North Carolina has Asheville… but Virginia has Abingdon.
When former New Yorker Marty Stefanelli and his wife moved from West Palm Beach, Fla. to Blue Ridge, Ga., they went from paying about $20,000 a year in real estate taxes to $3,000. The couple still maintains a residence in New York, where they pay about $30,000 a year in taxes, but Stefanelli plans to make Georgia their main residence within a few years. “I bought a pickup to fit in,” he quips.
Southern Appalachia is emerging as a growing retirement destination for northern transplants who find Florida too expensive, reports the Wall Street Journal today. The so-called “halfbacks,” who move to Florida and then halfway back north cite lower cost housing, lower taxes and lower cost of living.
Net migration to retirement destination Appalachian counties in Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee has risen steadily from about 10,000 in 2011 to more than 46,000 in 2017, according to census data.
The trend appears to be gaining momentum as local developers and real estate agents build housing product geared to the halfback market, and as local businesses provide products and services suitable for more affluent retirees. The newcomers are generating new tax revenue, creating new business opportunities and supporting more jobs for locals. The response is not universally positive. Some locals complain that the immigrants are driving up the price of housing and bringing in their brusque, big-city mannerisms. But overall the impact seems mostly beneficial.
Bacon’s bottom line: Apparently, this mini-migration to Appalachia hasn’t reached Virginia. But there is no reason Southwest Virginia shouldn’t be able to cash in. The terrain is just as beautiful as it is in North Carolina, the property and taxes are just as inexpensive, and there are urban areas like Roanoke and Bristol-Kingsport where retirees can avail themselves of comprehensive medical care. Aside from supporting new jobs, affluent retirees would bolster the tax base of hard-pressed local governments and support quality-of-life amenities that the communities could not otherwise afford.
This is not traditional economic development, but traditional economic development doesn’t seem to be working very well. Someone should research this market to ascertain what it takes to lure some of these halfbacks to Virginia.
