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Over the past 10 years, many things have changed.
A decade ago, Las Vegas didn’t have a single major league team. Now it has two — the NFL’s Raiders and the NHL’s Golden Knights — with a third, baseball’s A’s, en route. Poor Oakland has gone the other way.
A decade ago, TikTok was a sound that clocks made, not a social media site that’s the source of controversy.
A decade ago, “Game of Thrones” was just getting started. Now the series is done and we’re still arguing over that series finale.
Now, here’s another way things have changed.
A decade ago, most communities across the country were seeing their population of adults 25-44 — in other words, prime working-age adults — shrink. Now, most communities are seeing their population in that age cohort increase.
Some of these changes are more important than others. As much as I’d like to write about dragons and royal dynasties, today I’ll deal instead with demography.
I’ve often written about how we’re witnessing potentially historic changes in American migration patterns. Some of these were starting to happen before the pandemic, but the pandemic surely accelerated them. Whether these are temporary phenomena or longer-term changes, we may not know for years. Here are a few of them, though:
Virginia’s two biggest metro areas, Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads, are now losing population. Here’s how big that change is: Fairfax County hasn’t recorded a population decline since the 1830 census but will in the next one, if this trend continues.
Many rural areas, once accustomed to seeing more people move out than move in, are now seeing just the opposite trend: More people are moving in than moving out.
As a result, some rural areas that once were growing older are now growing younger, as their median ages drop — pulled down by newer, younger residents.
These trends are almost too big to comprehend and sometimes I have to recheck the data myself because it runs counter to so much of what I’ve seen in my lifetime. Maybe I will get to quote from “Game of Thrones” after all. In one of the later episodes, Jon Snow asks Tyrion Lannister how he can persuade the leaders of Westeros that an army of the dead is about to descend upon them. Tyrion responds: “People’s minds aren’t made for problems that large.” Instead, he advises Jon to focus on a smaller subset of the overall problem that people can understand. Here, we don’t have a problem but an opportunity. OK, it is a problem for some places — especially those communities losing population — but in the spirit of Tyrion Lannister I’ll focus today on just one part of these migration trends that are reshaping the country: the movement of people 25-44.
Everyone is important but, to paraphrase George Orwell, some are more important than others, at least economically speaking. Those ages 25-44 matter because that’s an age cohort that’s in the workforce, likely having children, and definitely spending money on houses and other things.
Hamilton Lombard, a demographer at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, recently wrote about the importance of the demographic changes we’re seeing. He starts in the late 1970s. Manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979, then started falling and jobs in service industries grew. “This economic shift brought with it a demographic realignment, with population growth concentrating in large metros where service industries thrived,” he writes. The flip side: Small towns and rural areas lost population, with young adults being the most likely to leave as they moved to jobs elsewhere.
We often hear about political polarization, but some of that is rooted in economic and demographic polarization, and that transition from an industrial economy to an information economy is part of what’s to blame.
“In the decades that followed 1980, America’s large cities and metro areas grew more economically and demographically different from its small towns and rural areas,” Lombard writes. “Unlike manufacturing plants, most white-collar service industries tended to cluster in the largest cities, such as Washington D.C. or San Francisco, where employers and employees could benefit from large networks of expertise and the rapid exchange of ideas. The influx of young white-collar workers into large cities since 1980, meant that in the following decades nearly 80 percent of the country’s growth in its under 45 population has been concentrated in metro areas with over a million residents.” While those places grew, smaller ones tended to shrink — and became much, much older because many young adults were no longer there.
Put another way: “The migration of young adults from rural to urban areas caused communities to become increasingly unbalanced demographically,” Lombard writes. Northern Virginia, in particular, benefited from these migrations: “In Arlington County, this influx led its population of 25- to 44-year-olds to grow faster than any other county within the country’s twenty largest metro areas,” Lombard writes. On the other end of the scale, Highland County’s demography became so lopsided that its population of those over 65 was twice as large as those 25-44. It’s as if that county (and many other rural counties) had a missing generation. Well, not entirely missing, but certainly reduced enough to matter.
“Heading into the 2020s, the demographic divide between large cities and rural areas was expected to widen further as the labor supply tightened and large metro areas intensified their efforts to sustain workforces,” Lombard writes. Then came the pandemic. Now look what’s happened. In the three years following the 2010 census, “only 27 percent of counties in rural and small metro counties saw an increase in their 25 to 44 population,” Lombard writes. In the first three years following the 2020 census, 63% of rural and small metro counties have seen their population of people 25-44 increase.
Here’s how things used to look:
Here’s how things look now:
You’ll see that fewer places are seeing their populations under 65 shrink. Now let’s take a closer look at Virginia. Now let’s flip that around.
In the first three years after the 2010 census, most Virginia localities saw their population of people 25-44 decline (that’s reflected in the top map above). However, in the first three years of this decade, 95 of Virginia’s 133 cities and counties have seen their 25-44 population increase.
Some communities have seen particularly large increases. Not surprisingly, these are the same communities that have also seen rapid population growth overall. The largest percentage growth of those 25-44 has come in New Kent County — up 21.11%. In Orange County, that cohort has grown by 12.06%; in Suffolk, 11.24%; in Louisa County, 11.20%; in Goochland County, 11.17%.
However, we also see some large increases in rural counties that aren’t necessarily high-growth centers: In Highland County, not only the least populated county in the state but also its oldest, with a median age of 60, the 25-44 population is up 9.50%. In Appomattox County, that cohort is up 9.16% (one of many reasons that Appomattox is not “dead” as former state Sen. Amanda Chase implied). In Northumberland County on the Northern Neck, it’s up 8.47%.
All this in a state where the overall growth in that age group is just 1.25%.
As you go farther west, we do see the growth rate of those 25-44 slow considerably (just 0.2% in Wythe County) and then disappear entirely. Some localities along the state’s western edge are still losing people in that age group. In Buchanan County, it’s shrunk by 5.94%. However, that’s not the largest decline, either in percentage terms or in raw numbers. In percentage terms, the biggest drop of those 25-44 is in Charlottesville at -11.44%. In terms of raw numbers, the biggest outflows of those 25-44 is in Fairfax County, which saw its population in that age cohort fall by 3,109. That’s -0.98%, so not particularly large in percentage terms. However, if you look at Arlington, its population in that age cohort fell by 5.04%, which puts it in the same range as some of the hardest-hit coal counties. Well, some of them. Russell County saw its 25-44 population increase ever so slightly, at 0.69%.
The implications of these trends are potentially enormous, and may be ones we haven’t fully thought through.
As noted before, we’re seeing median ages in some rural counties start to fall.
We’re also seeing median incomes start to rise. Some of these new residents bring jobs with them — remote jobs — so they’re making their money from somewhere else but spending some of it locally. This is good for the economy. “Between 2019 and 2023, IRS applications to start new businesses in the country’s smallest metro areas and rural counties increased 13 percent faster than in other parts of the country,” Lombard writes.
In Virginia, the fastest growth in new business formation has been in the rural counties along the Chesapeake Bay. In second place is … Southwest Virginia. In third, Southside.
The world is turned upside down.
In general, more residents 25-44 makes for a larger labor pool. This is important, Lombard says, because the effect of declining birth rates is about to hit the economy. “After 2025 the steady decline in the number of Americans turning 18 will make it more difficult for the workforce to grow in every part of the country,” he writes.
That’s a problem so big that it will require a column all its own.
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