Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 3, 1991 TAG: 9102030321
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
While the Roanoke Valley's population barely budged, migrations of a potentially historic nature swept over the rest of the state, according to recent census figures:
Southwest Virginia, after gaining population when the energy crisis drew people back to the region during the 1970s, lost population.
Migration from the coalfields during the '80s approached the size of the historic migration that depopulated Appalachia during the '50s and '60s, touching off fears among some community leaders that another, even more debilitating, exodus had begun.
The state's three largest metro areas gained more residents than ever. Northern Virginia added 400,000 people; Tidewater gained 236,000; Richmond picked up 108,000.
By decade's end, two of every three Virginians lived in the so-called "urban crescent."
Virginia - parts of it, anyway - also became more ethnically diverse. Blacks followed whites to the suburbs. In some suburbs outside Richmond and Norfolk that began with "white flight" a generation ago, the number of blacks doubled. Meanwhile, the state's small Asian and Hispanic population, concentrated in Northern Virginia, more than doubled. Asians and Hispanics are now the biggest minority groups in some Northern Virginia communities.
If demography is destiny, as those who analyze population trends often proclaim, the Census Bureau's every-10-years head count is a snapshot of what a community looks like and how much it has changed since the last sitting.
For now, it's a grainy picture at best. The Census Bureau has released only limited information on population totals; the most detailed data won't be available for several months, or even years.
But here's a closer look at the picture the early numbers paint of Virginia as it enters the 1990s: Roanoke looks west The outlines of the "New Dominion" first appeared in the aftermath of World War II - when the exponential growth of the federal government began to urbanize previously rural counties across the Potomac from Washington, and when the mechanization on farms and mines began to drive people from Southwest and Southside Virginia.
Except for a brief interruption during the energy crisis of the 1970s, when people momentarily flocked back to the coalfields, those two trends have continued unabated over four decades.
The result has cleaved Virginia into two separate and unequal parts - a dynamic swath of fast-growing suburbs in the east and a withering rural west.
But although the Roanoke Valley sits at the edge of two regions in economic distress - Southwest and Southside Virginia - their problems historically have not touched the valley.
On the contrary, since World War II the Roanoke Valley's population has generally grown at a rate not far off the state average. For instance, during the 1970s, the Roanoke Valley's population expanded by 10 percent, about the same rate as Tidewater's.
But during the 1980s, that changed - dramatically.
The Roanoke Valley's growth nearly came to a halt, for reasons still not entirely understood. Its geography and economy - hemmed in by mountains, well off the populous Interstate 95 corridor, with no state university or fast-growing employer to heat up the business climate - are the reasons most usually cited.
To be sure, localities outside the Roanoke Valley but still close enough to be within commuting distance - such as the New River Valley and the counties around Smith Mountain Lake - posted sizable population gains.
But even when the region from Radford to Lynchburg is viewed as a whole (as many business leaders like to view things), the market still grew by only 6 percent during the 1980s, compared to 16 percent during the 1970s.
Whether that's a one-decade aberration or a more permanent phenomenon is a subject that has many Roanoke Valley business leaders and government planners wringing their hands and plotting economic development strategies.
However, the latest census makes one thing clear: Although the Roanoke Valley is still the fourth-largest metro area in the state, population trends suggest it now has more in common with rural Southwest Virginia than with the state's other cities.
One sign of that came last September when Roanoke City Council decided to contact Southwest Virginia governments about the possibility of forming a regional coalition to promote economic growth.
Northern Virginia grows
Northern Virginia - once the state's stepchild, openly ridiculed for not being "real Virginia" - has emerged as the state's biggest metro area.
In 1970, Tidewater was. And a decade ago, Tidewater and Northern Virginia were about the same size.
But Northern Virginia grew by one-third during the 1980s. Now, one in every four Virginians lives in the Washington suburbs, and the region has come to exert a powerful influence on the state's politics and economy.
There are no signs that the suburban sprawl that began in the post-war boom of the 1950s is going to stop. Instead, Virginians are having to change their geographical vocabularly as outlying cities such as Winchester, Culpeper and Fredericksburg boom with commuter growth and fall into Northern Virginia's expanding orbit.
The browning of Virginia
Northern Virginia also is changing in other ways.
Once almost entirely white, it's now becoming the state's most ethnically diverse region, thanks to an influx of Asians and Hispanics - a nationwide trend that's been called the "browning of America."
In some ways, Northern Virginia has become to the state what California is to country.
Virginia's small Hispanic population more than doubled during the 1980s - from not quite 80,000 to more than 160,000.
That's only about 3 percent of the state's total population. However, two-thirds of Virginia's Hispanics are concentrated in Northern Virginia.
In Arlington, Hispanics now constitute 14 percent of the population and have passed blacks to become the largest minority group there; in Alexandria, Hispanics account for 10 percent of the population.
The growth of Virginia's Asian population mirrors that of Hispanics. The number of Asians also more than doubled during the 1980s - from 66,000 to 159,000, about 3 percent of the state's total.
As with Hispanics, two-thirds of Virginia's Asians live in Northern Virginia. Asians are the biggest minority group in Fairfax County, where they comprise more than 8 percent of the population, as well as in Fairfax City and Falls Church.
Despite their growing numbers, Hispanics and Asians have yet to become a force in Northern Virginia politics, although they could someday, says University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato.
"They have one of the lowest voter registration rates you'll find anywhere in the country," he says.
What voting power the two groups have is diluted, Sabato says, because the Asians and Hispanics tend to be scattered throughout the community, rather than clustered in any one particular neighborhood where their numbers would make them an important voting bloc in a municipal ward system.
"I'll tell you who should be working hard to register Asians and that's Republicans," Sabato said. "In many places, Asians tend to be among the strongest Republicans," especially Asians of Vietnamese descent - whose numbers are especially large in Arlington.
White flight, black flight
Two other trends, though far less noticeable, made Virginia's cities and suburbs somewhat less white.
First, "white flight" continued to drain population from central cities. Roanoke, Lynchburg, Richmond, Norfolk, Portsmouth and Petersburg all lost population to the suburbs.
In Roanoke, 5,587 whites left the city during the decade, accounting for the city's population decline that dropped it under the 100,000 threshold.
Such white movement increased blacks' proportion of the population in central cities, but usually not by much.
In Roanoke, whites went from 77 percent of the population to 75 percent, while blacks went from 22 percent to 24 percent.
The biggest change came in Petersburg, where white flight boosted blacks' proportion of the population from 61 percent to 72 percent. Although blacks are a majority in Richmond and a string of counties in Southside, nowhere else do blacks constitute as big a majority as they do in Petersburg.
At the same time, there was a big increase in the number of blacks living in the suburbs - perhaps an indication of a growing black middle class. The number of blacks doubled in Fairfax, Prince William, Virginia Beach, Chesterfield and Henrico.
In Henrico, nearly half of the newcomers in that Richmond suburb were black; in Virginia Beach and Chesterfield, one of every five newcomers was black.
Although the percentage of blacks in most suburbs remains in the single digits, blacks now account for 20 percent of the population in Henrico; 14 percent in Virginia Beach and 13 percent in Chesterfield.
However, as with most of the population trends, this one eluded the Roanoke Valley. Roanoke County's black population inched up only slightly, to stand at 2.5 percent.
by CNB