Bacon's Rebellion

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Virginia Population: 8.3 Million and Climbing

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by

James A. Bacon
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Virginia 2013 population growth highlights fresh from the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center:

  • Current population: 8.3 million
  • The state population grew 74,531, less than one percent and the slowest rate since before the Great Recession.
  • Still, that rate was faster than the national average, making Virginia the 14th fastest-growing state in the country.
  • Population gains were concentrated (a) in Northern Virginia, and (b) in urban areas. Urban-core jurisdictions of Arlington, Fredericksburg, Harrisonburg, Radford and Richmond grew faster than the state average.
  • Many counties outside the urban crescent, including all seven coal-producing counties in Southwestern Virginia, lost population.

For details, click here.

— JAB

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6 responses to “Virginia Population: 8.3 Million and Climbing”

  1. LifeOnTheFallLine Avatar
    LifeOnTheFallLine

    River City, what! The population is already north of what it was in 1990. It will be interesting to see what happens as the housing stock gets occupied. It seems like mostly when politicians talk about redeveloping Richmond they implicitly mean North of the river…a bike boulevard on Floyd and converting lanes on the Leigh Street Viaduct are great projects, but some talk of North-South connectivity across the river would be nice.

  2. FreeDem Avatar
    FreeDem

    It’s not just the coal country in the Southwest that’s on the decline, all of Southside is struggling too. The area was thrown bags of money from the Tobacco Commission to reinvent itself and what has it done? Nothing.

    Interesting to see that as a percentage the growth is highest in both the inner localities of Arlington and Alexandria and the outer suburbs of Loudoun and Prince William, while Fairfax lags all of them.

    Here’s a big shift, at an estimate of 151,218 for Alexandria, the Cooper Center’s most recent forecast has Alexandria’s population higher in 2013 than what they had originally projected back in 2012: http://www.coopercenter.org/sites/default/files/node/13/Locality%20Projected%20Total%20Population,%202020-2040.pdf

    Compare all this to the old post from the blog: https://www.baconsrebellion.com/2012/11/virginia-demographic-projections-read-the-fine-print.html

    I’m seeing much weaker growth in Roanoke and Lynchburg suburbs than projected, Charlottesville stands out a lot more, the inner core of Arlington and Alexandria are doing better, and some of the boom we saw south of Prince William County along 95 at the end of the last decade has slacked off.

    1. Tysons Engineer Avatar
      Tysons Engineer

      “Interesting to see that as a percentage the growth is highest in both the inner localities of Arlington and Alexandria and the outer suburbs of Loudoun and Prince William, while Fairfax lags all of them.”

      Fairfax doesn’t lag them, it starts with a massive population of nearly 1.1 million compared to 210,000 in Arlington and 310,000 starting in Loudoun.

      Fairfax grew by 31,000 residents. Arlington grew by 13,000 and Loudoun grew by 21,000.

      Those are the numbers that matter, not relative percentage change (especially when one is such a far greater population than the others).

      1. FreeDem Avatar
        FreeDem

        Thanks for reading.

        As I said, the PERCENTAGE, is higher in both Arlington, Alexandria, Loudoun, and Prince William.

        And as I then pointed out, the higher percentage was not forecast for Arlington and Alexandria in previous Cooper studies.

        That matters.

  3. larryg Avatar
    larryg

    Thanks for the links! And I’ll make the same comment that I did back in 2012… that… ” These population projections rely on the assumption that future population is a function of the past demographic trends.”

    I do no denigrate the Cooper Center.. they’re doing the work but when it comes right down to it.. they’re reduced to looking at past trends to predict future trends – which maybe in the past was okay but now.. it’s fraught with uncertainty.

    and I wonder also about job creation predictions….

    and … I still wonder why VDOT uses these projections to justify new roads.

  4. Darrell Avatar
    Darrell

    I remember reading somewhere that Tobacco money was going to free college education. Maybe the reason nothing appears to be happening down in Southside is because the educated ones moved to NoVA?

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