An image of Brandermill, a suburb in Richmond, VA by AiRVA used with permission.

Early on in the pandemic there were a wave of articles predicting the death of downtowns and a return to rural life. Beyond the sightings of moving trucks in Manhattan, little other proof materialized. COVID-19’s effect on where and how we live going forward remains largely unknown, but in the seven months since the pandemic began the evidence that urbanism may hold the answers to a brighter future has only gotten stronger.

With the explosion of telework transforming our relationships to commuting and a sense of community, the pandemic could end up being a turning point in the growth trajectories of Virginia’s geographically and socioeconomically diverse regions. Can NoVA retain its economic edge in a post-pandemic world?

How urbanization is shaping NoVA and RoVA

Thanks to 26 years of Republican rule at the state level, residents of the overwhelmingly blue DC suburbs in Northern Virginia (NoVA) developed a strong in-group/out-group mentality about anywhere west of Winchester or south of Fredericksburg. Consequently, the resulting “rest of Virginia” or “RoVA” moniker is often lazily deployed to explain any differences among regions of the commonwealth and reinforce NoVA exceptionalism. Recent demographic changes in Virginia have gotten a similar treatment.

A closer look at the Census data on where the Under 18 population has been growing over the last decade reveals burgeoning numbers of young people not just in the DC suburbs but rather throughout the entire Urban Crescent. But why is it important to know which regions of Virginia have the most kids?

“If I was going to look at one characteristic to describe future growth, the median age of the locality is one of the best predictors,” said Hamilton Lombard, a demographics research specialist with the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service. “NoVA is one of the youngest areas of the state, but there are increasingly large groups of young people in Richmond too and somewhat in Hampton Roads.”

The true trend at work appears to be rapid urbanization. Even Virginia’s towns and cities in its mountainous west have staved off population loss. “Roanoke has faced significant job losses, but the city is still attracting people while lots of its neighboring counties have been hemorrhaging residents,” said Lombard. “Even the tiny town of Covington has stronger demographics than its rural neighboring areas. We see the same trend everywhere — in Harrisonburg versus Rockingham County, stronger growth in Charlottesville than Albemarle.”

Virginians’ rush from rural areas to its suburbs and cities may even be responsible for the commonwealth’s leftward lurch to become a blue trifecta state over the last few years. Although Democrat’s newfound dominance of state politics — and particularly NoVA lawmakers’ stranglehold on leadership positions in the legislature — seems here to stay, COVID-19 has the potential to alter the state’s economic and demographic trajectory permanently.

Work from home for the win

“The biggest possible change to NoVA’s growth trend has come in the last six months via the rise in telecommuting,” said Lombard. Even in pre-pandemic January, he predicted in a report that telecommuting may become Virginia’s biggest demographic trend of the decade after noticing a 43% increase in the number of residents working from home since 2010. Back then just 6% of the commonwealth was working remotely; however, “the pandemic has moved the trend in telecommuting five to 10 years ahead of schedule,” said Lombard.

A recent data snapshot of current commuting practices across the Capital Region from the Greater Washington Partnership found that “more than 20% of the workforce could be teleworking full-time indefinitely. If true, this would represent a 15 percentage point increase compared to the roughly 5% of the regional workforce that teleworked full-time prior to COVID-19.” Of the 430 unique employers surveyed in the study, 45% of those with 20 or more employees plan to shift some of their workforce to a permanent telework schedule.

Telework data by employer size by Greater Washington Partnership.

The exponential 400% growth in telecommuting in the region since March means many white collar workers are enjoying unprecedented flexibility at the same time many supposedly “essential” workers are facing historic levels of evictions, poverty, and economic uncertainty. An increasing number of those with the freedom to work from home seem to be looking for new homes farther afield. So how does this impact the commonwealth?

The Great Reshuffling

Throughout the month of March home searches in rural areas surged as city-dwellers began their hunt for less cramped quarters in which to ride out quarantines. Daniel Herriges—senior editor at Strong Towns—never bought into the hype around a mass urban exodus. “A lot of those stories about a flood of people flowing out of major cities don’t go into a lot of detail about who is leaving, where are they going, and who is moving in instead,” he said.

His team believes COVID-19 has caused a “Great Reshuffling” of the American populace. “There is so much pent up demand to live in major cities evidenced by high rents over the last years. My guess is that there is a huge stock of people ready to move into cities who haven’t been able to afford a place in one for a long time,” said Herriges. Even when folks do choose to move to more rural areas, much of the data about where they take up residence can be so broad as to be misleading.

“When people gain the ability to live a few hours away from their work, they often choose to live in a small city or town,” said Weldon. “The idea of a couple moving from the Fairfax suburbs to a 25 acre farmhouse isn’t realistic. This isn’t a second back-to-the-land-movement like in the 1970s. People are moving to small towns and mid-sized cities because the cost of living is lower, and with grocery delivery and online shopping they can still enjoy all the amenities of the big city.”

With demand for real estate in small towns (urban areas with populations ranging from 10,000-50,000 people) up by 105% since the start of the pandemic, initial data on home sales seem to back up the theory. So could a Great Reshuffling actually help revitalize the small towns and cities in the “rest of Virginia?”

Winners & losers

From his research at UVa, Lombard has found the top destinations for teleworkers share a similar set of characteristics. They tend to be areas with easy access to outdoor recreation that aren’t super remote, offer a lower cost of living, and still provide good access to transportation infrastructure like railroads, airports, and interstates.

“If telecommuting becomes even more common, you may get in the situation that people live 1-2 hours away from their office and only need to go into work 1-2 days a week,” he said.

That means not all of RoVA will be winners. “The infrastructure in communities outside of the Urban Crescent is not good enough because the broadband and transportation infrastructure is not advanced,” said Lombard. Consequently, COVID-19 and the telework revolution could wind up accelerating pre-existing trends such as NoVA residents’ growing migration south to Richmond where 36% of newcomers over the last several years hail from the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metro area.

Herriges similarly believes the quality of places rather than the quantity of inhabitants will prove the strongest predictor of an area’s post-COVID-19 fate. “Some of the most fragile places are those that don’t have a diversified base of uses like office parks and suburban big box retail,” he said. “Whether in dense city neighborhoods or small towns, places that have a traditional urban form, mixed-use districts, and robust downtowns are closer to bringing in the revenue they need to maintain themselves. Places that used to empty out at 5pm will really suffer.”

Calls to convert unwanted retail and office buildings into new housing are too simplistic, he warns. Oftentimes window placement and the need for new residentially compartmentalized HVAC systems prove cost-prohibitive, not to mention the difficulty of refinancing commercial spaces into residential units.

His advice for struggling cities and suburbs is to lower the bar to reuse spaces that would otherwise remain empty and ignored. “You’re better off planning for versatility rather than fighting the last war,” said Herriges. “We can’t know what the next shock to our cities will be, but we can begin planning for a more flexible future now.”

A recipe for regrowth

Lombard prescribes a complimentary set of solutions for Virginia’s state and local leaders looking to benefit from the teleworking boom. “Telecommunications upgrades are the most obvious way to improve,” he said.

After such workers have high-speed internet in their new communities, their second top concern is how to get to and from the office on that potential 1-2 days a week they may need to physically go into work. That means new and expanded commuter and passenger rail service could make all the difference between a worker finding the VRE train commute from Fredericksburg feasible or the long highway drive from Winchester unpalatable.

The final hurdle to helping teleworkers move to other parts of Virginia, Lombard believes, is a lack of marketing. Regional business groups or even the state could play a key role in highlighting the high quality of living one can get in Virginia’s Southside and mountainous west. “To make this shift happen, people need to understand what the benefits are of moving away from bigger urban areas to smaller ones,” he said.

If a concerted push to encourage the growing ranks of teleworkers to seek greener pastures proves successful, could that mean the beginning of the end for wealthier, more urbanized regions like NoVA? Lombard says no, not for a long time at least.

“I don’t foresee any time in the near future where Northern Virginia will be shrinking in population, but if the trend towards telecommuting continues, we could see NoVA’s growth declining because of the high cost of living,” he said. “People could live in more affordable communities across the state and still access the same jobs—and even their office when they need to—thanks to better telecommunications and transportation infrastructure.”

Wyatt Gordon is the senior policy manager for land use and transportation at the Virginia Conservation Network, and an adjunct professor at Virginia Commonwealth University's Department of Urban Planning. He's a born-and-raised Richmonder with a master's in Urban Planning from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa and a bachelor's in International Political Economy from American University.