The Borough’s population fell to 12,307, losing 1,896 residents — more than 13 percent of its population in 2000 — over a 10-year period during which surrounding communities, such as West Windsor and Montgomery Townships, grew at rates of over 20 percent. The population of Princeton Township, meanwhile, grew to 16,265, an increase of only 238 residents over the decade.
“I was not expecting a 2,000-person drop in the Borough population, and I’d like to get to the bottom of that statistic,” Borough Councilman Kevin Wilkes ’83 said, explaining that the scale of the danger posed by the decrease in population depended on its cause.
“Depending on the reason for the population drop, it could signal trouble for Borough property taxpayers, if there’s a shrinking population or tax base,” he said. “But there are other explanations also. It could be there’s smaller households.”
Montgomery Township saw a 27.3 percent increase in population to 22,254, in the period covered by the census while the population of West Windsor Township grew by 24.0 percent to 27,165.
Wilkes speculated that some of those townships’ new residents may have moved there from the Borough.
“I hear, anecdotally, of people who say they can’t afford to live in the Borough anymore and they have to move,” Wilkes said. “Maybe some move very far away, maybe some move to immediately adjacent communities. Clearly there’s some type of pressure that’s causing people to move out of the Borough.”
In an interview with the Princeton Packet, Montgomery Township Mayor Mark Caliguire attributed the increase in his township’s population to the completion of projects begun in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as to the township’s “rural character.”
“We have had a tremendously aggressive and successful open-space program,” Caliguire told the Packet. “As a result, over 30 percent of our town is preserved as public or private open space.”
Though the Borough’s population has fluctuated over the last century, it did so within a “surprisingly small band,” Wilkes said.
“To have a 2,000-resident drop in 10 years, I think, is rare,” he added.
Wilkes suggested that one cause of the decrease in population may have been the construction of new graduate student housing outside the Borough over the last decade. However, University Vice President for Facilities Michael McKay said he thought that was unlikely.
“I’m not sure that one can link that to a decrease in Borough population since not all of the current grad population (I mean total grad students, not individuals) now here was here then, and I doubt that all of them lived in the Borough before,” he said in an e-mail. “In addition, I would think that non-student residents would have back-filled the vacated Borough housing.”
Wilkes said he would examine more detailed data to be released by the Census Bureau in hopes of gaining insight into the decline’s cause.
“I hope it’s not something like the canary in the coal mine — in other words, an indicator of deep pathology,” he said. “I hope this isn’t the beginning of a steep trend of decreasing population.”
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