By Nick Miroff
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 24, 2007; B01
Loudoun County has added more than 100,000 people since 2000, increasing its population by 59 percent and leading a surge in which Virginia has grown by a half-million people since the decade began, according to a University of Virginia study released yesterday.
The state's growth has been concentrated in Northern Virginia, where Prince William County has added 88,000 people and Fairfax County, the state's largest jurisdiction, has packed in nearly 47,000 more residents. The next fastest-growing counties -- Stafford, Spotsylvania and Culpeper -- are on the edges of the expanding region. Overall, the state's population has grown by 560,000 since 2000, to 7.6 million.
The study puts numbers to a trend that has been clear in crowded classrooms, on packed freeways and in the struggles of local governments, as Northern Virginia is being rapidly remade into a region more affluent, urban, diverse and politically liberal than it was a few years ago.
"By and large, this shows a continuation of a trend that has been in existence since the early 1990s," said research associate Mike Spar of U-Va.'s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, which conducted the study. "The state is generating a lot of jobs and attracting a lot of migrants."
Too many, say some politicians in Loudoun and Prince William, which both took steps last month to restrict development.
"It's a growth rate that is not sustainable for any reasonable amount of time -- financially or socially," said Loudoun Supervisor James Burton (I-Blue Ridge). "Our debt has skyrocketed. Our residents have seen their taxes double and triple and congestion go from bad to a nightmare. The growth has been too fast for the government to keep up with providing infrastructure needs."
Several population indicators were used in the study, including census data, school enrollment, birth and death certificates and tax exemptions. They show that statewide growth levels have tapered off since 2000, slipping from an average annual rate of 1.3 percent between 1990 and 2000 to an average of 1.2 percent since 2000.
The study also found that 33 cities and counties have lost residents in the past six years -- older urban areas such as Richmond, Petersburg and Roanoke, as well as rural counties in Southside and southwestern Virginia. Many of those residents seem to have migrated north, along with workers from other parts of the United States and the world who have been lured by the Washington job market.
The study found that population growth was driven almost equally by more births than deaths and by people moving to Virginia from other states.
"This is a long-term trend," said Spar, who predicted that Virginia will be home to 8 million residents by 2010. "We're growing twice as fast as the nation as a whole," he said, noting that states such as Georgia and Florida are adding residents even faster.
No other region in the country, however, has created as many jobs in recent years as the Washington metropolitan area. Between 2000 and 2005, the region added 359,000 new jobs, said Stephen S. Fuller, director of the Center for Regional Analysis at George Mason University, citing Labor Department statistics. That was 75,000 more jobs than the nation's No. 2 job engine, Miami.
"We've been adding jobs faster than we've been able to add resident workers," he said. "Had we been able to produce more housing, we could have added more people." The Washington region is the eighth most-populous in the United States, Fuller said, but is fourth in the number of total jobs, trailing only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago.
The imbalance probably means more congestion on Northern Virginia's already-choked roads. "The downside [to growth] is pretty clear," said Corey A. Stewart (R-Occoquan), chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors, who was elected last year on a pledge to curb residential development. "Increased tax bills. Crowded schools. Public services stretched and overwhelmed."
Prince William, Stewart said, has quickly turned from a mostly rural "southern county" to a more "cosmopolitan, urbanized" area. "It's become more diverse -- not just racially diverse, but in terms of people from around the country and around the world," said Stewart, a Minnesota transplant. Newcomers from Fairfax and other wealthier counties demand more services, too, he said -- better schools, parks and mass transit.
"It has also changed the political dynamic significantly," he added.
For a time, Prince William was becoming more Republican, Stewart said. That's changing, too. "Now, it's going the other way," he said.
