Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 24, 1993 TAG: 9301260396
SECTION: NEW RIVER VALLEY ECONOMY PAGE: 12 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Kevin Kittredge
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Medium
RADFORD IMPOVERISHED? BLAME COLLEGE STUDENTS
Radford the poorest city in Virginia?Census data released by the Virginia Employment Commission in April showed Radford has the highest poverty rate of any city in the state - 32.2 percent.
City Manager Robert Asbury was appalled. Not to mention skeptical.
"Fiscally stressed, yes," he said. "But impoverished, no. It's screwy. I don't believe it."
Neither, on reflection, did a lot of other people - including Dave Rundgren of the New River Valley Planning District Commission.
Rundgren noted Radford has a hardly shabby median family income of $31,000.
What Radford does have is college students. And it had roughly three times as many in 1990, when the last census was taken, as it did a decade before.
College students, of course, are notoriously broke.
"I think you've definitely hit upon it," conceded the VEC's census data expert, Daniel Jones, when asked about the student theory.
"The students are picked up where their school is located. They are considered residents of the localities in which they reside. . . . I think it's going to tremendously influence income levels."
The clincher: comfy Blacksburg, home of Virginia Tech, has an even higher poverty rate than Radford's: 37.4 percent. But Blacksburg was not listed as the poorest city by the VEC because it is a town.
Still, students may not be the whole story in Radford. The city also has an abundance of low-income housing - so much that it attracts impoverished residents from outside Radford, thus inflating the city's low-income population, argues Suzanne Glass, superintendent of welfare and social services for the city.
"We have three times as many cases transferred in here as we transfer out," said Glass this past spring, while being interviewd about the census figures. "When we ask why they came they say, `the low-income housing.' "
Glass - whose office must handle the increased caseload without increased revenues - has argued for a moratorium on low-income housing in the city.
Asbury agreed Radford is overbuilt on subsidized housing - but said it is not overbuilt enough to explain the census figures making it Virginia's poorest city.
Radford in the past has had one of the highest per capita and household incomes in the state, the city manager said.