Last week, Virginia announced $10 million in federal funding would go to four projects in communities where coal was once king. Wise, Buchanan and Dickenson Counties were “left behind” by economic growth in other parts of the state between 2000 and 2016. Now, however, experts report signs of improvement.
A non-partisan think tank called the Economic Innovation Group or EIG has tracked the fortunes of just under a thousand counties nationwide – 42 of them in Virginia. Growth in their median household income was far lower than the national average and population growth was less than half the national rate, but EIG’s August Benzow sees signs of hope for these places. He notes, for example, that most have recovered jobs lost during the pandemic.
“It was a very quick bounce back from employment losses," he says. "We also saw that population loss was not especially severe in these counties, and the household income growth was pretty good.”
Nationwide, Benzow notes left behind counties gained more than four times as many jobs as in the four previous years and started new businesses at their fastest rate in the 21st century. Trends contributing to these improvements include the chance for people to work from home in rural areas rather than being forced to work in cities and programs designed to protect people from the impact of the pandemic.
“We had stimulus checks, and we had the child tax credit, and those had an immediate effect on people’s pocketbooks which definitely trickled down to left behind places.”
Benzow is quick to add that so-called “left behind counties” still report a big gap between their wages and the rest of the country, and we’ll have to wait and see what the impact of Biden-era programs like the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will have in those places.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
