Submitted by Lucky-Specialist-790 t3_11lv5w1 in vermont
Vermont has a population of around 645,000, while New Hampshire has close to 1.4 million. Vermont is actually a slight bit larger, and geographically they are fairly similar. What do you think are the main reasons for such a large difference in population?
Yep grew up there and can confirm. When asked where I grew up I say Seacoast and when I get a strange look I say 45 mins north of Boston near the ocean and it clicks.
Hey I grew up on the seacoast too…went to Winnacunnet. My family from Boston proper, I wousltn necessarily say the seacoast is a “Boston suburb” but I digress
Right? I don't know how my cousin commutes from Rowley to Logan everyday.
I used to commute from Hampton to Boston 4x/week for school til I was able to move back
It's manageable if you leave super early and have a place to park. Other than that it's a grind.
Def not a Boston suburb. Lots of towns and a whole state line in between. But people just got the location when I’d refer to Boston’s distance.
Exactly.
Man Seacoast would always roast us in club soccer lol 😂
That's because the dummies who ask are lucky to even know where Boston is. Somewhere they saw a map and remembered it. Outside of that they couldn't find Montana.
Can we just pin this and be done?
Beat me to it
Here's a population density map of new england: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/pizl2o/population_density_of_new_england_municipalities/
Good map, but even this method can be deceptive and hide the peak volume centers. E.g. the city of Boston is basically a dot on this map, but has a population basically equivalent to all of Vermont’s!
This.
Portsmouth is an hour north of Boston. Would you call Barre “basically a Burlington suburb,”? 🤔
Boston is a larger city than Burlington. A good chunk of Fairfield county is an hour north of Manhattan, and I think everyone would call Fairfield county a suburb of NYC. There are also a ton of large employers north of Boston in the Burlington/Andover region like Raytheon, HPE, etc. that makes commuting from NH much easier.
>A good chunk of Fairfield county is an hour north of Manhattan, and I think everyone would call Fairfield county a suburb of NYC
Connecticunt here. FFC is absolutely a suburb of NYC, and more like NY than New England IMO.
I see. So the size of the city shortens the geographic distance. Gotcha. 😆
Larger cities influence a larger area, don't understand what's difficult to understand about that. NH is included in the Boston MSA in the Census.
Of its suburbs? Yes, of course. The suburbs of, say, Chicago, are massive geographically.
The suburbs of Burlington are very small, both geographically and population.
I guess you could. Plenty of prep commute back and forth.
That's commuting distance for a lot of people.
Nashua for sure.
Nahhhh, Nashua is a Lowell suburb. Salem is just North-north Lawrence.
Boston
And the ocean
End of explanation
admittedly besides the economic prominence it's very easy to forget that any of that coastline is actually in NH
The primary reason is the southeast quadrant of NH is pretty much part of the Boston metro area. Outside of that region, population density between VT and NH is pretty similar.
Also, both get sparser farther north, but VT gets bigger in the north while NH gets smaller
I think because Burlington is close to Montreal.
There's more people just in Hillsborough and Rockingham County than the entire state of Vermont. 750k vs 640k.
It IS formally a metro census area.
The biggest reason is that there are almost three times as many people in New Hampshire
I read this in Perd Hapleys voice hahaha
This question reads like a 4th grade social studies assignment, I couldn’t resist.
Oh don’t get me wrong… I love it
You can tell that its bigger by the way that it is
How neat is that?
Perds perdverts
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New Hampshire has always had much larger scale industry than Vermont due to having ocean ports, being proximate to Boston, and having much gentler topography in the southern part of the state. This led to the development of larger cities like Manchester and Nashua, then the development of large suburbs in the mid-20th century.
There’s a great Brave Little State episode that really gets in the weeds on this topic.
I think this is the one you're referring to. Talks about how geology has affected the development of VT and NH.
You beat me to it! Thanks for dropping the link!
Correct!
[deleted]
Yes! Such a good episode :)
Thanks for a more in-depth answer than just "Boston suburbs," which is certainly true today but not 100 years ago. Your answer does a much better job of explaining it historically!
Most of NH’s population is in southern NH. Proximity to Boston.
Also NH has coastline and a sea port.
Shorter coastline than Lake Champlain lol.
Seaports are important though.
New Hampshire has a small slice of sea coast which is a non-trivial part of its earlier commerce and growth. Vermont's largest population center (Chittenden County) used to be pretty geographically isolated with the mountains on one side, and the lake on the other. This is why Montpelier became the capitol and not Burlington, because dignitaries and diplomats wouldn't have to traverse the mountain roads.
Vermont is just poorly located for most industry, but southern Vermont used to be one of the machining capitals of the world. We had some of the best engineers and machinists that could make just about anything, including the machines that made things.
Nearly all of that industry was outsourced to east Asia to cut costs. Had Vermont (and the United States as a whole) been able to keep things in-house, Vermont would be known for a lot more than tourism/skiing/maple syrup these days.
I think people would be really surprised at the level of small-scale mechanized industry there used to be in nearly every rural village in northern New England in the 19th century. This area is often romanticized as a bucolic agricultural region but the truth is that agriculture was never that lucrative here, we'd never be as developed as we are without the machinists and blacksmiths. The steam-powered automobile was invented in Hinsdale, NH in the 1890s, and the guy who created the prototype of the modern elevator that enabled the construction of skyscrapers grew up in tiny Halifax, VT
There are still a lot of high end custom mechanical engineering firms dotted around the state.
Oh definitely I was just saying that the popular image of old-timey Vermont is something like Currier and Ives or Norman Rockwell when it was surprisingly cutting edge for its time and place. If people took a time machine to any rural town here in the 19th century, it would probably be unrecognizable in many places because of the sheer number of small mills and workshops. Nowadays only the farmhouses and mill city manses have survived and so they dominate the popular imagery of the historical landscape.
Yeah, the Stowe, Manchester, and Woodstock effect.
I live at the top of NH. When I cross the bridge into VT the only difference I notice is the lack of salt on the roads.
Well, VT uses something — because Rust is King here.
brine
Word.
Everytime I drive on 89 VT always feels different from NH for some reason
Billboards
No it's not even that
89 in NH doesn't even have billboards
I don't get that far south very often.
Taxes, sea port, taxes, multiple military bases (population didn’t change a lot when Pease was closed because of other agencies), taxes, etc… etc…
You forgot taxes👍🏼/s
Also taxes
Higher property taxes are that much of an incentive to move there?
NH property taxes < VT income tax + VT sales tax + VT property tax
Gonna play devils advocate to the common consensus in this thread. Boston proximity has indeed led to a higher desirability in NH (close to jobs), but that’s not the main reason.
VT just doesn’t have the housing to support 2x more people. Apartments and homes surely could be built to accommodate more people, and I’m sure plenty of people would love to move to VT, but right now housing costs and lack of supply keep tons of people out of state.
Not only is this problematic today, but if the VT populace continues to trend to an older demographic, the state is going to be in even more trouble with the tax base.
Across the country, the bread-and-butter for states & municipalities to pay for nice services is taxing high-earners, generally people between 30-55. VT makes it really hard to grow that base of people.
Don’t think it’s the housing market, Portsmouth NH median home cost is 45% higher than Burlington VT. Supply/Demand pricing suggests the housing costs are greater in NH
Right - but the incomes support that in NH. 2019 median income in Portsmouth was $83,923, and $51,394 in Burlington. THAT is the disparity & the issue w/ VT
VT has the lowest rate in the country of residents who can afford the median home, at 16%. Next lowest is CT at 21%. There’s some issue here
I feel like I'm a great example of that. We moved to VT for family reasons as we needed to be in New England. My partner's job got sent to VT. We'll move away again in a few years. I don't think people realize how high the cost of living is here and how low the pay is.
I have a masters. I got a job in my field with a very well known nonprofit here. It was a cool job. I finally quit because I was making so little money and they expected too much of me even at a good salary. A nonprofit doing the same work at a nonprofit in states like Arkansas and Oklahoma would be paying me 2x as much. It was an eye opener when I realized something. After undergrad, I took classes for a summer at a midwestern state school. I got a day job at a telemarketing firm being on the phones. This would have been in 2006 or 2007. I don't remember for sure. I made more there taking inflation into account than I did in VT doing a professional job. I looked up the job at that same place and it took benefits into account. It was paying more than I was making in a low cost of living area.
Geography plays a role, Vermont was better suited to Agriculture and New Hampshire not as much, though New Hampshire was well suited for industrial production.
With agriculture, fewer people tend more land, and your hamlets and small towns develop accordingly. With industry and manufacturing, you need more people to work in a focused area and develop larger towns and small cities. Vermont's larger towns and cities tend to be a result of commerce (shipping, railroad hubs etc).
Brave Little State did an interesting piece on the development of the two states years ago.
NH has lower taxes and has allowed more land to be developed for business and housing compared to VT. As others have said the proximity to Boston as well
Vermont taxes everything and is always in the worst of tax bitten in the US, NH has some high taxes but doesn't tax everything and overall tax burden is one of the lowest.
More Free Staters in NH, more Hippies in VT
Manchester, the largest city in NH is nearly three times the size as Burlington, the largest city in Vermont.
Also NH was one of the 13 original colonies, Vermont was not. So NH had a head start.
NH also has some coastline and is closer to Boston.
VT was NY, NH and MA depending on who’s telling the story and how far back you go.
People keep referencing a Brave Little State episode on this questino - I think this is it, although it doesn't specifically talk about population
I’d move there just for the tax benefit if I could.
Depends on how much you make. I can't link directly but if you go here and select NH you'll see that if you're in the bottom 20% of income you pay 9.1% of family income.
In VT in the bottom 20% it's 8.7%. Which isn't a huge difference, but is a difference.
As you get more wealthy, NH looks better for taxes.
I’m in the 30% fed and top VT tax bracket. I moved from Florida pre pandemic. My extra cost to live here is $26k a year.
My wife is from here and the schools are great, so I eat it.
Top 20% in Florida is 2.3%
Ugggg. That's a tough one. I just came back from the kids vacation in Florida. Its crazy and over populated, but I still love it there. Warm, sunny, lots to do. Knowing that I am writing a $2300 check once a month for what is free or cheaper in Florida.
I love my wife and kids.
When you live in florida, you'll understand why those taxes in Vermont are valuable. Especially if you have kids and put them in a Florida school. The only places that have some decent schools are those that have high local taxes to make up for the lack of money coming from the state
New Hampshire has sea ports.
This. Coastal state vs landlocked is kinda a no brainier. Especially the way our country developed. Pretty sure that is a global thing that coastal areas have more population.
Boston. How is this a question? Southeastern NH is in the suburbs of Boston.
My parents chose NH over VT. they had looked at a number of things, cost of living, job opportunities and pay, crime etc. ultimately it came down to the number of DUIs VT has every year and repeat offenders. they chose NH as it had a lower rate at the time (not sure how things compare now)
Historically it's because Vermont's soils were better for agriculture, whereas NH is Closer to the coast and population centers. That lead NH to develop more of an industrial economy whereas VT's was/is still way more agrarian. Plus you can commute to Boston.
NH is VT but with jobs and billboards
I'm from western MA and one of my friends is from Southern NH. He is a thousand times more in tune with massholiness than I am.
Boston.
Mostly because it has coastline, but international border seems to attract dense population too.
The international border for NH is narrow and sparsely populated compared to the VT Quebec border area
Really REALLY sparsely populated. I don't think there's anyone north of 2nd Connecticut Lake. Maybe a few cabins off Indian Stream Road. I think they're all seasonal.
Yep.
What an interesting discussion! I appreciate everyone’s input
Proximity to Boston and no state income tax.
The income tax thing is really not a big factor in my opinion. NH makes up for it in numerous other ways.
NH property taxes are insane. Better to be a renter there. But I’m amazed at the tax rates in VT too. Personally, I would move back to VT in a heartbeat but for the taxes.
I live in Vermont and own a business in NH. My property taxes in Vt are much lower.
Yup Boston
Vermont is a rogue part of NY!
The southern third of New Hampshire is basically part of the Boston metropolitan area, particularly Rockingham, Hillsborough and Strafford counties.
[deleted]
A big issue is that Vermont is upside down.
Boston. That’s the answer. Boston.
Different tectonic plates?
As someone who lived in VT most of my life and just recently moved to NH, I can say that there is a lot more going on (at least in the southern third of the state). I was shocked at how much more I now pay in property taxes vs. what I paid in Chittenden county. However, lack of sales tax, state income tax, and better paying career opportunities more than make up for that.
The flatland near the ocean
Vermont is always putting a lot of pressure on New Hampshire. Okay that’s an old joke from Car Talk.
As everyone else said: it’s proximity to the eastern part of Massachusetts that increases population in southern New Hampshire.
Vermont (and far western Massachusetts) have lots of people from New York City. They can pay crazy high prices for real estate. They go back to the city for medical care. Some go as far as Vermont. But the whole Lenox/wolf trap area has events, some simulcasts from New York, to satisfy people who want to flee the city.
Live free or die-how about the tax structure
The Bunny Gene in New Hampsterites.
Because lesbians don’t have as many children?
Once had a load of wood delivered by a black lesbian in Vt, true story. Was from out of state I believe, the woman not the wood.
Well, I'd say it's because the COL is lower, but I'm not really sure about that. I had no idea that NH had that many more folks than Vermont, tbh. I think NH is a little more rugged, and it does have a tiny coastline, but 1.4 million? I have no clue as to why NH has so many more folks.
I’d say New Hampshire is better any day. Small businesses that actually appreciate you spending money with them, small businesses that don’t overcharge for cheap meals( $32 for 2 chicken thighs and mixed root vegetables make my blood boil in vermont) , more salt on the road /plow services when it snows ,more basic creature comforts aside from being close to boston and taxation and better chain selections and hours,etc. oh and my favorite about New Hampshire: tradesmen ( plumbers, electricians, etc) that actually want to work and show up on time and on the day they say they will show up!
Cause NH is pro-business. It is very competitive nationwide for winning private businesses to move their operations up there. I used to do this type of work in a previous life. VT is slowly starting to realize this economic opportunity around its Burlington area (mainly Williston). Also, NH is technically part of the Northeast "mega-metropolis" which spans from D.C. all the way to Manchester.
Many people are ignorant with how great of a state NH is. Its got freedom, natural beauty, higher educated people, tons of recreational activities, easy access to airports and major cities, and pro-business. Once all my kids are done with schools in MA, I'm outta here.
I think it has less to do with Boston than people have stated. Sure, it's a great city, I grew up there but it's become pretentious, over priced and there's no parking. I get job offers to work in Boston and that's a big no. The plain truth is this, people living in over priced over taxed Massachusetts suddenly realised what New Hampshire had to offer. No sales tax for one... Just think, for one, when you go out to buy a new car you can afford a nicer one because there's no grubby Massachusetts tax to stiff you with. The idea that New Hampshire is a "suburb of Boston" is laughable. New Hampshire is where you go to get away from it. The down side to that trend is the same folks who voted for higher taxes brought their dumb politics up here.
They both suck, everyone loses. Carry on.
Higher VT standards? And the Boston thing. Was watching Bill Burr on Coffee with Jerry last night and at the risk of adding another city to the mix Bill described Boston as San Francisco with racism.
Boston is bigger than Plattsburgh.
Seacoast, no state income tax, not Massachusetts but commutable. Are you blind or just like asking dumb questions?
I know a lot of people are saying “because Boston”
I mean…maybe kinda…but not really. I’ve lived in NH 20 years and rarely ever go to Boston. Same with several people I know here in SE NH.
We live here because its awesome.
Edit: I love VT and NH. Somewhat surprised at massive downvotes. I browse here because I like your state. I said nothing negative. Oh well reddit gonna reddit. Have a great day friendly neighbors.
The south is ugly, and the north is filled with Trumpers. No thank you
NH is much more free and less authoritarian, less taxes and friendlier population
They still haven’t legalized weed unlike the other NE states. Can’t be that free lol.
The state figured out another way to reach into your pocket and lower the quality of a good on the market place no friggin way 😂 y’all got corruption to testing labs & and a co-opted advocacy group that asks the state to get more involved, sounds nightmarish to me.
You sound like a fun person.
Grow your own and see how NHSP likes it.
Can I get a source or you know, anything factual, besides Less taxes. Being friendly depends on many things.
De-growth mindset pervasive throughout Vermont, anti housing, anti any industry. Not even pro low income housing
Yeah from the idiots that move here and them try to keep it “pristine” at the expense of long-time residents. We need industry and housing like any other state. I’m glad there are people actually trying to solve these problems instead of pushing the anti-industry narrative on reddit.
being batshit libertarians who just want attention is generally not a perk
Being a coddled delirious soyjock whose economy would crumble if government subsidies stopped is not a perk, neither is not having the local will to build things when the tit finally runs dry.
Before equal housing opportunities real estate agents would not allow many people to move to VT. It was kept intentionally restricted for many years and now is the fallout of that.
Source?
Yeah real estate agents refusing money just doesn't add up.
one of my thoughts too, but idk. i could believe they thought keeping poc out would help the area, but no source, not valid. Can't just say shit like that without evidence.
mmartino03 t1_jbe90hi wrote
NH's proximity to Boston. Southern NH is basically a Boston suburb.