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Solving West Virginia’s problems requires more West Virginians
Despite the perception, not all things demographic for the Mountain State are doom and gloom.
The story of West Virginia is one of movement and extraction. Folks move in, take things, move out, need something, move back, lather, rinse, repeat.
Folks migrated in, found timber to extract, then more folks came, found coal to extract, then more folks came to mine the coal, then less coal meant fewer folks, fewer folks means less everything else.
On and on it goes, and to the current generations of West Virginians, it currently seems like the trough part of the wave, because in many ways it is.
Between the 2010 and 2020 census, West Virginia lost just short of 60,000 residents, a number that would easily be the largest city in the state if encamped as a group. Since the 2020 census, another 18,000 residents have left. The population decline now spans decades, generations, and — when graphed against the rest of the country — is a glaring outlier to a growing nation.
If you go back to West Virginia’s last significant population increase of the late ’70s and early ’80s, the numbers and decline show that the generational problems of the Mountain State are becoming just that; generation…
