Southwest Virginia’s coalfield counties are facing some of the steepest population declines in the state — and among the most dramatic anywhere in rural America. According to new projections from the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia, Buchanan County is expected to lose nearly half its people by 2050 — a 48% decline.
Dickenson County will lose 31% of its population. Wise and Russell counties are each projected to shrink by 30%, while Lee County is expected to lose 28% and Tazewell County 26%. These numbers paint a stark picture: if current trends continue, Buchanan County will have lost three-quarters of its people within a single lifetime. As Cardinal News’ Dwayne Yancey has observed, there are now more hearses headed to the cemetery than incoming moving vans in many of these communities.
We’re not just losing numbers — we’re losing the critical mass that keeps communities alive. Shrinking tax bases strain schools and clinics. Volunteer fire and rescue squads struggle to replace aging equipment. Local businesses close earlier, then for good. And after every flood, more families ask if it’s sustainable to rebuild at the bottom of a hollow while idle acreage sits on benches and ridgelines above town.
Floods made the land problem impossible to ignore
On July 18, 2025, a deluge displaced families in Russell County and sent torrents through communities already strained by economic decline. Grundy, in Buchanan County, was forced years ago to relocate its entire downtown to higher ground — an unprecedented project led by the Appalachian Regional Commission and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that even produced the nation’s only three-story Walmart. This kind of effort proves that bold, climate-resilient rebuilding in the coalfields is possible. Yet most communities lack the resources to attempt such transformations on their own.
We’ve tried everything but changing the names on the deeds. For more than half a century, Washington has poured billions into highways, retraining programs, and anti-poverty initiatives, much of it channeled through the ARC. ARC helped accelerate vocational training and provided needed infrastructure, but it never addressed the core reality: in the coalfields, people do not control the land beneath their feet.
Virginia’s land ownership problem
Southwest Virginia illustrates the scale of the challenge. In Wise County, 45% of the land is owned by corporations. Two major entities, Penn Virginia (58,000 acres) and the North Carolina-based Heartwood Forestland Fund (28,000 acres), together control about a third of the county’s surface land. These ownership patterns mirror West Virginia, where in some southern coal counties the top 10 landholders own more than half of all private land. The concentration of land in a few hands — much of it absentee or corporate — makes community planning nearly impossible.
One possible solution comes from a proposal I first suggested nearly a decade ago: an Appalachian Homestead Act aimed at retaining population, drawing back the mountain diaspora, and attracting new residents who value the region’s beauty, culture, and growing infrastructure of roads and broadband. I suggested that the federal government buy up properties from bankrupt and distressed coal and timber companies and make it available to local communities for housing, agriculture, and new economic ventures like carbon credits. Moving people to higher-ground communities — as Grundy has done with federal support and as Gov. Andy Beshear is doing across the border in Kentucky — could end the cycle of flood damage while laying the groundwork for long-term prosperity.
Skeptics may call such legislation unrealistic. But history offers precedent: before the Tennessee Valley Authority became law in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous first 100 days of 1933, Sen. George Norris of Nebraska — who had no direct political stake in the TVA region — introduced or supported 19 different bills over 12 years to address flooding and navigation on the Tennessee River. Persistence paid off. Surely among the 26 senators and 13 governors of today’s Appalachian region, there are leaders willing to champion a Homestead Act for Central Appalachia’s coalfields.
A homestead initiative holds appeal across the political spectrum: for conservatives, it’s about property rights, individual responsibility and free-market solutions; for progressives, it’s about reducing inequality, restoring the environment and adapting to climate change. Americans built the West with homesteading. Nothing is more American than homesteading — and Appalachia deserves the same chance.
Nearly a decade has passed and the case for that homestead vision has only strengthened. Central Appalachia — particularly the coalfield counties of Southwest Virginia, Eastern Kentucky, Eastern Tennessee and Southern West Virginia — remains what the President’s Appalachian Regional Commission report for President Kennedy characterized in 1964 as “a region apart — geographically and statistically.”
The urgency of this vision has been underscored by nature itself. Significant flooding on July 18, 2025, displaced 21 people in Russell County’s Dante community. This latest deluge joins a relentless pattern of climate-driven disasters that have made flood-prone hollows increasingly uninhabitable, from the devastating 2022 floods in Kentucky that killed 45 people to the repeated inundations that now seem to arrive with each major storm system.
How the act would work
Community Land Trusts (CLTs)
Nonprofits that hold land permanently for community benefit, leasing it for housing, farming and local businesses. CLTs keep housing affordable, ensure local control and prevent speculative resale. Tennessee’s Woodland CLT, created after the 1977 flood, has secured hundreds of acres for housing and community use.
Land Banks
Public entities that acquire problem properties — tax-delinquent, abandoned or distressed — clear the title and transfer them to CLTs or other community-controlled groups. Virginia already has land bank legislation on the books, and Kentucky’s successful Louisville Land Bank Authority demonstrates scalable models for rural applications.
Linking cleanup to new uses
The biggest challenge to reusing former mine lands is environmental liability. Federal law allows “bona fide prospective purchasers” to acquire contaminated sites without becoming liable for the original pollution — but only if they follow strict cleanup and monitoring rules. A Homestead Act should fund that cleanup before land is transferred to communities, and pair it with environmental insurance for added security.
Once land is remediated and held in trust, it can become the base for a diversified local economy:
— Sustainable agriculture to rebuild Southwest Virginia’s historic orchards and vegetable production.
— Renewable energy on reclaimed mine lands, generating lease income and skilled jobs.
— Outdoor recreation on trust-owned trail networks that attract tourism without displacing locals.
Financing the vision
Financing a modern Appalachian Homestead Act should begin with funds already on the table. The federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) has committed billions to environmental remediation, mine land reclamation, broadband expansion and resilient housing. Much of that money is flowing piecemeal through existing agencies, but a Homestead Act would braid those streams together, targeting them to high-ground relocation, land acquisition and community land trusts.
The act wouldn’t require a wholly new appropriation so much as a coordinated strategy to direct IIJA funds, Appalachian Regional Commission investments, and USDA rural development programs toward a single end: putting safe, usable land back into community hands.
Private and philanthropic capital can multiply the impact. Foundations already funding climate adaptation, rural development and land conservation could partner with land banks and community land trusts seeded by federal dollars. States could provide tax abatements and bond financing for infrastructure in high-ground communities. Local ownership of renewable energy projects on reclaimed mine lands can generate lease income that is recycled back into housing and job creation.
In short, the Homestead Act’s financing rests on a federal spine of infrastructure funds, reinforced by state incentives and private capital, making it both feasible and scalable without requiring a massive new federal bureaucracy. Rebuilding in the same flood-prone hollows is not resilience; it’s roulette. Much of the coal, timber, railroad and land-company property in the mountains remains undisturbed, with gorgeous vistas, clean water and good land for agriculture, housing and business ventures. Will those companies sell? It’s time to ask — checks in hand. The original purpose of assembling so much acreage — coal extraction — has little or no future in most places. If they refuse, let’s tax the holdings at their true value to pry land loose for community use.
A chance to reverse the tide
A 21st-century Homestead Act offers compelling advantages for political leaders across the spectrum. For conservatives, it emphasizes individual responsibility, property ownership and free-market solutions while reducing long-term government dependency. For progressives, it addresses inequality, environmental restoration and climate adaptation while empowering marginalized communities. Few things are more American than homesteading.
For too long, the coalfields’ wealth — coal, timber, gas — has flowed out of the mountains while the damage stayed behind. Now, as climate change makes other regions hotter, drier and less livable, we have a chance to make our hills and hollows a place people come to, not leave. Over half of America’s fruits and vegetables are grown in California and trucked east at a time when the Colorado River is shrinking. That makes no sense when our mountains can prosper with traditional and vertical farming and plentiful water. For those who argue farming is impossible in steep country, visit the farmers markets in these counties — or the terraced farms of Asia that have fed the population for centuries.
If we don’t secure the land and put it in community hands, we’ll watch more floods take more homes and more young people take the road out.
A Homestead Act for Appalachia — with Virginia front and center — could turn safe ground into a foundation for a new economy. It could keep the young ones here, beckon “come home” to the mountain diaspora, welcome newcomers, and rebuild communities that can survive the next hundred years, not just the next storm. The coalfields don’t need another study or another handout — they need their land back, their voice restored and partners willing to work as hard as mountain people do to build a future worthy of these hills.
The land is there. The tools are there. What we need now is the will to put them together.
Jim Branscome, a native of Carroll County, worked for the Appalachian Regional Commission from 1969-1971. He is a retired managing director of Standard & Poor’s in New York City. A former journalist, his work has appeared in The New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post and numerous other national newspapers and magazines.