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I hate to be an alarmist, but Virginia has a problem and that problem could get worse.
The problem is a part of the state that’s losing population.
It’s not just losing population, it’s losing population in all age cohorts except 65 and older — so this is a part of the state that’s getting smaller and older at the same time, not a good economic combination.
Furthermore, this region’s economy is now structured in a way that makes it vulnerable to even more population outflows.
It also faces a political threat to a key employer that could fuel even more population decline. Even without that political threat, though, the region is potentially in jeopardy.
This troubled part of Virginia may sound a lot like the coal-producing counties of Southwest Virginia, and there are some rough similarities. However, we’re talking instead about Northern Virginia.
It’s well-documented now that Virginia’s population trends are undergoing a paradigm shift — and, as part of that, Northern Virginia is now losing population. Several new batches of U.S. Census Bureau data help paint a deeper picture of what’s happening.
Before we go further, we should explain why you’re reading about Northern Virginia in a publication devoted to Southwest and Southside: Northern Virginia is the state’s largest metro area and, therefore, its largest economic engine.
Some facts and figures: The biggest single source of tax revenue in Virginia is the individual income tax; 67% of general fund revenue comes from personal income taxes. The corporate income tax accounts for 7%. (For some, that’s a reason why we could reduce or eliminate that tax; for others, a reason why we should increase it. But that’s a topic for another day.)
Northern Virginia is the wealthiest part of the state; Loudoun County is the most affluent county in the whole country.
Fairfax County alone accounts for 22% of the state’s taxable income, according to the annual report from the state’s tax commissioner. Altogether, Northern Virginia accounts for 40% of the state’s taxable income.
Fit all those things together and you’ll see how important Northern Virginia is to the state’s economy. Then there’s this: Most school systems outside Northern Virginia get most of their money from the state. In some small localities, the state share of school funding is about 60%, according to the Virginia Department of Education.
The bottom line: Northern Virginia is subsidizing rural school systems (and lots of other things). That’s why even the parts of Virginia most distant from Northern Virginia have a vested interest in making sure its economy is strong. If there are things we want or need from the state, Northern Virginia is going to help foot part of the bill. Rural politicians may occasionally find it politically convenient to run against Northern Virginia — that’s often a good applause line — but the economic reality is that we need Northern Virginia more than it needs us.
That’s why this latest round of census data is so worrisome.
We already knew that, by raw numbers, Fairfax County has had the state’s biggest population decline — down 10,911 people from 2020 to 2023. That’s happening entirely because more people are moving out than moving in. Northern Virginia is one of the few places in the state where births outnumber deaths; there just aren’t enough people arriving in the maternity ward to offset those leaving by the moving van.
Internal Revenue Service reports show that since 2013 Virginia has had more people moving out than moving in — the IRS knows where you live! — and that out-migration is driven exclusively by the state’s two biggest metros, Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, in that order. Most rural areas are now seeing more people move in than move out; Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads are seeing just the opposite:
The reasons for that are hotly debated. Republicans tend to blame high taxes, Democrats tend to cite a lack of investment in roads, demographers point to high housing prices. We will leave those debates for another day.
Instead, let’s look at some of this new data.
As the births-outnumbering-deaths figures might suggest, Northern Virginia remains younger, often much younger, than other parts of Virginia. However, while many rural areas are seeing so many newcomers move in that their median ages are dropping, Northern Virginia continues to age. As late as 2020, Roanoke had an older median age than Fairfax County; now Fairfax County is slightly older: 39.4 for Fairfax, 38.6 for Roanoke. A generation ago, in 1980, Fairfax County was much younger than Martinsville — Fairfax was 30.4 then and Martinsville was 35.2. Today Fairfax is the aforementioned 39.4 and Martinsville is 37 (and dropping after spiking a few years ago).
It may not be worth worrying about incremental changes in median ages, but here’s what’s driving that beneath the surface. Fairfax County, Arlington County and Alexandria are among 20 localities in the state that are losing population in every cohort except 65-plus. When we see those trends in some of the counties in Southwest Virginia or other scattered parts of rural Virginia, well, that’s not very surprising. When we see it in the state’s biggest metro (and also in parts of Hampton Roads), that’s more concerning.
From 2020 to 2023, Virginia lost 22,966 people under age 25. Fairfax County alone accounted for more than half of those — 13,771. We are now in a position where places such as Danville, Martinsville and even tiny Highland County are now seeing their under-25 populations increase. This is a demographic triumph that only a few years ago we’d have thought impossible, yet now it’s happening — but the outflows from Fairfax County and some other localities are wiping out those gains.
In the 25-to-45 cohort, Virginia is gaining population statewide. Overall, we’re up 19,129 in that age group from 2020 to 2023. However, once again, we see many Northern Virginia localities losing that age group. Arlington has lost 4,765, more than any other locality in Virginia. Fairfax County has lost 3,109, Alexandria 2,743 (and, in Hampton Roads, Virginia Beach has lost 3,535 in that age group, but it’s unclear from a distance how much military separations have to do with that).
For whatever reason, Northern Virginia has become the state’s biggest population drain. In a recent presentation to the business group Virginia FREE (which I attended virtually), Hamilton Lombard, a demographer with the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, pointed out one reason Northern Virginia isn’t growing. Wealthy regions, he said, typically don’t grow as fast as less-affluent ones. Why not? It’s too expensive to live there, so that limits the ability of many people to move there. That doesn’t fully explain why Northern Virginia is losing population, and not simply not growing very fast, but it does go a long way. In some ways, Northern Virginia is a victim of its own success.
It’s difficult to figure out a way around the high housing costs in Northern Virginia. Nobody wants to depress the value of their most valuable asset — their home. And in many places, there’s not much political interest in more development. I cannot sit here in the Blue Ridge Mountains and tell Northern Virginia what it should or should not do.
However, I can point out two threats (and neither of these thoughts is original to me, by the way).
One is structural: the rapid growth of remote work. Northern Virginia has one of the highest rates of remote work in the country. In Arlington, 26.9% of the workforce works remotely, at least some of the time. In Falls Church, 26.8%. In Loudoun County, 23.5%. In Fairfax County, 21.7%.
Here’s the danger of that: Remote workers are, by definition, mobile. They can live anywhere they want, or at least anywhere that there’s sufficient broadband access. We’ve already seen some remote workers move to more rural locations; that’s part of what’s driving this Zoom-era rural migration. While rural areas are working to attract more remote workers, localities in Northern Virginia might want to wonder: What’s keeping all these remote workers here? At what point might some of them decide to move to a lower-cost community and pocket the difference?
Between the high percentage of remote workers, and the high housing costs, “those two statistics don’t bode well for the region,” Lombard told Virginia FREE.
Lombard laid out two scenarios. Under the most optimistic scenario, many remote workers stay in or near Northern Virginia because they sometimes do have to go into the office. “There is a less optimistic scenario that I think is just about as plausible,” Lombard said, “and that is that the outmigration from Northern Virginia just accelerates as it becomes more and more obvious that remote work is sticking around.” In that case, maybe some of those workers move to smaller communities in Virginia — or maybe they move out of state altogether. “It could be that migration from Virginia picks up rather than slows down,” Lombard told the group. “I think that’s less a plausible scenario, but it’s probably 40%-60% or 45%-55% situation — either one is fairly likely.”
Lombard likens the emergence of remote work to a trend as significant as suburbanization or the emergence of the Sun Belt after World War II. “It’s a fairly fundamental change,” he said, and that makes Northern Virginia vulnerable.
I approach the next threat to Northern Virginia gingerly because it involves politics, but that doesn’t make it any less real.
Donald Trump wants to shrink the federal bureaucracy. Trump’s “Agenda 47” plan calls for moving up to 100,000 federal jobs “out of Washington to places filled with patriots who love America.” There may, indeed, be a good national rationale for decentralizing some federal offices, but, from our parochial point of view in Virginia, this would be bad for the whole state, and not just Northern Virginia.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin says he’s not concerned, saying, “There are fabulous opportunities for folks to find a new employer in Virginia should the one they work for move away.” However, what would you expect him to say? Historically speaking, we saw economic growth in Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads slow with sequestration more than a decade ago. If thousands of federal jobs were now eliminated or moved out of Virginia, that could “act like a negative economic shock to the economies of the two states and Washington, D.C.,” Robert McNab, director of the Dragas Center for Economic Analysis and Policy at Old Dominion University, told The Washington Post. It might well accelerate the out-migration we’ve already seen.
Even if those job cuts never come to pass, Virginia has reason to be concerned about Northern Virginia. What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens in Fairfax County has a way of impacting what happens in Franklin County.
Southwest won’t get a small nuclear reactor but somewhere else will
Gov. Glenn Youngkin originally pushed a small modular nuclear reactor (called SMRs) for Southwest Virginia. That’s no longer happening, but last week the Biden Administration announced plans for the U.S. to help build an SMR in a place that has a close historical connection to Virginia. I’ll have an update on that and other political news in my weekly political newsletter, West of the Capital, which goes out Friday afternoons. You can sign up for that or any of our other free newsletters: