Migration in the Bluegrass
Drawing Migrants from around the Nation and Commonwealth
The Bluegrass region denotes central Kentucky, usually defined as everything from the foothills of the Appalachians to Louisville, up to the Ohio River. But the heart of the Bluegrass is centered on Lexington, Kentucky and the surrounding counties. Today, I’ll explore this region’s migration patterns.
Defining the Region: Which Counties are Included?
The Bluegrass region as I’ve defined it was home to about 765,000 people. Of that, about 300,000 live in Fayette County (so Lexington proper), and another 83,000 live in Madison County, the largest county in the region, where Richmond, Kentucky is home to Eastern Kentucky University.
The fact that Richmond is home to EKU may raise some concerns for readers: why is Eastern Kentucky located in the Bluegrass? I’ve extended the boundaries of the Bluegrass somewhat further east than the usual definition in order isolate other Appalachian regions for analysis. However, this eastward extension has little material impact: Estill, Menifee, and Powell counties only account for 2.2% of gross Bluegrass interstate migration. Meanwhile, Fayette County alone accounts for 55% of all gross migration. In other words, including this or that outlying county (as in the case of Greater Cincinnati) just doesn’t matter that much.
My definition also includes all of the counties in the Lexington-Fayette-Frankfort-Richmond Combined Statistical Area except for Rockcastle County in the south. I also include several other counties to even out the area.
The core Bluegrass region can easily be spotted in the light green areas at left, north of the Kentucky River. Those green areas are mostly fields, especially horse farms, cow pastures, and tobacco. In the east, the broad rolling hills of the Bluegrass give way to Appalachian foothills and the terrain seen in yesterday’s post on Inner Appalachia.
But immediately around Lexington, there’s a clear hub-and-spokes system. Starting from Georgetown in the north, Frankfort, Versailles, Nicholasville, Richmond, Winchester, and Paris are all arranged roughly evenly around Lexington, with major roads connecting their downtowns to Lexington’s. Richmond is the furthest out, separated from Lexington by the Kentucky River.
The Bluegrass Dominates Kentucky Migration
About 18,500 Kentuckians moved into the Bluegrass per year, while just 13,600 moved out. That’s a net gain of about 5,000 people per year, or a net migration rate of 0.65%. That’s a very high rate. Certainly nowhere else in Kentucky had an equal rate.
Much of the Bluegrass region’s strength in migration is thanks to education. For public schools, the region is home to the University of Kentucky, Kentucky State University, and Eastern Kentucky University. Between them, the three schools have 45,000 students. For private liberal arts colleges, there’s Transylvania University, Midway College, Georgetown College, Centre College, berea College, Asbury University, and St. Catharine College, which between them have another 8,000 people. Beyond that, tens of thousands more students attend myriad professional schools, seminaries, and technical colleges in the area.
What drives educational migration to the Bluegrass isn’t just one school, but a whole network of schools that recruit a wide range of students. It’s not just one grad school or college, but the fact that there are appealing colleges for almost any level of student. After college, the area’s migration record is less stellar. The Lexington-Fayette metro area actually loses migrants with college or graduate degrees on net.
It’s unclear why the Bluegrass loses migrants (albeit very slightly) to northeastern Kentucky. One reason may be suburbanization, as some counties right on the border of the two areas are beginning to see some people who work in Lexington move in. And, if education is truly the only explanation, it’s not clear why the region would have major gains from Louisville (unless Louisville residents are much more likely to attend UK than Lexington residents are to attend UofL: possible, but not certain by any means). The strength of the Bluegrass economy, including “knowledge economy” jobs, manufacturing, suburbanization, and affordable housing may appeal to migrants more widely. But more on that later.
The Bluegrass Draws Major Migration Flows from Around the Nation
About 19,300 people move into the Bluegrass a year, while about 15,600 people move out. The result is a pretty huge net gain of about 3,700 people a year, for a net migration rate of 0.5%. For perspective, none of the other regions analyzed thus far cracked 0.31% migration. Statewide in 2013, Kentucky had a net migration rate of about 0.1%. In other words, the Bluegrass state rocks at attracting migrants from other states, despite not being on a state boundary.
In terms of the volume of migration, northern Kentucky saw in-and-out migration equivalent to 5.2% of the population, Louisville had 4.4%, Inner Appalachia had 3.7%, while the Bluegrass had 4.6%. In other words, the Bluegrass was just as or more connected to Kentucky’s neighboring states as many regions that actually border those states.
While there are many ways to explain these trends, it’s important to note that the Bluegrass region’s strength isn’t just Lexington. Migration in Fayette County was equal to migration in the rest of the Bluegrass: about 0.5%. Bluegrass counties well outside of Lexington’s commuter belt saw some of the strongest migration flows. An explanation of migration in the Bluegrass must address Lexington, but also needs to address regional strengths more broadly, especially in rural areas.
Local factors can help explain migration in the Bluegrass. I’ll start with Lexington-specific factors (like the extensive college network I’ve already outline), then move outside of Lexington.
College Enrollments Can Account for 1/5 of All In-Migrants
The University of Kentucky’s 2013 freshman class had 4,650 students. Of those, 31% were from out-of-state. That’s 1,441 migrants right there. If we assume that all the schools I listed earlier had 25% of their enrollment from out-of-state, then we can account for roughly 3,500 migrants per year. For a region that attracts roughly 19,200 migrants generally, that means students account for about 18% of all interstate migration.
Without actual admissions data from UK, I can’t estimate how much inter-regional migration is due to students, but it’s likely to be similar in scale. If another 3,500 students migrated from around Kentucky to Bluegrass schools, that would be about 20% of all in-state migrants.
In other words, yes, education really is that big a deal. Education likely also motivates out-migration by graduates, so the net effect of universities is more ambiguous. Unless, of course, the local area also offers appealing living conditions and a good job.
Hub-and-Spokes Cities Facilitate High Quality of Life
Earlier, I mentioned Lexington’s distinctive hub-and-spoke system of outlying cities. Between Lexington and those cities is some suburbia, but also lots of farms and economically active countryside. This picturesque “working greenbelt,” combined with commutes under 30 minutes to downtown Lexington, makes it possible to work downtown while living in the gorgeous green hills of central Kentucky. Whether it’s downtown urban living, big horse farms, low-density mansion-neighborhoods, suburbia, or small-town living, the Lexington region has it all. This means that the region won’t lose many migrants to other regions simply because they want a different style of living: for any lifestyle except transit-dependent high-density urban life, the Bluegrass has it.
This geographic diversity also creates employment diversity, including jobs in education (such as at the many nearby universities), agriculture, services of various kinds, manufacturing (like the Toyota plant in Georgetown), and other jobs.
Livestock Agriculture (and Rising Prices) Have Strengthened Outlying Counties
The data in the map at left comes from the USDA’s Census of Agriculture. It shows an important fact about central Kentucky: agriculture is mostly about animals, not crops. This map shows just livestock and poultry for sale, generally as food products. Rising demand from the developing world especially has boosted farm incomes for livestock producers, reducing out-migration by rural individuals, as farming can make real money in central Kentucky.
Horse Farms are Huge in the Bluegrass
Outsiders often know about Kentucky from the Kentucky Derby, and so the state has a reputation for having horses. Thus far, I haven’t talked about horses much, despite already covering Louisville, where the Kentucky Derby is held. However, the Bluegrass is where horses are really big. Much of Kentucky has some amount of horse-raising, but, around Lexington, it’s huge. This business employs trainers, tour guides, farmers, investors, and many others. It’s a business that often requires substantial skills and education, from specialized horse-surgeons to terriers, feedstock farmers, and race-track workers, it’s an atypical “agricultural” sector, and one that draws people from far away to be a part of it. Robust heritage industries (like the horse business, or the bourbon industry in the same area) that can’t easily be drawn away by competition in other regions facilitate economic development by creating spinoff industries, such as tourism, gaming, accommodations and restaurants, and other benefits.
The Bourbon Boom: How Sector-Specific Demand Can Boost Migration
One of Kentucky’s most widely-known products is, as mentioned above, bourbon. Bourbon barrels are aged almost exclusively in Kentucky, and are so numerous that the state actually has more barrels of bourbon than people. In pure caloric terms, the population of Kentucky could survive off of stored bourbon and nothing else for about 100 days. It’s a huge business. It’s also a geographically concentrated business. The map shown has a pin for every active distillery (there are a few in other parts of Kentucky, but this is the great majority). As can be seen, they’re distributed in an arc from Louisville, to the Western Pennyroyal, then back up into the Bluegrass.
A 2014 impact study commissioned by the bourbon industry found that distillery-related employment rose from about 1.2% of all KY employment to over 1.5%, while the bourbon industry’s share of wages rose from a low point in 1999 of about 1.4% of all wages, to about 2.7% in 2013. This boom is largely driven by rising demand for bourbon and other brown liquors around the nation.
When a product specific to a certain region has such a rise in demand, it boosts the income of producers. That in turn boosts their local consumption, allows expansions of payrolls, and creates second-order economic benefits for a region. It’s no surprise, then, that bourbon-country saw strong migration: the area is creating jobs in a high-demand industry, and boosting income and consumption in the local area.
The Bluegrass is a unique region that manages to draw migrants from around the state and nation. It’s a strong center of migration for Kentucky, and counterbalances somewhat weaker migration records for other regions.
Migration in the Bluegrass is a story of traditional strengths like horses and the region’s distributed towns, as well as a strong knowledge-economy based on the large network of colleges and universities. The area doesn’t hang on to its graduates as well as it might, but, even in passing, they contribute to the region’s economic and cultural vitality, and constitute a major part of its migration story. Then there are other appeals to the Bluegrass region: from scenery to affordable housing, the area has many amenities.
A word of caution, however: many of the Bluegrass region’s strengths neither can nor should be duplicated. It may not always be prudent for a state to have so many schools clustered together, leading to major outflows of graduates from other areas. Not every region has heritage industries like bourbon and horses that are experiencing remarkable boom-times, and those boom-times may not last. Lexington’s growth may eventually be curtailed by high local taxes, suburbanization that destroys local scenery, or increasing traffic (a driver in downtown Lexington has far less driving range in a given time than from downtown Louisville or Cincinnati). Likewise, the lack of sufficient graduate schools leads to significant out-migration by students seeking further education. The University of Kentucky isn’t enough to solve this problem: to hang onto graduates, the region would need a large amount of top-tier graduate programs carrying out intensive R&D and recruiting well beyond Kentucky, like North Carolina’s research triangle. Such an investment might not be desirable if it requires underfunding other priorities.
In sum, the Bluegrass has some real strengths, and is enjoying good times. But there’s a limit to how much of that can be extrapolated to other regions, or the area’s own future.
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Full Disclosure: I’m from the Bluegrass region originally, and attended Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Yes, you can make a dracula joke.
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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.
