Kodiak is shrinking and greying, even as the rest of Alaska grows

Kodiak, one of Alaska's larger communities and one of the nation's biggest fishing ports, is losing people — and the ones leaving are its youngest. Nearly 1,000 residents have left the Kodiak Island Borough over five years, Mayor Jared Griffin told the assembly Thursday, and even after births and new arrivals, the borough is down about 650 people, roughly 5 percent of its population.

That puts Kodiak against the grain. Alaska as a whole grew slightly last year; Kodiak, like much of the state outside Southcentral, shrank.

The bigger worry, Griffin said, is who's leaving and who's staying. The number of young children is falling: residents aged 5 to 9 dropped from 970 in 2020 to about 800 last year. Over the same stretch, the population in its 70s jumped from roughly 700 to 900. "We have a rapidly aging community," he said. Men are leaving the island about twice as fast as women.

"Even more significant, I think, is we continue to see fewer young children entering the population," Griffin said. The borough's median age ticked up from 35 to 36 in five years — small on paper, but he called it a real shift.

He laid out the stakes plainly: fewer kids means smaller schools, a thinner workforce, and changing demand for housing and borough services on an island that runs on fishing and the Coast Guard. But he stopped short of calling it fate. "They're trends, they're not destiny," he said, adding that the new numbers will feed the borough's coming strategic planning.