Why does wyoming have so few people

Many of those people likely moved to surrounding states, Chief Economist Wenlin Liu wrote in an analysis of the numbers. Things grew even worse throughout the last year as the pandemic and declining energy sectors delivered a one-two punch. The majority of people who left, according to state data, were likely between 25 and 40 years old. According to an analysis of electoral college votes by the voter reform organization FairVote, a vote by a Wyomingite in a presidential election is worth three times as much as a vote by a resident of New York.

Though nearly three dozen cities around the country boast a larger population than Wyoming, the state still has just as many members of Congress as more populous states like Delaware and North and South Dakota.

In the latest reapportionment following the census, Republican-controlled states like Montana and Texas gained seats in their share of the member Congress while blue states like New York lost them. In many states, state legislatures manage redistricting. That means states could redistrict to benefit the party that controls them, even if, like New York, they stand to lose a congressional seat.

Using U. Census numbers, members of the Legislature will meet later this year or next to begin the redistricting process, using changes in population in different areas to determine how residents will be represented.

With local data not yet available, it is unclear which districts stand to lose or gain representatives in the next Legislature, particularly given when the census was conducted. The Wyoming Constitution requires districts to reflect the common characteristics of the communities they represent, meaning that places like the Wind River Indian Reservation are often considered first in the redistricting process.

Urban centers then come next, leaving rural expanses of the state largely up for grabs, resulting in districts like the massive House District Housing markets in locales like Sheridan, Cody and Lander have become increasingly competitive over the past year, according to reports. Some of that may be due to more out-of-state residents looking to Wyoming to capitalize on remote work or to escape from crowds or social strife, observers say.

Increases in population might not necessarily be a good thing for Wyoming either. And that anti-growth scale is by design. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Please contact the developer of this form processor to improve this message.

Even though the server responded OK, it is possible the submission was not processed. The Wyoming Legislature is in a time warp, ignoring the reality that coal is dead and Wyoming oil is dying. T hey have zero interest in actually diversifying Wyoming development. Without tourism the population in this state would be half of what it is now. And characterizing an entire state by one person is not really cool.

To support this: take a look at a precipitation map of the Western U. Wyoming is noticeably drier than any of its neighboring states, with the possible exception of Utah. Well, yes and no. The Oregon Trail runs right across Wyoming and was primarily active from the s until the transcontinental railroad was completed, but apparently very few people thought Wyoming was nice enough to stop in.

It's west of the th meridian , which is fairly significant for agriculture. As far as government land ownership, I'd be pretty surprised if quite a bit of that land wasn't up for grabs under the Homestead Act or something similar, but nobody wanted it.

I forgot to mention that even in places with water, in many places much of the water is alkaline, which can cause lots of problems for people and stock. That's why you have an entire county named Sweetwater , to celebrate some spot within it that had good water. Water rights are a big deal in that part of the country. You can't just park yourself next to the Platte River and start pumping water out of it, because the water already belongs to people downstream from you.

Doing that during the wild-and-wooly years could get you killed. These days it'll land you in court. Not to mention what the EPA will do to you. And the Fish and Wildlife Service. Wyoming has basically no topsoil anywhere It's all bedrock right at the surface. Fantastic for geologists, shitty for farmers, which is a problem when you're a rural state. I too suspect railroad patterns had something to do with it, although I expect the railroads weren't there because the settlers weren't there because the soil wasn't there.

There's often an assumption that all of the lower 48 is "filled in" because there are no gaps in the map, when that's not really the case. In a way, the question ought to be "why do so many people live in Wyoming? No one has explicitly mentioned this, so: Wyoming produces a lot of coal. The deposits there are immense and they're close enough to the surface to strip mine.

The Black Thunder Coal Mine alone produces million metric tonnes of coal per year. Best answer: I think also the West is quite thinly settled in general, and some accidents of line-drawing make Wyoming look like more of an outlier than it really is. Nevada is another dry-as-hell state that's largely owned by the government but it's got 2.

The other states are certainly more populous, but one way to look at it is that the West is thinly peopled almost everywhere, and there are a handful of tiny patches of population density, and none of those places happened to fall in Wyoming.

The West, in general, is not suitable for permanent human settlement without mind-bogglingly massive civil engineering projects. The native people that lived here before the whites either 1 moved with the seasons or 2 died out because of water problems. So the Dry West basically has patches where enormous amounts of energy were expended by some combination of the Federal government or the Mormons to make the desert "survivable" for some period of time.

Utah was first, thanks to Mormon settlement. Tons of money was spent to make Southern California livable, because of the influence of powerful landowners, mainly. The whole American mythology of homesteaders and smallholders scratching out a living on acre farms and knitting together the institutions of small towns doesn't really work west of the th Meridian, save for the coastal Northwest.

I personally think this is kind of funny given that the people who live in the rural West are generally the most extreme, conservative, "fuck everyone, I'm a wild independent cowboy making my way out here on my own! Cowboys, ranchers, all those guys are welfare princes. I think, generally, it might make more sense not to ask "why do so few people live in Wyoming?

Everything in the West comes back to water. I grew up in Wyoming. It's a terrible shithole. Winters are long, bitterly cold, and windy. The landscape is for the most part extremely barren and difficult to traverse in the winter. It's a shithole. Wyoming is the the 3rd driest state in the USA. Nevada is 1 and Utah is 2. Just on a density basis, look how little populated Western Colorado is.

It is no surprise that all of these cities are right along the foothills of the Rockies where there is a good water supply. If you've ever landed at Denver's airport which is a ways Northeast of city you'll find that it is in a flat, barren wasteland.

Imagine hundreds and thousands of square miles of that. I lived in Wyoming for exactly days. It was all I could take. The winter I spent in Wyoming was the harshest I have ever experienced. I am not a winter wimp, I grew up in Minnesota.

Wyoming lost 1, residents between July and July , according to U. Census Bureau estimates. For a state with a population of just over ,, economists say the decline makes a dent. Idaho and Nevada were the fastest-growing states in the U.

Many of those leaving Wyoming in recent years have been laid off coal miners. Joy Shada moved to Cheyenne in after her husband found work with the tobacco producer Altria. Shada is now trying to sell her ice scrapers and winter windshield guards online. Extractive resources served as the economic basis of these communities; when profits sank or resources dried up, townsfolk packed up and headed elsewhere.

Similarly, tumbling natural gas and coal prices in recent years have sent Wyoming workers packing, Liu said. Wyoming is the eighth largest crude oil producer in the nation, and produces about 40 percent of all coal mined in the United States.

In , it was one of the top ten natural gas-producing states in the nation, according to the U. Energy Information Administration. Prices for those resources sank between and , with oil prices dropping as much as 50 percent, natural gas as much as 30 percent and coal by 20 percent.

Anytime the price is higher, the economy is strong. Compounding the issue, he said, is the fact that the extraction industries have gotten more efficient in recent years, and thus rely on fewer workers.