ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, July 24, 1996 TAG: 9607240026
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
FOR YEARS, the New River Valley was a high-growth counter to no-growth stagnation in the rest of Southwest Virginia. Not any more.
According to mid-decade population estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Roanoke metro area is now growing faster than the New River Valley Planning District. That's quite a role reversal.
Neither valley, though, is growing as fast as the state and national averages. That's unchanged from the 1980s.
The two valleys' role reversal should remind that New Century Council efforts to develop a regional economic strategy could benefit New River as much as Roanoke. Meantime, our region's overall sluggish growth underscores the need to start implementing some kind of strategy.
Contributing to the role reversal has been a modest but definite uptick in Roanoke Valley population growth. After only a 1.9 percent increase for the entire decade of the '80s, the metro area grew by nearly 3 percent in just the first half of the '90s.
But a more dramatic - and sobering - contributor is the downward spiral of growth in the New River Planning District. For whatever reason, the presence of Virginia Tech and Radford University is not now driving the kind of economy that acts as a magnet for newcomers.
The New River Valley's university-fueled population growth of the '70s - 23 percent for the decade - would have been difficult and probably undesirable to sustain, given the current inadequacy of growth-management and open-space planning. The '80s saw a more modest population growth of 8 percent.
But with only 2.3 percent growth in the New River Valley for the first half of the '90s, a new question arises: Is the New River Valley on the road to population stagnation?
It's a question they're not asking in another university-centered community: Charlottesville. In the 1970s, the New River Valley and the Charlottesville metro area grew at roughly the same - and rapid - pace. But in the '80s, the population of the Charlottesville area grew by nearly double the percentage of the New River Valley. In the first half of this decade, the Charlottesville metro area grew by 9.5 percent - four times the growth rate of New River, and behind only Northern Virginia among the state's metro areas.
Growth in itself isn't necessarily a good thing. But managed growth is essential for rising living standards.
Statewide, population growth has slowed a bit from the '70s and '80s. Even so, according to Julia H. Martin and Donna J. Tolson of the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia, current trends suggest the state's population will grow from 1990 to 2000 by about 14 percent. That's a couple of percentage points higher than the national average.
In a recent edition of the center's News Letter, Martin and Tolson also report some moderation in the unevenness of the state's population growth. So far in the '90s, for example, no section of the state has actually lost population, as did several planning districts in Southwest and Southside Virginia during the 1980s.
Nevertheless, they observe, unevenness persists, though in a somewhat different way. In the '80s, the western half of Virginia was the slow-growth portion of the state. In the '90s, the southern half has been. For Southwest Virginia, which lies in the slow-growth half either way you cut it, the point is less than momentous.
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