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.

According to the most recent population estimates from Weldon Cooper, observes the RTD, Chesterfield County has added more residents than any other in Virginia since 2020. Henrico County ranked No.4 in population growth. And four of five of the localities showing the fastest percentage growth are rural counties around Richmond.

Chesterfield County added 30,300 new residents between July 2020 and July 2024, beating Loudoun County with 18,300. Henrico County grew by 11,600.

New Kent County’s population grew by 16.8%, Louisa County by 10.2% and Caroline County by 9.3%.

According to the RTD, newcomers typically move to one of the metropolitan region’s core jurisdictions (the city of Richmond, Chesterfield and Henrico), while people in those localities move to any outlying county.

Somehow, this has happened with long-time Richmonders being only dimly aware of it. It’s not as if the region is experiencing a highly visible business boom. We still have the same old complement of second-tier Fortune 500 companies. The region has a modest tech sector but few fast-growth “gazelles.” Virginia Commonwealth University has been expanding as a second-tier research center, but it has spun off only a few business enterprises.

Lombard attributes Richmond’s growth in part to a housing stock that is more affordable than Northern Virginia’s. In 2000, Northern Virginia was building four times as many new housing units yearly as Richmond. By 2023, the ratio was almost one to one. NoVa authorized construction of 10,700 new units compared to 10,000 in the Richmond region with half the population.

Lombard says that some of the Richmond region’s growth consists of Northern Virginians seeking more affordable housing. Many newcomers are young people starting new families. The evidence: The number of births in births in Richmond, Chesterfield and Henrico has increased over the past four years even as the national birth rate has declined.

But there’s more to the story. The Richmond region has enjoyed more job creation than Virginia and the nation as a whole, Lombard says. It’s not a boom town, but it’s growing. Another factor is the rise in remote work, he says. The Covid pandemic triggered an exodus from big cities to smaller metros. Remote workers could keep their higher salaries while buying homes at a lower price. That, of course, could change if it turns out that many of those remote workers are employed by the federal government. President Trump’s executive order for remote workers to report back to the office could change the dynamic in a hurry.

On the other hand, Trump’s war on the federal bureaucracy could have devastating implications for Northern Virginia’s growth prospects. If Trump and Elon Musk’s DOGE succeed in downsizing the federal bureaucracy and slashing spending, NoVa could lose tens of thousands of federal jobs, and the money pipe watering the region’s vast ecosystem of federal contractors could run dry. NoVa could see more than an economic slowdown. The region could experience a recession.

What former Governor George Allen once glowingly touted as the Silicon Dominion could become the Silicon Scrapheap.

The political situation in the nation’s capital is so super-charged, however, that anything can happen. Trump’s shock-and-awe strike against the federal power structure will likely inspire a ferocious reaction as the Deep State fights for its survival. There are too many variables at play for anyone to predict with any confidence how this battle to the death will turn out.

Whatever happens in D.C., Virginians are fortunate to have one major metropolitan region able to carry the growth banner.

“If you’re looking at the state economy, the state has become really dependent on Northern Virginia over the last couple decades for economic growth, and for growth in general,” Lombard told the RTD. “So, it’s a real positive for the state to see the Richmond area accelerating and basically take up some of the slack where Virginia hasn’t been able to in the last decade or so.”