Roanoke and Lynchburg are rising as destinations for people moving out of Washington metro. Will Trump’s cuts accelerate that?

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The pandemic was a seismic event that accelerated a nascent trend of people moving out of urban areas into rural ones. We’ve seen the impact of that across Virginia: Northern Virginia is now the part of the state that’s losing population, while most rural localities now see more people moving in than moving out.

The pandemic alone wasn’t the trigger for those changes in domestic migration. High housing prices in Northern Virginia have had something to do with that, too, but the pandemic marks a bright line at which those trends already in motion moved into a higher gear.

Could President Donald Trump’s downsizing of the federal government produce a similar tectonic shift in migration patterns? More to the point, could Trump — with his job-cutting colleague Elon Musk — set in motion an exodus out of Northern Virginia that prompts even more people to move into other parts of Virginia, particularly the western part of the state?

The answer to the first part of that question certainly seems at least partially to be “yes”: Since Northern Virginia is already seeing record out-migration, and since Trump is reducing the workforce of the employer that drives that region’s economy, it seems logical to conclude that we’ll continue to see at least some out-migration from the D.C. suburbs. Whether it’s more out-migration or whether that out-migration stays at the same level is harder to say, but when has a reduction in force at a region’s major employer ever been a positive economic event?

The answer to the second part of the question — will we see more people from Northern Virginia move downstate? — is more speculative, but there are some facts we can bring to bear that suggest a “yes.” 

I’ve spent some time rummaging through two decades’ worth of federal data on job trends and moving trends. My main takeaway: The Roanoke Valley and Lynchburg have been rising as destinations for people moving out of the Washington metro area. 

In 2011, the Roanoke Valley was the 17th most popular destination for those leaving the D.C. market. By 2023 (the most recent data available), it had moved up to 11th place.

In 2011, wherever Lynchburg ranked, it wasn’t in the top 25, which is all this particular database displayed. By 2023, Lynchburg had moved into 18th place.

Even without the current turmoil in Washington, these changes seem significant because they’re a sign that both communities are becoming stronger magnets for Northern Virginia expatriates. Does this mean that if terminated federal workers look outside Northern Virginia for future employment, more of them will look to Roanoke and Lynchburg than if this job-cutting had happened a decade or more ago? We don’t know; there are lots of complicating factors, not the least of which is what jobs are available and where. There’s a reason Roanoke and Lynchburg don’t rank higher on the Washington metro’s destination list and why some Virginia metros — such as the New River Valley — don’t rank in the Top 25 at all. They’re simply smaller and have fewer job opportunities, particularly at the same income levels that many in Northern Virginia are accustomed to making. 

Still, these communities have been moving up on the Washington area’s destination list and it hasn’t been a sudden, one-year thing — this has been a steady rise, which gives more confidence that this is a real trend and not a temporary statistical blip.

Let’s take a deeper look. 

The database that produces all this data is run by the Census Bureau. Besides counting people’s heads every 10 years, the Census Bureau also tracks where people move when they change jobs. It’s a little-known tool, at least to me, and I’m indebted to the state official who introduced me to it (but probably doesn’t want to be publicly credited). With the J2J Explorer (that stands for Job-to-Job) we can see where people moved when they moved out of a particular metro area. 

There are two important things to know about this data. First, it’s limited to official Metropolitan Statistical Areas so we don’t have data on places that aren’t in MSAs, such as Danville and Martinsville and all our rural areas. Sorry. We work with the tools we have.

Second, this data is limited to people moving from one job to another — it’s not retirees moving, or people entering the workforce and moving away from home. It’s people quitting a job here and taking a job there. The Internal Revenue Service maintains a separate database that can be used to track migration, based on where people file their tax returns from. That covers all taxpayers. When we see a lot of people in the IRS database moving from, say, Roanoke to Florida, but don’t see that in the Census Bureau’s J2J Explorer, we can conclude that those Florida-bound people aren’t moving for work — so are probably retirees.

Now let’s circle back to our main point: where people from the Washington metro go when they move out of town for jobs. You can see in the two charts above that the top seven desintations haven’t changed. The movement is in the places below that, with Charlottesville, Lynchburg and Roanoke all moving up. Of those, Roanoke has made the most dramatic jump, from 17th to 11th. Charlottesville has moved from 12th to 8th. It’s harder to tell with Lynchburg, since Lynchburg wasn’t in the top 25 at all before and now is 18th.

The raw numbers have increased, too. In 2011, the Census Bureau says 1,340 people moved from the D.C. metro to the Roanoke metro. That figure has now more than doubled to about 3,000 per year. We don’t know the previous figures for Lynchburg, but the D.C. migration there is now about 1,850 people per year.

Here’s perhaps a more colorful comparison. In 2011, people moving out of Washington for jobs were more likely to move to Los Angeles, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Dallas than to move to Roanoke. By 2023, Roanoke was a more preferred destination than any of those. 

I offer the following observation with the greatest of caution. 

Let me say again: Trump’s government job-cutting may or may not be good for the country but it is most assuredly not good for Virginia. The Washington metro is a giant company town and the federal government is the company in question. 

Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax County, says that in his ZIP code, 1 out of 5 people work for the federal government, and that doesn’t count federal contractors who aren’t employees but still depend on government funding for their livelihood. He says he’s “terrified” of the economic impacts and he’s right to be. We all ought to be. The Northern Virginia portion of the Washington metro accounts for 42% of the state’s gross domestic product; it is the state’s economic engine. Conservative voters downstate may detest Northern Virginia’s liberal politics but their communities are, in many ways, the prime beneficiaries of its robust economy. Rural schools get most of their funding from the state, which is another way of saying they’re getting a lot of it from Northern Virginia, just cycled through Richmond. In Scott County, 65.4% of the school funding comes by way of Richmond so, roughly speaking, a quarter to a third of Scott County’s school funding may come from Northern Virginia. If anything disrupts the Northern Virginia economy, the effects of that are ultimately going to be felt in Scott County and other parts of rural Virginia.  

I don’t want to be an alarmist but what happens in D.C. is not going to stay in D.C.; we’re going to feel it in Danville and Dickenson County and lots of other places. However, and this is the part I want to be cautious in expressing, the economic impact of these changes could be mitigated — if fired federal workers stayed in Virginia and if they found comparable-paying jobs. Those are two mighty big “ifs,” but this database suggests that the former is not as unlikely as it may seem, because we’ve already seen a trend of more people who are moving out of the Washington area move into places downstate in Virginia, with Roanoke rising on the charts, and Lynchburg somewhere behind it. What we don’t know is that second “if” — whether Virginia has enough comparable-paying jobs, be it in Northern Virginia or elsewhere, to take in the federal workers who are now in the unemployment line.

The Stephen S. Fuller Institute, a regional economic think tank at George Mason University, warns that Northern Virginia is “entering a period of historic uncertainty.” So are we all.

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