Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 22, 1993                   TAG: 9403100008
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

IT'S A FACT: WE'RE FALLING BEHIND . . .

We do, after all, measure our success in relation to others, especially when we engage in The Conversation - that running debate you've doubtless overheard or participated in more times than you can remember.

You know: Mr. X laments that his offspring had to move to Charlotte (or Richmond or Washington or wherever) to land a good job. The Roanoke region's economy is falling behind, he worries.

Mr. Y replies that he's been around the world, and there's no place like Roanoke. Unemployment remains relatively low here. And anyway, who would trade the local rush hour for Charlotte's?

Borne by anecdotal evidence, such assertions follow one another in a predictable procession of to and fro. The scripted Conversation drones on, leading nowhere, and for an obvious reason: Most debate about growth isn't derived from an objective assessment of our situation.

Which is not to say The Conversation should be dropped - just improved and substantiated. If the vague comparisons by which we vent our uncertainty and measure our prosperity were lent the weight of hard data, perhaps the running debate could be pushed into running somewhere, instead of in place.

In the "Peril and Promise" installments this week, news analysis - with the help of urban consultant David Rusk - coaxed the data into telling us worrisome things. It is indeed a fact, for instance, that more young people are moving from the Roanoke region than are moving to it, not an encouraging trend.

The data also suggest why this is happening. Though unemployment in the New River and Roanoke valleys is relatively low, also low is the rate of growth in incomes.

Compared to what, you ask? In 1950, Roanoke was a Southern anomaly, well-industrialized with high-wage jobs - more like a Midwestern manufacturing center, in some ways, than a Southern city, says Rusk. This railroad town enjoyed the second-highest median household income ($3,224) of any metropolitan area in Virginia and North Carolina; only Richmond was more affluent.

Since then, however, Roanoke's income growth has lagged by 10 percentage points the national average, while incomes in Raleigh, Durham, Winston-Salem, Richmond, Greensboro and Charlotte have soared beyond the average.

The fact we must contend with is this: Our region's economy is declining, in relative terms, because we aren't replacing disappearing high-wage industrial jobs with other kinds of well-paying employment. More successful regions are doing just that.

The challenge in trying to reverse the trend is posed starkly by Rusk. His statistics show that midsized cities with major universities tend to fare better than cities without universities, that state capitals tend to attract higher-wage jobs, and that midsized cities near major metro areas tend to benefit from spillover growth. On these counts, Roanoke does not compare well.

And as if that weren't bad enough, economic geographers quoted in Monday's paper remind us (as Realtors also do) that location is destiny. The Roanoke region is ill-placed, they say, to benefit from future growth.

Roanoke's prosperity has traditionally depended on extraction of natural resources from Southwest Virginia, and on Roanoke's role as a retail service center. Now a wide swath of the state, for which Roanoke has been a hub, is in decline. Far removed from the interstate 95 and 85 corridors, our region isn't well-connected with the fast-growing markets in North Carolina and the Washington, D.C., area.

No, the sky isn't falling; we're doing OK for now. But we needn't worry about Charlotte-like traffic jams.

The data suggest that the Roanoke and New River valleys are indeed falling behind. That drifting along in splendid isolation is not a sustainable option. That the region better get moving, or resign itself to finding ever smaller, ever less-prosperous places with which to compare itself.

Such facts may not be pleasant, but they're a good starting point for conversations about our future.