Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 29, 1993 TAG: 9312150002
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: D2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
As warning signals go, this isn't especially ominous. America is a mobile society. Americans, particularly young Americans, have long been willing, sometimes eager, to pull up stakes and establish their adult lives and careers far from their original homes.
There's nothing wrong with that. Such mobility has been a source of strength for the national economy. It has been a source of strength for local economies, too - in places with growing and attractive job opportunities.
Unfortunately, the Roanoke-New River region isn't one of those places. Migration in our area has been moving the wrong way.
The truly worrisome signal for the region's future isn't that many young people are moving out. It's that they are not being replaced by equivalent numbers of young people moving in.
In 1980, the U.S. Census Bureau reported, 43,407 people aged 15 to 19 were living in the nine-county, four-city region that is the focus of this newspaper's series about the community's economic future. By 1990, they had become adults aged 25 to 29 - and there were only 36,759 of them.
What happened to the missing 6,648?
To some extent, nothing. Many weren't there in the first place. Mainly because of the presence of Virginia Tech and Radford University, the region is a net importer of temporarily domiciled undergraduate college students. This inflated the number of 15- to 19-year-olds in the region in 1980, making the exodus look worse than it really is.
Even so, there is an exodus, and it is serious.
One way - rough, but quick and comprehensible - to get around the student-population problem is simply to remove from consideration the two universities' home localities, Montgomery County and the city of Radford. This still shows the region with about 2,500 fewer people in their late 20s in 1990 than the number in their late teens in 1980.
Moreover, 2,500 is almost surely a low estimate. It does not, for example, take into account 18- and 19-year-olds from this area (apart from Montgomery and Radford) who in 1980 were attending college at Tech, Radford or outside the region.
The true size of the regionwide net loss of 15- to 19-year-olds during the '80s, leaving out the comings and goings of college students, is probably between 3,000 and 4,000, or even higher.
It's as if a horrible disease or war or other catastrophe had struck the region and literally decimated its population of young people - wiping out one in approximately every 10 of those in the age group that by 1990 was embarking on working careers, laying down roots, establishing families.
These numbers, if only at the margin, reflect a region in decline as a place of opportunity. A region whose reputation as a good place to start a career and raise a family is eroding. A region with a growing imbalance between young and old.
It foretells, if the trend continues, fundamental - and not necessarily pleasant - change in the region's social and economic fabric.
America in the coming decades faces a struggle with the challenges posed by unprecedented aging of its population. The Roanoke and New River valleys could find themselves facing such problems in spades.
Which is not to say that the Roanoke and New River valleys' apparent appeal as a retirement center is to be deplored. On the contrary, it could prove to be one factor in helping sustain the region's economic health.
It shouldn't be allowed, though, to mask the demographic deterioration farther down the age ladder, and it cannot counter the warning signal this represents. If all the young people leave, the reasons for older people to choose to retire here might vanish as well.
Nor is this to suggest that an appropriate regional aim is to ensure that every young person in Roanoke or Montgomery County or Salem or Pulaski sticks close to home. That isn't how America works.
But for young people who'd like to stay, there needs to be sufficient opportunity to make staying a reasonable option. And to replenish the ranks diminished by those who do leave, there must be enough opportunity to draw young people here from outside the region.
As the numbers make plain, there isn't enough opportunity now.
by CNB