by James A. Bacon
I’m old enough to remember — waaaay back in the early 1980s — when Richmond was the dominant business center in Virginia. But as editor of the start-up Virginia Business magazine in 1986, it quickly became apparent that the mega-trend business story of the era was the extraordinary economic and demographic growth of metropolitan Washington. I recall publishing a magazine running a cover story describing Northern Virginia as “The Suburb that Ate Virginia.” By the late 1980s, it wasn’t even a contest. Northern Virginia had become the commonwealth’s growth driver.
And so it has been ever since. Fortune 500 companies began moving to NoVa. The tech sector boomed. The population swelled. Household incomes soared. Northern Virginia, which once was thought to extend from Washington to the Occoquan, now in the public imagination reaches to the Rappahannock. Somehow, NoVa’s economic dynamism persisted despite the challenges of soaring housing prices, strained infrastructure, and arguably the worst traffic congestion in the country.
For four decades, Virginia’s state capital was left eating NoVA’s dust.
Then, suddenly, around the time of the Covid pandemic, something changed. Northern Virginia, once a massive magnet for domestic in-migration, became an exporter. The population continued to grow thanks to a steady influx of foreigners, but more “domestic” migrants (people moving within the country) were leaving the region than arriving. Meanwhile, more domestic migrants were moving to the Richmond metropolitan area than ever.
Citing the work of Hamilton Lombard, who runs the demographic research group at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center, I’ve noted the sea change on this blog. Now the Richmond Times-Dispatch has taken belated notice that the baton of population and business growth has passed back to its hometown.
In the past four years, Central Virginia has added more residents than any comparable period since the first census taken in 1790.
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