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In the four years following the last census count, Roanoke’s population has declined by 2,104 people.
That figure — an annual estimate from the U.S. Census Bureau that came out recently — stands out in many ways. Among them:
Roanoke has gained population slowly but steadily from 2000 to 2020, so this population decline constitutes a reversal of a quarter-century trend.
The last time Roanoke lost population was in the 2000 census that equaled the 1990s. During that decade, the city lost 1,486 people, so Roanoke has now lost more people in the first four years of this decade than it did during the entire decade of the ’90s.
During the 1980s, Roanoke lost 3,823 people, so the city is on pace to lose more people than it did in those years.
To find a bigger population loss, you have to go back to the 1960s when Roanoke lost 4,985 during a period of suburbanization and white flight. Roanoke’s current population losses, if they continue at the same pace through the rest of the 2020s, would come close to that — a projected 4,734.
In terms of numbers, Roanoke’s population losses are larger than those of some comparably sized cities. While Roanoke has lost 2,104 people, Portsmouth has lost 1,463. It’s not a western Virginia issue. Martinsville saw its population increase by 352, Salem gained 567 people, Radford went up 1,210 and Lynchburg grew by 1,284.
Only three localities in the state saw bigger population declines during that 2020-2024 time period: Newport News (-3,183), Virginia Beach (-4,626) and Norfolk (-6,924).
That raises an obvious question: Why is Roanoke losing so many people?
The census estimates give some insight, although not enough.
There are four drivers of population change, and they group together into two categories: births vs. deaths and people moving in vs. people moving out.
Roanoke has lost population both ways, although primarily because more people are moving out of the city than moving in.
In the first four years of the decade, Roanoke had 672 more deaths than births. That’s not unusual. Most localities in Virginia saw the same thing — a consequence of an aging population and declining birth rates.
Deaths outnumbering births accounted for 31.9% of Roanoke’s population loss; 68.1% of the population decline can be attributed to more people moving out than moving in. The census figures show a deficit of 1,412 people from out-migration. The city’s population loss would have been even steeper were it not for international immigration. The census shows that Roanoke lost 2,950 people through domestic out-migration; gaining a net of 1,538 immigrants helped mitigate that loss somewhat, but not enough. (I’ll deal more with immigration in a future column, but Roanoke is not alone in finding that immigration is preventing census numbers from being even worse than they already are. In some parts of Virginia, the only reason why there’s population growth is because of immigration.)
Now we’ve at least narrowed things down: Roanoke’s biggest demographic challenge is people moving out. Only 11 of Virginia’s 133 localities saw more net domestic out-migration than Roanoke did. Some cities in the western part of the state have seen no net domestic out-migration. Among those: Danville, Martinsville, Radford and Salem.
Some of that may reflect post-pandemic trends that have seen increased migration out of larger cities and into smaller ones — but by larger cities, we mean places such as New York, not Roanoke. Why is Roanoke so different from many of its neighbors? (You’ll notice that for these comparisons, I’m sticking with other cities, but the observations wouldn’t change if I added in Roanoke County or Botetourt County. Both have seen their populations increase; both also have positive migration figures, with more people moving in than out. Roanoke stands alone in the Roanoke Valley.)
To find out more about these numbers, I turned to Hamilton Lombard, a demographer with the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia. He dug into the statistics and sent me this analysis by email: “Roanoke City overall has more older housing that is lower value with close to half of housing units being rented out,” he said. When there’s economic growth, “you tend to see homeownership rates go up and household sizes fall as fewer people need to split their housing costs with roommates.”
The practical effect of that is more people move out of the city — because, with so many rental units in the city, it’s places outside Roanoke where the homes tend to be for sale. If more people need to room together to save expenses, that generally increases the number of people in the city because that’s where a lot of rental property is. If fewer people need to room together to save expenses, that generally reduces the number of people in the city because some may move out to other localities.
Lombard notes that Roanoke has seen a sharper rise in home prices than other communities. “Roanoke City is one of only a handful of localities that have seen their median home values double since the pandemic, the rest were in the Richmond area as well as Page County which has been attracting a rising number of residents from the DC area,” Lombard said.
High home prices are good for sellers but not for buyers, so that gives renters another reason to leave the city — to find more affordable housing for sale elsewhere.
Those moves have additional demographic consequences.
When renters with children leave the city, they’re often replaced by renters without children, so even if the housing unit is still occupied, there’s a net drop in population.
Secondly, when renters with children leave the city, it means those children are exiting the city school system, as well. “During the long recovery from the financial crisis, more families rented homes in cities and enrolled their children in local schools, causing enrollment to rise in cities like Roanoke,” Lombard said. “Roanoke’s enrollment rose over the 2010s up until the pandemic, since then its enrollment has fallen in part from more families leaving the city, this is a trend that many cities in Virginia and across the country are experiencing.”
The departure of younger renters, in search of affordable housing to buy elsewhere, also means there are fewer children being born in the city — because their children are now being born elsewhere. In that sense, Roanoke’s high out-migration is connected to its low number of births and a growing imbalance between births and deaths. Roanoke’s births fell by 13% from 2019 to 2023, Lombard said. “In the rest of the Roanoke region, the number of births rose during the same period in part from families moving to the communities. The decline in births in Roanoke has helped its birth-death balance shift from having on average over 200 more births than deaths during the 2010s to having over 200 more deaths than births in 2023. This imbalance makes growth very difficult for the city while it also has domestic out-migration.”
Lombard’s summary: “Roanoke’s fall in population and out-migration is worth paying attention to, as is its rapid increase in home prices. The increase in housing prices show the city is attractive but my interpretation of the out-migration is that affordability in the city is a growing problem. Median income for families in the metro area rose only 3 percent after adjusting for inflation between 2019 and 2024. Fortunately, as housing prices in the region have risen new home construction has also, with the number of new residential units permitted for construction in 2024 reaching their highest levels since the mid-2000s. But only about a tenth of the new housing units were in the city, even though it accounts for a third of the region’s population. Unless housing in the city becomes more attractive, possibly from increased construction or more of the region’s residents renting, Roanoke will likely find it difficult to return to its 2010s population levels.”
Now, for my summary: Roanoke has often found it difficult to build more housing. We’ve seen multiple controversies over proposed developments, with neighborhood groups protesting that a particular project wasn’t right for that neighborhood. There was a big political fight over whether and how to develop the Evans Spring property alongside Interstate 581 and the 4-3 vote in favor, and there’s still talk of revisiting that decision. The 150-acre tract is the largest piece of undeveloped land in the city, and some think it should be preserved as green space. That could well be the right decision in terms of the environment, but the demographic consequence could be that it’s hard for the city to retain young adults who have or want children — and houses with yards.
As intense as they sometimes are, rezoning decisions are often easy to visualize in terms of cause and effect: Allow this development, and you’ll have more traffic on these streets. Policy questions are harder to picture: People are generally in favor of more housing in the abstract, less so when things become more specific. This is an election year in Roanoke, with three of the seven seats on the ballot. Will the city’s population loss, the reasons behind it and the possible solutions become a campaign issue? If so, here are the numbers.
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