Category: Demographics
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65 Is the New 25
by James A. Bacon As Baby Boomers reach their retirement years, the Age Wave is washing over the country. The big push among the G.I. Generation and the Silent Generation was to head south, settling in Florida and Arizona. But Boomers have other ideas. They are more inclined to age in place. And if they…
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Virginia’s Behind-the-Scenes Transportation Planning Revolution
by James A. Bacon The McAuliffe administration is generating big headlines by re-thinking mega-projects like the Charlottesville Bypass and the U.S. 460 Connector favored by the previous administration. Those projects came to the fore because federal regulatory authorities made it clear they had major problems with them, leaving Transportation Secretary Aubrey Layne scrambling to keep…
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The Terrible Link Between Income and Longevity
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in Business and Economy, Courts and law, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Energy, Environment, Health Care, Infrastructure, Insurance, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Media, Money in politics, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Regulations, Gov’t Oversight, Science & Technology, Social Services and EntitlementsBy Peter Galuszka Call it a tale of two Virginias. One is rich with military retirees, ample benefits and gated communities. The other is remote, poor and polluted, where the life expectancy for men is merely 64 years. The former is Fairfax County at the heart of NOVA, Virginia’s economic engine, the land of federal…
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Can We Rename It the Washington-Norfolk Mega-Region?
Here’s another perspective on Richmond and Hampton Roads — as the southern anchors of the Washington-Boston mega-region. Home to 56.5 million people, the mega-region has an economy the size of Germany. Technically, in the taxonomy of economic geographer Richard Florida, the southern anchor of the Washington-Boston corridor is Washington. But, then, he did publish the…
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McDonnell’s U.S. 460 Debacle
By Peter Galuszka Towards the end of his term, former Gov. Robert F. McDonnell and his transportation chief, Sean Connaughton, bulldozed through a dubious project that would build a superhighway from Suffolk to Petersburg along the path of old U.S. 460 in southeastern Virginia. Few understood the urgency of such a project, which involved a…
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Who You Calling British, Boy?
In 2000 the U.S. Census Bureau published a popular map showing the distribution of the most common ancestry broken down by county (and in Virginia, by independent city). Hamilton Lombard over at the Weldon Cooper Center’s Stat Chat blog has updated the map using 2010 Census data with a new ancestry classification. The Census combined…
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Map of the Day: Virginia as Two-Headed Fish
Luke Juday has a new toy, software that allows him to draw a map of Virginia that distorts cities and counties according to the relative size of their population. It’s one more way to show the demographic dominance of the urban crescent from Northern Virginia to Hampton Roads. The map creates an interesting Rohrschach test.…
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No Negative Coal Poetry, Please
By Peter Galuszka Meanwhile, over in West Virginia, the long arm of King Coal reaches over to a high school poetry reading. Grace Pitt, a Hurricane High School student, wanted to read a poem by Charleston poet Crystal Good about Richmond-based Massey Energy’s April 5, 2010, disaster at its Upper Big Branch mine that killed…
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Map of the Day: Where the Immigrants Settle
Foreign-born immigrants now comprise 10% of the Commonwealth’s population. Eighty percent of Virginia immigrants originate from Asia or Latin America. The top five countries of origin are (in order) El Salvador, India, Mexico, Philippines and Korea. Sixty-eight percent of all the state’s immigrants reside in Northern Virginia. So reports the Weldon Cooper Center’s StatsChat blog…
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Second Map of the Day: Where the Young People Are Going
If the future of Virginia resides with its young people, we can see from the map above that some regions are a lot better off than others. Luke Juday, several of whose maps I have re-published on Bacon’s Rebellion, has moved to the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, where he has begun posting on…
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McAuliffe Peruses Tobacco Commission
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in Business and Economy, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Economic development, Environment, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, Planning, Politics, Public safety & health, Science & TechnologyBy Peter Galuszka What’s going on with the Tobacco Commission? Gov. Terry McAuliffe wants to know and is asking for a detailed accounting of its finances over the past five years. The Tobacco Indemnification and Revitalization Commission, created in 1999 with a $1 billion endowment from lawsuit settlements with four major tobacco companies, has been…
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Marriage, Children and the Millennials’ Preference for City Life
by James A. Bacon How long will the return-to-the-cities movement of the Millennial generation last? Smart Growthers think that a fundamental lifestyle shift is occurring. Millennials are different: They are the smart-phone generation, the shared-ownership generation. As long as they can readily access a car when they need one through Zipcar or a peer-sharing service,…
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Virginia’s Philosophical Crossroads
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in Business and Economy, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Environment, Federal issues, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, LGBQT, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Race and Race Relations, Regulations, Gov’t OversightStanding before a trim, white, clapboard house off Lafayette Boulevard in Norfolk last week, friends and supporters of gay rights cheered loudly as two same sex couples approached a front-yard podium to celebrate their legal victory in having Virginia’s gay marriage ban overturned. The night before, U.S. District Judge Arenda Wright Allen, citing Abraham Lincoln…
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Why Are Virginians Such Weather Whoosies?
By Peter Galuszka The other day I tried to book a lunch date with the Blogger in Chief but was informed that inclement weather was looming on the Old Dominion and he might be hibernating for a few days. Imagine my surprise this morning when I awoke to find a few inches of snow and…
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Tar Heel Grief Just Down the Road
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in Business and Economy, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections, Law Enforcement, Demographics, Disasters and Disaster Preparedness, Economic development, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Electoral process, Energy, Environment, Federal issues, Government Finance, Government workers and pensions, Health Care, Housing, Infrastructure, Labor and Workforce, Land use & Development, LGBQT, Media, Money in politics, Planning, Politics, Poverty & income gap, Property rights, Public safety & health, Race and Race Relations, Science & Technology, Social Services and Entitlements, Water-waste waterBy Peter Galuszka It’s sad to see two states to which I have personal ties – North Carolina and West Virginia — in such bad ways. The latest raw news comes from the Tar Heel state where we are seeing the handiwork of hard-right- Gov. Pat McCrory who has been on a tear for a…