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In William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” the Roman senator/general Cassius grumbles to his brother-in-law Brutus that Caesar is getting too much credit at their expense and they were to blame for not doing something about it: “Men at some time are masters of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”
Their solution was to round up a bunch of people to stab Caesar to death. Today’s column will not propose such a bloody solution, but it does echo Shakespeare’s famous line. The past two days, I’ve looked at the latest population projections from the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia. On Tuesday, I looked at how most of Southwest and Southside (along with counties along the Chesapeake Bay) will lose population, with some of them losing 30% or more of their population by the year 2050. On Wednesday, I looked at some specific localities, such as how the Lynchburg metro will add more people than the Roanoke and New River valleys combined and how others will see steep, and accelerating, population declines.
I closed by saying there were political implications in the numbers, and here they are. This is also where the Shakespeare quote applies: None of this demography is dictated by the stars; it’s all the consequence of human behavior and the choices people — sometimes individually, sometimes as communities — have made.
Slower population growth will mean slower economic growth
The projections see Virginia’s population growth slowing down, from 24% over the first quarter of this century to 17% over the next quarter. Almost all localities that have been growing will see their population growth slow down. Thirteen of them will see population growth slow down so much that those localities will start to lose population. Localities that have already been losing population will see their population declines accelerate. Only a random four places — Manassas, Newport News, Prince George County and Staunton — are expected to see population growth increase (and then not by much).
Our overall population growth is slowing down for two reasons: a declining birth rate and reduced immigration. (Even though these projections assume lower immigration rates, demographer Hamilton Lombard at the Weldon Cooper Center says it’s possible that they still overstate future immigration, which means population growth rates will be even slower than what’s being forecast. We’ll come back to immigration and just focus on birth rates here.) A declining birth rate means the overall population starts to skew older and older as people live longer but fewer children are being born. An aging population translates into slower economic growth: Young adults spend a lot of money on household formation, and that’s being reduced. Fewer working-age adults also means a smaller labor pool.
More economists have written papers about this than Shakespeare wrote plays, but if you really want to know more, I refer you to this 2023 report published by the National Bureau of Economic Research that warns that “population aging will slow economic growth throughout much of the world.” They called it “demographic drag.”
Gov. Glenn Youngkin came into office promising to build a “rip-roaring economy” in Virginia. With slower population growth, it will be harder for future candidates for governor to promise that — or at least harder to deliver.
Some rural communities are going to feel the pain of a shrinking economy
All these are airy concepts, and some Virginians in communities that have seen a lot of population growth may welcome a respite from development — some might say over-development. However, the consequences of slower population growth will be more painful in communities that go from gaining population to losing population, or those that start losing population at a faster rate. The most extreme case is in Buchanan County, which is projected to lose 48% of its population over the next 25 years. That’s fewer customers for stores, that’s fewer workers for businesses. You don’t need the imagination of the gentleman from Stratford-upon-Avon to imagine what that does to the local economy. Rapid population growth is not always a good thing, but a declining population inevitably brings down the economy around it.
Slower population growth in Northern Virginia has come at a time when rural Virginia needs Northern Virginia most
Here’s where all this starts to get political. Rural Virginia depends on Northern Virginia, whether it realizes that (or likes that) or not. Northern Virginia supplies 42% of the state’s general fund tax revenues. Rural Virginia gets most of its school funding from the state — in a few cases, almost two-thirds of a locality’s total funding. As rural populations decline, there will be fewer local taxpayers, but some expenses don’t decline with population. A county with a single high school will still need to figure out how to fund that high school, regardless of the population. While there might be fewer students and fewer teachers in that school, the heating bill for the building might be the same (or, realistically, these days, higher). School buses will still need to run the same number of miles, even if they’re picking up fewer students. All that means rural localities may need to look to the state for even more funding, at a time when the state’s overall population growth (which overlaps with economic growth) is slowing.
Now for more bad news:
Rural Virginia’s political voice will grow even fainter
Loudoun County’s population growth will slow by more than one-half. Nonetheless, Loudoun is still projected to add 283,740 people over the next 25 years. That’s the size of the entire Roanoke Valley, whose population is expected to grow by just 13,535. Meanwhile, the region from Wythe County west to the Cumberland Gap is projected to lose 68,417.
The effect of that will be to shift political power even more to the urban crescent, particularly Northern Virginia. That will also play out in redistricting, when it comes time every 10 years to redraw legislative lines. The question is not whether rural Virginia will lose seats, but rather how many. That means it’s going to become harder for rural Virginia to make its case in Richmond.
A more suburban (and less rural) Virginia could make the state more Democratic. Or not.
In today’s political environment, a more populous Northern Virginia means more Democratic votes and a less populous rural Virginia means fewer Republican ones. However, political poles sometimes switch, so we shouldn’t automatically assume that these population projections point to a more Democratic Virginia. In 2000, Loudoun and Prince William counties were considered Republican counties. Now they’re Democratic ones. In 2000, Buchanan and Dickenson counties were Democratic counties; now they’re Republican ones. We simply have no idea how the politics of the next 25 years will unfold.
At least three things could change these projections: higher birth rates, more immigration and more remote work.
Of these three things, only one — immigration — can be easily changed through politics. Politicians may try to change the trajectory of the other two factors, but other countries that have tried to raise their birth rates have not had much success. Nonetheless, we are likely to see proposals to promote a higher birth rate. We’ve also seen pushback against remote work from some in corporate America — although a shrinking or slow-growing labor pool may give workers more of an upper hand in setting the terms of their employment.
Immigration is the easiest thing to change, but politically perhaps the hardest. Right now, the political climate in the United States makes it almost impossible to increase immigration — even though, demographically, that’s what the country needs. Rural Virginia, confronted with these shrinking populations, ought to be clamoring for more immigration, but that’s not how our political system works right now.
The United States stands in stark contrast to our neighbor to the north, Canada. Both have the same demographic challenges but have chosen different solutions — we are restricting immigration while Canada, under both Liberal and Conservative party governments, has pursued generous immigration policies specifically to “rebuild the demographic pyramid” with younger workers. The main opposition to Canadian immigration policy has grown out of more practical concerns rather than philosophical ones — increased immigration has brought about a housing crisis. That brings us to:
Slower population growth could exacerbate the housing shortage
At first glance, that sentence makes no sense. Wouldn’t it be the other way around? Here’s why that’s not necessarily so. Some part of Northern Virginia’s slow population growth is because fewer houses are being built for new residents to live in. Under the laws of supply and demand, that means the price of existing housing is going up, making Northern Virginia a more expensive place to live. If developers think population growth will slow, they might build even less housing, driving prices up further. Will we see developers building more housing if growth trends show slower growth?
“If Northern Virginia continues to build relatively few new homes, then one question the projections raise is where some of its forecasted growth (and much of Virginia’s forecasted growth) will be diverted to?” asks Lombard, the Weldon Cooper demographer.
Remote work also plays a role here. “Hybrid/remote work has made it possible for many Northern Virginians to move hours away from DC and still keep their current job, which has increased migration to other parts of Virginia far from the DC area,” Lombard says by email. “Many of these areas are ramping up new home construction levels, the number of new homes built outside the Urban Crescent has doubled over the past decade. If this trend continues, it will be less likely that Virginia’s rural counties and small metros will have a smaller population in 2030 than today, despite their aging populations and significant birth-death imbalance.”
The real political challenges may come in rural areas that will feel something of a demographic whipsaw. Many will see their populations decline due to an aging population dying off, while still seeing more people moving in than moving out. Not every death creates a vacant house — some of those who die may be in retirement communities, or leave behind a spouse in a still-occupied dwelling. However, everyone who moves in will need a place to live. We’ve already seen zoning disputes in rural counties that are losing population overall but have more people moving in than moving out.
A slow-growing population also complicates the housing picture in another way: fewer people to build those houses. “Many rural counties that have seen their workforces shrink over the past two decades have struggled to increase the number of homes constructed,” Lombard says. “In the seven coalfield counties, the number of new homes built in the last few years is still a third the amount built in previous decades but unlike in Northern Virginia, home construction levels in the Coalfields were low even during the 2000s housing boom.”
That’s why housing is both simple to solve (build more houses) but also hard to solve (fewer people to build them, plus zoning disputes about where they should be).
Shakespeare, who dabbled in real estate speculation when he wasn’t writing iambic pentameter, would have appreciated these challenges. We may not.
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