West Virginia Leads the Country in Population Loss

The population of West Virginia continues to decline. Thirty years ago there were about Three million people living in the Mountain State. Now less than two million folks call West Virginia home. As the Charleston Gazette explains, with more than 3000 residents leaving the state last year, West Virginia is losing folks faster than any other state.

            As one among the many who have left the hollows and the mountains, this is bittersweet for me. I dearly love West Virginia. I grew up eating pepperoni rolls, and I’ve drunk more than my share of sassafras tea. My mom would make cobbler from the blackberries that I picked in our fields. And I remember how black my hands would stain when we’d gather walnuts in the fall.

            More than anything, it was wanderlust that lead me away. And I never really had a reason to go back for longer than a visit. So I now live in southern California instead of West Virginia. Although I am one of the many former West Virginians, my story is not typical of how and why it is that so many thousands of folks have left. When it comes right down to it, there are fewer and fewer jobs. And the jobs that are there don’t pay as well as they may have in the past. Poverty plagues the state, one of the poorest in the union. With a 18.5 percent of West Virginians living in poverty, the Center For American Progress ranks the Mountain State 41st in its state poverty raking.

Below is a map indicating the counties that have seen population loss and the ones that have seen increases in their numbers. The eastern panhandle has seen an increase in numbers, largely because now the eastern panhandle now serves as a large bedroom community for the D.C. area. Monongalia County has seen the largest increase, almost seven percent. As well, it may be that this area of the state is becoming a bedroom community for Pittsburgh.

 GIS mapping by Paul Hormick. Source files: West Virginia Broadband Mapping http://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/bb/data.html. Population information from West Virginia Public Broadcasting http://wvpublic.org/post/which-west-virginia-counties-have-seen-most-population-loss-recent-years

But of the 55 counties, only 15 have seen increases in their numbers. Forty counties have fewer folks than just a few years ago. Wyoming, Clay, Pendleton, and Mingo have seen population losses of over four percent each. If you take another look at the map, you’ll see that down in the southwestern section of the map are all counties that have lost folks. The one at the bottom, that’s McDowell County, which has lost almost seven percent of its population. Now take a look at the same map below that now shows where the great surface mines and mountaintop removal mines are.

 

GIS mapping by Paul Hormick. Source files: West Virginia Broadband Mappinghttp://www.wvgs.wvnet.edu/bb/data.html and I Love Mountains http://ilovemountains.org/maps: Population information from West Virginia Public Broadcasting http://wvpublic.org/post/which-west-virginia-counties-have-seen-most-population-loss-recent-years

For all of those who equate coal with jobs, this second map reveals the falsehood of that claim. At one time, before the giant machines came in to make the giant mines in the mountains, dozens of men might be employed at a mine. And those jobs were union jobs paying good wages. As with the mountains, those jobs and good wages are gone.

 

A closer view of the footprint that the mines make across West Virginia

This has nothing to do with a fantasy world in which president Obama has a “war on coal” and much more to do with the loss of labor rights, cheaper natural gas from fracking, a criminally negligent West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection (and the same can be said of the federal EPA), and politicians who are beholden to and serve King Coal instead of the West Virginia citizens who cast their votes and send them into high office.