Category: Demographics
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Why Are Asians and Hispanics So Healthy?
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has issued its annual Healthy Community report for the United States. As usual, the information is packaged in such a way as to highlight the health disparities between racial/ethnic groups. But the findings for Virginia, which the state-level report largely overlooks, do not fit the dominant institutional-racism narrative. It turns…
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Chesterfield County Leaking Affluent Households
This column was published originally in the Chesterfield Observer. While the details of migration trends in and out of Chesterfield is unlikely to prove of great interest to anyone outside of Chesterfield, the analysis shows how citizens can use IRS migration data to gauge the health of their home locality. Hobbled by the sequestration-driven budget…
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Another Look at Virginia’s Lagging Population Growth
After decades as one of the nation’s fast-growth states, Virginia’s population now is growing line with national averages, according to data found in Hamilton Lombard’s latest post on the University of Virginia Demographics Research Group’s StatChat blog. Lombard attributes the lagging population growth to out-migration resulting from the impact of federal budget austerity on Northern…
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Retirement, Not Jobs, Pushing Virginians Out of State
Virginia has been losing population to domestic out-migration for the past five years. Most people (including me) have assumed that the reason for the exodus (well, not really an exodus, more of a drip… drip… drip… leakage) can be attributed to sub-par economic growth. In other words, more people are leaving than coming because more…
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Fewer Young People, More Geezers Working These Days
The percentage of young people (ages 16 to 25) participating in Virginia’s workforce has been sliding over the past 15 years, while the percentage of old-timers (65 years or older) in the workforce has been increasing. The percentage change of geezers in the workforce increased 59% between 2001 and 2016, according to data published by…
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Virginia’s Income Drain: $1.5 Billion Last Year
Last week I noted that more people left Virginian between 2015 and 2016 than moved into the state — the fourth year in a row the Old Dominion suffered more out-migration than in-migration. From a taxpayer’s perspective, that wouldn’t be so bad if poor people were leaving and rich people were coming in. Sadly, that…
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More People Still Leaving Virginia than Moving In
Virginia has experienced its fourth consecutive year of domestic out-migration, reports Hamilton Lombard with the University of Virginia’s demographic research group in its StatChat blog. Prior to 2013, Virginia had never experienced a year of out-migration since the Internal Revenue Service began collecting data in 1978. (The data is based on address changes for households…
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The New Look of Virginia High School Grads, Circa 2030
Lots of good data coming out of the retreats of the House and Senate appropriations committees yesterday and today… The chart above appeared in a presentation by April Kees, legislative fiscal analyst, to the Senate Finance Committee. By 2030, whites will constitute a bare majority of high school graduates in Virginia. The percentage of blacks…
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Is a Washington-Baltimore-Richmond Mega-Region in Our Future?
In 2008 economic geographer Richard Florida argued in his book, “Who’s Your City?”, that the economic units that matter in understanding economic growth and development aren’t nation states, or states, or even metropolitan statistical areas. They are mega-regions — conglomerations of metropolitan areas that are increasingly bound to one another through business interactions. By Florida’s…
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Second Chart of the Day: Unemployment
Another chart from the Commonwealth Institute based on the latest U.S. Census data: poverty rates across Virginia metro areas. Here’s what leaped out at me: Every single metro area, from Harrisonburg to Winchester, had a poverty rate below the statewide average of 11%. How high must the poverty rate for non-metro (aka rural) Virginia be…
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Chart of the Day: Median Household Income
Here’s the latest data on median household income from the Census Bureau, courtesy of the Commonwealth Institute. Nothing much new here: Residents of the Washington Metropolitan Statistical Area make 50% or more than inhabitants of Virginia’s other metros, more than $90,000, just like they always have. There is a well-defined second tier: Hampton Roads (Virginia…
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Americans Increasingly Skeptical of Value of Four-Year Degrees
Americans are finally getting wise to the value of a four-year college degree. A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds a significant growth in skepticism over the past four years, especially among Americans who haven’t graduated from a four-year college. Overall, 49% of Americans believe that earning a four-year degree will lead to a good…
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As Virginia Inches Toward Becoming a Majority Minority State, What Do Racial/Ethnic Classifications Mean Anymore?
Whites will comprise less than a majority of Virginia’s population by 2040 — 47.4% — according to recent projections by the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia. That’s down from a forecast 58.6% in 2020. The percentage of non-Hispanic whites and blacks in the state’s population will shrink by 5.7% and 8.3% respectively,…
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Rural Virginians Will be Really Old by 2040
Like every other state in the union, Virginia’s population is getting older. The trend is particularly pronounced in rural jurisdictions, as seen in these maps compiled by Shonel Sen with the Demographics Research Group at the University of Virginia and published in the StatChat blog. Everyone seems so focused on immediate problems that localities have…
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Virginia as Nation’s 10th Most Populous State?
Virginia’s population growth has slowed in recent years, but the Old Dominion still is expected to grow faster than the nation as a whole. At current growth rates, Virginia could become the 10th most populous state in the country by 2040, according to Shonel Sen with the Demographic Research Group at the University of Virginia.…