Rural Virginia sees same population growth rate as Nashville. That growth just isn’t evenly distributed.

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Nashville has grown so fast it’s no longer just Nashville. It’s now sometimes jokingly called Nashvegas.

Far from being just a country music city, Nashville is now a corporate center, a health care center, home to teams in the National Football League, the National Hockey League and Major League Soccer. It’s considered on the short list of cities to get a Major League Baseball team once the next round of expansion comes.

Nashville is one of the hot cities in the country right now, economically speaking.

The latest Census Bureau figures show that since 2000, the Nashville metro area has seen 50,532 more people move in than move out. That’s the equivalent of Nashville adding a county about the size of Virginia’s Henry County. It also works out to a net-migration growth rate of 3% since the last census headcount in 2000.

You know who else has the same level of net migration as Nashvegas (I mean, Nashville)? Some other relatively high-growth localities in the Southeast. Chattanooga, Tennessee, for instance. Asheville, North Carolina. Ditto Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and Columbia, South Carolina.

And one place that might surprise you: rural Virginia.

Earlier this year, the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia released its annual population estimates for each county and city in the state. These don’t come in a vacuum. The U.S. Census Bureau has now released nationwide estimates for every locality. They show nationally what we’ve seen happening here in Virginia: People continue to move out of big metro areas and into rural communities.

Those urban outflows are slowing down from the year before, but they are still continuing. The places with the three biggest declines via out-migration were New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. The three places attracting the most people via domestic migration were Polk County, Florida (Lakeland, just outside Orlando); Montgomery County, Texas (on the northern edge of the Houston metro); and Pasco County, Florida (in the Tampa-St. Petersburg metro).

In Virginia, we’ve seen multiple reports now that show Northern Virginia is losing population — through out-migration — and that rural Virginia is gaining. It’s a historic paradigm shift in demographic trends that’s likely driven by, or at least accelerated by, what I’ve called a Zoom-era migration.

What’s new about the latest census report is that we’re able to place Virginia’s population changes within a national and regional context, and that context is pretty surprising — it shows rural Virginia picking up newcomers at Nashvegas-style rates.

Population changes are driven by two things and only two things: either births exceed deaths (or the other way around), or people moving in outnumber those moving out. In Virginia, we’ve seen before that most localities have more deaths than births, a dual consequence of an aging population and a declining birth rate. In those localities, the only way population growth happens is when there are so many people moving in that they outnumber both those moving out and the deaths-over-births deficits. In much of rural Virginia, that’s exactly what’s happening. That growth just isn’t evenly distributed. Localities in Southwest and Southside continued to lose population, but the migration-driven population growth is pushing further south. In some places, that’s reversed population trends. In other places, it’s slowed population declines.

If you look just at people moving in or out, you’ll see most of Virginia — even rural Virginia — is seeing an influx of newcomers.

That’s how we get that 3% growth in in-migration since 2020. (I’m indebted to Hamilton Lombard at the Weldon Cooper Center for crunching these numbers so we can have some useful ones to compare and contrast.)

For comparison purposes, that’s not just as fast as Nashville. It’s also as fast as the Winchester metro area — and Winchester is the fastest-growing metro purely in Virginia.

Of all the metros in Virginia, the Kingsport-Bristol metro has the biggest growth via migration — 4% — but it’s partly in Tennessee, and the Tennessee side is driving most of that.

Still, what we see here is an inversion of all the demographic trends that many of us have grown up with — with the fastest growing increases in newcomers coming in rural Virginia, and west of the Blue Ridge (something both Bristol and Winchester have in common at opposite ends of Interstate 81).

Here’s a more detailed look at the trends:

Meanwhile, the Washington metro, which includes Northern Virginia, comes in on the negative scale. It’s seen net out-migration since 2000. So has Hampton Roads. We’ve seen those numbers before, so they don’t surprise me. What does surprise me is how rural Virginia’s migration rates compare to rural areas in neighboring states:

For as much as Virginia gets compared to North Carolina, the difference here seems pretty stark. Why are so many more people moving into rural Virginia than rural North Carolina? Don’t get too excited. Part of that is a definitional thing. “North Carolina’s Appalachian counties are more developed than Virginia’s which means many are in MSAs and not counted as rural,” Lombard told me by email. (MSA stands for Metropolitan Statistical Areas, basically metro areas; it’s a way to account for different localities being in the same metro area). Still, rural Virginia’s population growth via migration remains notable, mostly because for so long many localities in rural Virginia were seeing just the opposite: population losses via both out-migration and deaths over births.

What’s changed? Many things, Lombard says. The pandemic has undoubtedly changed things, making remote (or hybrid) work far more common, which, in return, has freed many workers from the constraints of geography. Before the pandemic, those moving out of urban areas “were overwhelmingly retirees,” Lombard says. “They tended to either move out to the edges of large metro areas or scenic recreation counties, typically with mountains and or large bodies of water.”

Those places still see lots of newcomers — the place in the Mid-Atlantic with the biggest percentage growth of in-migration is Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where the number of newcomers has grown 15% since the last census. Hilton Head, South Carolina, comes in at 7%.

However, we’re also seeing those patterns change. “With the increasing insurance costs from living in hurricane prone areas, living further inland has become more attractive,” Lombard says. “This is helping push more people into southern Appalachian counties, such as Grayson or Highland, but also into Virginia’s Bay area counties which are less exposed to hurricanes.”

He also advises: “If remote work persists and the current migration trends persist, then there does have to be more planning to account for this change and for the areas that will be impacted. The biggest takeaway from the 2023 estimates for me is that the current migration trends appear to be more long term than almost anyone would have thought a couple of years ago.”

All that’s helped drive up the in-migration rates for rural Virginia counties, and put us in the same growth category as Nashville.

In this week’s newsletter:

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This week I’ll look at the latest early voting trends in congressional primaries across the state.

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