Why Southwest Virginia’s Population Trends Are Changing in the 2020s
Late in May the Demographics Research Group presented at the Southwest Virginia Economic Forum held at UVA Wise. Below is a summary of the presentation, which examined Southwest Virginia’s historical demographic trends, recent shifts in migration, and factors that may help shape its future population. Note that in this post, Southwest Virginia is defined as Go Virginia Region 1.
Tolstoy famously observed that “Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Communities experiencing population and economic decline also tend to have their own unique source of "unhappiness," often rooted in the loss of a major industry—coal in Southwest Virginia, tobacco and manufacturing in Southside, fisheries around the Chesapeake Bay. Though Virginia’s regions have lost different types of jobs, they all have struggled to create new jobs in the fast-growing, high-paying service industries, such as finance or tech, which the U.S. economy has transitioned to in recent decades. This economic transition has fundamentally reshaped Virginia’s demographics. At the end of World War II, 14% of the state's residents lived in Southwest Virginia, while 43% lived in all rural counties outside Virginia’s current metro areas. Today, those figures are 4% and 14%, respectively, with most rural communities in Virigina struggling with the same demographic trends: aging populations, deaths outnumbering births, and population decline.
One of the key impacts of the U.S. economy’s shift toward high-paying service industries in the 1970s and 1980s was that employers began prioritizing access to large pools of skilled workers. As a result, white collar industries concentrated in the country’s largest metro areas. The departure of Norfolk Southern’s corporate headquarters from Roanoke, first to Norfolk in the 1980s and then to Atlanta in the 2010s, followed this pattern. Nationally, this shift widened the gap between rural and urban economies. Today, nearly half of Northern Virginia’s workforce is employed in high-paying service industries, such as accounting, law, and engineering. In Southwest Virginia, the share is under 15%. The rural-urban income gap is most obvious between Southwest and Northern Virginia: in Loudoun County the median household income is four times greater than in Buchanan County. No other state has a larger income gap between two counties.
This gap in economic opportunity between Virginia’s rural counties and its largest metro areas has caused rural Virginia to lose a larger share of its young adults than its neighboring states. Data from the Census Bureau and Harvard’s Opportunity Atlas show that millennials from Southwest Virginia were more likely to complete college than their peers just across the state line, but also more likely to leave and not return. This steady out-migration has aged the region and Virginia’s other rural areas faster than other aging rural areas in neighboring states. In 1980, the median age in Buchanan County was 26, younger than any other Virginia county without a college or military base. By 2020, it had reached 48, nearly a decade above the statewide median.
As Southwest Virginia’s population has aged, deaths have increasingly outnumbered births. By the mid-2010s, the region had 1,500 more deaths than births each year. By 2023, the annual gap had doubled to 3,000. Just to maintain its population, Southwest Virginia would need to attract that many new residents annually. The loss of young adults and its birth-death imbalance has put Southwest Virginia on track to have 100,000 fewer residents by 2050 than it did in 2010, a decline of 25%.
How the pandemic has blurred the rural-urban divide
Even as the birth-death imbalance has continued to deepen in Southwest Virginia, migration trends have reversed with the region attracting the largest number of new residents in half a century. In the 2010s, the region lost about 1,300 more people a year to other parts of the country than it gained. Since 2020, these numbers have reversed with the region attracting 1,300 new residents annually. Only two counties in the region still see more people moving out than in. Across Virginia, more counties are attracting new residents than at any point in fifty years. Much of the shift has been driven by rural areas losing fewer and attracting more young adults. Between 2010 and 2013, nearly 4,500 more adults ages 25 to 44 left Southwest Virginia than moved to it. In the three years for which we have data since 2020, that number dropped to 764, with some counties now gaining young adults.
While the recent shift in migration trends is often attributed to the pandemic, many of the factors that have helped fuel the shift have been developing for decades. Housing prices in large metro areas have historically tended to be higher than in rural areas but in most cases the gap has grown in recent years. In 2000, the typical home in Northern Virginia cost three times more than one in Southwest Virginia. By 2019, it was closer to five times more. Home values in Arlington and Fairfax now exceed those in any other major east coast county.
The widening gap in the cost of living between large metro areas, like Washington, D.C., and smaller metro and rural areas is a significant reason why people are choosing to live in places other than larger metro areas. This has particularly been the case for entrepreneurs. Between 2019 and 2023, the number of new business applications submitted by Virginians to the IRS rose the least in Northern Virginia, while Southwest Virginia had the second largest increase in applications (70%) among Virginia’s regions. (Counties along the Chesapeake Bay had the greatest number.) The long economic expansion since 2010, punctuated only by the pandemic, reduced the risk of starting businesses in smaller markets, and the relative cost advantage of places like Bristol or Roanoke has made them more attractive.
Another factor, which was already fueling migration from high-cost metro areas long before the pandemic, is remote work. Despite repeated announcements from employers that employees must return to the office, work patterns have changed little since 2022. Most white-collar workers continue to work remotely full-time or split time between home and a central office. The persistence of remote work has effectively resulted in Southwest Virginia and much of rural Virginia becoming the outer suburbs of the large cities in the mid-Atlantic. Between 2019 and 2022, Census Bureau data shows that the number of Virginians living outside Northern Virginia but working (most likely remotely) for Washington, D.C.–area employers increased by nearly 24,000—roughly equivalent to the Pentagon’s workforce. Though Virginia is often described as having two parts, Northern Virginia and the rest of Virginia, one lasting impact of the pandemic has been that the rest of Virginia is increasingly economically tied to Northern Virginia.
A salary of $100,000 goes a long way in Southwest Virginia, where most households earn half that. The arrival of even a few hundred remote workers from the D.C. area has brought new spending and helped support small business growth in the region, but it has also added stress on some community resources. In 2024, Freddie Mac reported that four of the ten U.S. metro areas with the largest increases in home prices since the pandemic were along Interstate 81 between Bristol and Knoxville. While homes in much of rural Virginia remain affordable to many remote workers, they are increasingly out of reach for many long-time residents.
An Aging U.S. Population Will Intensify the Competition for Workers
High housing costs in metro areas, the spread of remote work, and the increase in businesses formation have all helped increase migration to small towns and rural counties in recent years. But the highest levels of migration have been to places that offer a high quality of life. While quality of life can be difficult to quantify, different indices show an increasing correlation between quality of life and both population and economic growth. Since 2020, rural counties with strong natural amenities, such as coastlines or mountains, have seen their 25-44-aged populations grow at twice the national rate. IRS data shows that in those same counties the incomes of new residents have grown three times faster than the national average since the pandemic.
Not every community has mountains or coastlines to market, but making places more attractive to workers is becoming more important. In 2010, there were 73% more Americans turning 18 than 65. By 2023, that margin had narrowed to just 12%. After 2025, the number of Americans turning 18 will decline each year for at least two decades, further tightening the labor supply. In much of the country, including Southwest Virginia, the workforce is already shrinking. However, some communities are responding. Marion County, Iowa, nearly the size of Wise County, is home to Pella’s headquarters. Facing a shrinking workforce, Pella invested $30 million in housing, recreation, and other amenities in Marion County to retain and draw additional workers to the community. In Virginia, Danville helped coordinate the investment of hundreds of millions in its downtown to make the city more appealing to both employers and workers.
A tightening labor supply will give workers more choice in who they work for, while the persistence of remote work will continue to offer many workers significantly more freedom in where they choose to live. That shift is creating new opportunities for rural regions like Southwest Virginia. With its scenery, mild climate, distinctive culture, and location near the fast-growing triangle formed by Nashville, Raleigh, and Atlanta, the region is well placed to compete for new residents. But realizing that potential will require continued work to improve the region’s quality of life and better communicate the advantages of Southwest Virginia. Without those efforts, Southwest Virginia will likely remain on track to lose tens of thousands of residents in the coming decades.
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View the PowerPoint slides for the 2025 Southwest Virginia Economic Forum (The Cooper Center slides are 64-84).