes. But it isn’t weather. It’s math, and somebody should finally walk through it out loud.

Start with the numbers nobody puts on a graduation card. Between 2013 and 2023, Alaska lost about 34,000 people of prime working age, 18 to 64. The number of babies born here just hit its lowest point since they were building the pipeline. Our schools are shrinking while the retirement rolls grow. None of that is a mystery or a mood. It’s a ledger, and lately it only moves one direction.

The math on the kitchen table

Now sit at the kitchen table where a 26-year-old is actually doing the math on staying.

The median single-family house in Anchorage runs a bit over $420,000, and there’s about a month of inventory on the market. A balanced market carries around six months. Ours has almost nothing on the shelf, so every listing turns into a bidding war. Run that price through the standard bank rule and the income a young household needs lands well north of $100,000 a year. Before the truck payment. Before daycare, which up here costs what a second mortgage used to.

Then the bills start. Electricity in Alaska averages about 25 cents a kilowatt hour against roughly 17 nationally. Groceries, fuel, insurance, all of it runs about a quarter above what the same cart costs Outside. And the paycheck that’s supposed to cover it has to come from somewhere, which is the real catch, because the careers that pay six figures are exactly what we have been exporting. The oil gets refined somewhere else. The minerals get processed somewhere else. The gas sits in the ground while we argue. So the engineering jobs, the trades at scale, the whole ladder a young family climbs, got built in Texas and Tennessee, and the kid in the hoodie followed the ladder.

That’s the part I want every parent to hold onto. Your kids didn’t reject Alaska. Alaska handed them a bill they couldn’t pay and a job market that couldn’t pay it, and they did the responsible thing. They come home for weddings and hunting season and they stand in the driveway breathing it in like they’re trying to store it up. They didn’t stop loving this place. Loving it just stopped being enough.

I watched this happen from the inside, in the driest way you can imagine. The state’s revenue forecasts carry a line for working-age population, and every year I sat with that line bending the wrong way. Fewer taxpayers, fewer builders, fewer young families. It is the spreadsheet version of the going-away party, and it compounds exactly like interest.

What a shrinking state does to itself

Here’s what a shrinking state does to itself. Every young family that leaves takes a classroom seat with them, so a school consolidates. Takes their spending, so a shop closes early and then closes for good. Takes their future kids, which is why the birth numbers look like they do. The town skews older, the tax base thins, the help-wanted signs stay up. Ask anyone in this state trying to hire a diesel mechanic, a lineman, or a nurse how that’s going. The labor shortage and the out-migration are the same problem wearing two hats. And the next 26-year-old doing the math sees a slightly worse deal than the last one did.

Nobody votes for any of this. It just accrues, year after year, while we hold going-away parties and call it normal. The cruelest version is the one I hear all over the state: grandparents who built a life here, now pricing flights south twice a year because the grandkids are growing up in a suburb of Dallas.

We were the state kids left for

The part that should sting most is that Alaska was built by kids doing this exact math in the other direction. Ask around any Legion hall or fish camp and you’ll hear the same story. Somebody’s dad came up with a duffel bag and a rumor of work. Somebody’s grandmother drove the Alcan in a car that barely made it. My family’s version ran through my dad trucking that same highway, and a two-bedroom dry cabin near the Anchor River with spring water and an outhouse. For fifty years this was the place a 26-year-old with nothing but nerve moved to, because the work was here and a person could build something. The pipeline alone pulled tens of thousands of young workers north.

We were not the state kids left. We were the state kids left for.

And the places winning now are doing it the way we used to, which is on purpose. Boise and Bozeman and Phoenix aren’t magic. They built housing at the pace people arrived, kept energy affordable, and said yes to the industries that showed up, and the ladder assembled itself. Nothing they are doing is beyond us. Most of it is stuff we taught them.

None of this is destiny

So let me say the thing that is supposed to sound naive. None of this is destiny. States compete for people the way businesses compete for customers, and people follow two things: careers and cost. Both of ours are fixable, because both of ours are self-inflicted. The price of power in this state is a choice we keep making by leaving our own gas in the ground while Southcentral rations and plans to import. The missing careers are a choice we keep making every time the raw wealth ships out unprocessed and the jobs it could have carried stay Outside. Fix the power, build the industries, and the ladder comes home.

Colleen and I are raising two girls in Wasilla. I think about which side of that airport goodbye we will be standing on in fifteen years, and I have concluded that a man cannot control that from his own driveway. It gets decided by whether this state chooses to build or chooses to shrink politely.

So here is the test I would put on every decision Alaska makes from here: every project, every budget, every permit that sits in a drawer for a decade. Does this make it easier or harder for a kid to stay?

That’s it. That’s the whole scorecard. A state where the answer keeps coming up “harder” does not need a demographer to tell it how the story ends.

We still get to pick the ending. But the parties are adding up, and I’m done pretending they’re weather.

Keep Alaskans in Alaska.