Migration in Inner Appalachia
How the Hills and Hollers are Holding Their Own
I started a new part of my series on migration last week by providing an in-depth look at Northern Kentucky’s migration flows, and then, yesterday, moved on to Louisville. Today, I want to look at a much-maligned region that is all-too-often held out as a basket case in terms of economic performance and migration: the Inner Appalachian region of Kentucky.
Defining the Region: Which Counties are Included?
The counties I include as part of “Inner Appalachia” had a 2010 population of about 256,000 people. The largest and most populous county was Pike County, with 65,000 people. It also has the largest city in the region, Pikeville. No county in the region is part of any metropolitian or micropolitan area or division. In other words, we’re talking about a very rural territory. The average population density in 2010 was about 66 people per square mile, compared to about 111 people per square mile for Kentucky on the whole, or 136 people per square mile for southern states generally.
The physical geography of the region is extremely rugged. Sharp, southwest-northeast ridges run along the Kentucky-Virginia border with few breaks (one such gap, the Cumberland Gap, is a historic location and park), and steep hills, mountains, and valleys cover the whole region. The area is thickly forested as well. The cleared spots you can see in the center are not cities, as you might expect, but mines so large as to be easily visible from space. The lighter lines crossing the forested areas like spiderwebs are the actual towns and roads; most mountain towns end up following valleys instead of forming on broad plains.
A road map may also be useful. No interstate highway crosses the area, and the state highway network, while reasonably well-maintained, simply cannot reach every valley. Especially in the areas between Hazard and Pikeville, the road network aptly reveals the challenges of the terrain: criss-crossing county and state roads link many areas, but there’s no easy way to get from “here” to “there,” and no central, organizing logic around an economic hub. In fact, the area doesn’t have a central economic hub, but rather lots of distributed centers of political and economic power in county seat cities.
Choosing which counties to include in a definition of Appalachia is always a challenge. Most formal definitions of Appalachia choose to adopt the broadest possible definitions. I have chosen to do the opposite, and identify narrower, smaller regions, in order to see how Appalachia’s (and eastern Kentucky’s) different parts perform. I’m sure many people, especially Appalachian natives, can present arguments for why one county or another should have been included, or not. I won’t argue that my regional definition is perfect. However, by drawing lines within Appalachia somewhere, we can provide the region’s stakeholders with better analysis, instead of the sweeping generalizations that usually typify Appalachian-focused commentary.
Contrary to the popular perception that Appalachia is in permanent depression, the fact is that Inner Appalachia’s internal migration record is better than that of northern Kentucky, and nearly as good as Greater Louisville. The mountain counties especially draw migrants from Louisville and, interestingly, Outer Appalachia. The only region to which Inner Appalachia loses many migrants is the Bluegrass: which is almost certainly due to educational (and some professional) migration.
Inner Appalachia’s migration record is at least as competitive as other regions. This puts the lie to the usual narrative told about Appalachia (both by locals and outsiders) that the region is losing tons of people to migration. In fact, it isn’t, and it’s actually gaining people from many less rural areas. While educational migration to the Bluegrass looks like brain drain, in reality the region gets enough other migrants to almost completely compensate for that loss. What we’re actually seeing is just churn.
In total, Inner Appalachia saw about 3,900 people move into the region, and 3,700 moved out per year. For a population of 256,000, those 200 people lost per year are a margin of error. Once upon a time, Kentucky’s mountain country may have suffered from serious out-migration: but that’s not the story anymore.
Inner Appalachia Draws Migrants From Every Surrounding State
Inner Appalachia manages to draw migrants from every state that borders Kentucky. This is something of a feat, given that Kentucky borders the most states of any state in the union except Missouri. But more importantly, it again suggests that people are finding at least something worthy in the area.
About 4,300 people move into Inner Appalachia a year from other states, and 3,800 moved out. In other words, the net gains from interstate migration more than compensate for the region’s small losses within Kentucky. Overall, the actually attracts migrants.
So what’s drawing people to the mountains? It’s hard to say exactly what draws migrants due to limitations in the data, but, within Inner Appalachia, Harlan, Knott, and Pike counties have seen the most robust in-migration, while Leslie and Martin counties have seen net out-migration.
Affordability and Data Constraints
I would love to be able to dig deeper into Appalachia’s story. Unfortunately, there are real limitations on how much we can say given the data. For example, it may be that affordable housing in Appalachia attracts migrants. But when I look up affordability data, the result looks something like this:
Which suggests the area may be generally affordable, but how much can we really say? Huge swathes of the region have insufficient data for meaningful conclusions to be made. This kind of research gap, which is correlated with poverty, poses a unique problem: areas with the most poverty have the least high-quality information available to policymakers.
It’s a problem that routinely faces policymakers in rural areas especially due to the difficulty of gathering information about a more widely distributed population. In order to address the problem, we need local stakeholders, academics, journalists and others to continue doing as they have been doing: speaking up and telling their stories. For under-researched areas, such stories are often the best “data” we can get.
So for any Appalachian locals reading, I’d love to hear your migration stories. What’s drawing migrants to your area, and what’s pulling them away? Where are they coming from and going to?
The Inner Appalachian region is rugged and hard to access, and has a reputation for long-term economic malaise. There’s a grain of truth to this reputation: the area does have issues with low employment and high poverty. This economic weakness combined with resource depletion and geographic isolation contributes to issues with governance, education, health, and other issues.
But despite those challenges, Inner Appalachia has a fairly strong migration record. The region loses few people to the rest of the state, and makes substantial gains from other states, especially those in the immediate area.
This relatively strong migration record indicates that Kentucky’s most mountainous regions have some real attractions for migrants. We can’t say exactly what these attractions are with certainty because data on rural, poor areas tends to be incomplete. That’s a problem that doesn’t necessarily have an easy fix: pouring in more money won’t necessarily solve the problem, and is, obviously, expensive. In the meantime, what data we do have tells at least a cautiously optimistic story about Kentucky’s mountain counties.
Start the series from the beginning!
If you like this post and want to see more research like it, I’d love for you to share it on Twitter or Facebook. But what’s just as valuable for me is if you click the recommend button at the bottom of the page. Thanks!
Follow me on Twitter. Follow my Medium Collection at In a State of Migration. I’m a grad student in International Trade and Investment Policy at the George Washington University’s Elliott School. I like to write and tweet about migration, airplanes, trade, space, and other new and interesting research. Cover photo source.
