What Comes Next for Huntington?
An Update
A while back I wrote a blog post about the Huntington-Ashland or “Tri City” metro area, where my wife is from. Since then I’ve of course kept an eye on Huntington, and I noticed that Huntington has been selected as one of 8 finalists for the America’s Best Community, which has a $3 million prize. To be clear, I’m rooting for Huntington to win, though it’s worth noting even just being a finalist means Huntington wins $100,000. Curiously, my dad’s hometown of Statesboro, GA is also a finalist, so there’s that.
But I want Huntington to win because it’s the closest thing I’ve got to a home-team in this contest, and because it’s in a poorer region of the country than most of the other competitors, so I think the money will go further, to people who need it more.
Meanwhile, I’ve had many people in Ashland, Huntington, and Ironton contact me about my blog post, asking for me to elaborate further on my views. Some have shared Huntington’s improvement plan with me. It includes some reasonable suggestions: a fairly viable-sounding plan to develop a polymer-commercialization center, a new intermodal connection, an ongoing redevelopment of an old factory that’s now housing a solar-related business and some other venues, promotion of eds/meds, etc. These are all reasonable ideas.
But afew other things have occurred to me as I’ve chatted about this topic with folks from the area. For example, Huntington literally walls itself off from the Ohio River for flood protection. This absolutely makes sense, but it does mean Huntington can get limited benefit from its riverfront location. There’s no waterfront real estate downtown to speak of, and while there are some interesting waterfront public spaces, and Huntington does have lots of large events thanks to its comparatively low police and fire protection fees for events, overall, this major scenic asset is mostly unused. An alternative flood-control system that wasn’t just “concrete walls” could be nice.
The downtown area has incredibly cheap and available parking. I’ve been downtown during peak business hours and never had to park more than a block from my destination, and it’s something like $0.25 an hour if I recall, and in some places free. On the one hand, that’s very convenient! On the other hand, a town of 50,000 people (and falling) might not need so many 4-lane downtown roads and supplementary parking areas.
In a poorer city with a large university physically separated from the business center and an excess of street space, there’s a blindingly obvious reform: repaint your lines with some bike lanes connecting poorer neighborhoods, kid-dense neighborhoods, and the university to amenity-dense areas, downtown, parks, and schools.
Who rides bikes? Kids, millennials, and people who can’t afford cars.
Where do they go? School, amenities, work.
What resources are needed for bike lanes? Paint and available asphalt.
All of these things exist in Huntington. Connect them. Given the city’s push to shake its “Most Unhealthy City in America” label, bike lanes make a lot of sense.
Another thing I’ve been mulling over is government efficiency. You don’t need a big government or a small government, you need a government that is able to hire good workers to provide good services at a good price. Allegedly, Huntington has historically offered very low government salaries in order to afford very generous government healthcare benefits. This is a misguided mix. Benefits matter, yes, but many workers, especially young workers, have a fairly fixed need for cash-flow, such as to pay off student loans. If you have to pick between competitive wages and competitive benefits, skimp on benefits, as they’re less visible and so less likely to shut people off from even considering a job. Plus, wages are more flexible, allowing the city to adjust its costs in the future.
Additionally, Huntington has excess built capacity. Some of it is extremely low-quality and needs to be knocked down and either not replaced, or replaced with much higher quality construction or high-quality green spaces. Some of it, however, is a good candidate for a moderate degree of historic preservation or redevelopment. I don’t know Huntington’s institutional structure, but a robust development corporation actively pursuing tenants and acquiring vacant property to reconfigure it for better future use can be valuable for areas struggling to stave off decline. Maybe this exists, I don’t know.
Finally, Marshall University, which makes surprisingly little appearance in Huntington’s plan. Here’s a graph of fall enrollments at Marshall University:
While my two data sources for Marshall don’t quite match up, both suggest that Marshall saw diminished enrollment after 2004, though I haven’t been able to figure out exactly why. Enrollment recovered through 2011, but has fallen again since. More broadly, total university enrollments in the Tri-State Area have not kept pace with national trends in college enrollment, which is shocking for a university town. Why hasn’t it kept pace? Simple:
The core reason universities are good for cities is not that they educate locals, but that they generate inflows. Outflows don’t actually hurt a city very much and tend to be very stable, but inflows can have powerful positive effects in terms of exposure to new ideas, connection to outside economic networks, attracting investment and consumption, and boosting the population.
Well, university-led inflows have been slacking off even as Marshall’s West-Virginia-centric recruitment has heated up, this despite West Virginia’s shrinking population of high-school graduates. With diminished recruitment from further away, Marshall (1) gets less revenue per student as out-of-state people pay more and (2) has a less beneficial impact on Huntington.
Another key driver of institutional impact is research and advanced studies. I don’t have data on Marshall University technology transfer, but here’s IPEDS estimates of their graduate students:
I don’t know what explains that huge jump in 2001, but aside from that, we’re looking at a flat line with a meaningful dip around the early 2010s. There’s been some recent recovery but the lack of growth here hurts. Marshal went 23 years with no engineering school in the heart of coal-and-steel country, and didn’t get an undergrad degree in it until 2006. Degrees do exist for some of West Virginia’s other sectors likely to predominate in the future (such as geology and park management), but it’s playing catch-up. Meanwhile, the research hospital is large (and recently merged with the other hospital in Huntington), but it doesn’t actually have excellent quality gradings. US News and World Reports doesn’t publish its ranking, which generally means it’s not a top-100 medical school.
I want to be clear. I’m not saying here Marshall is a bad school; it’s not. I’m not saying its leadership is bad; I have no idea about that. It seems like recent years have seen some meaningful expansions in program offerings, which is a really good thing. Many of the problems I’m flagging are old problems. What I’m saying is, Marshall University is not well-positioned right now to produce the kind of Eds-and-Meds growth many towns want research universities to provide.
It doesn’t have longstanding top-flight programs closely related to local industries (except maybe Forensics, but that’s not one you want to consider a “local industry”). It doesn’t recruit heavily from out of state or abroad. Indeed, the lack of heavy recruitment from just over the river in Ashland or Ironton is particularly egregious. A better regional credit- and tuition-sharing system between ACTC in Ashland, the Ohio University campus in Ironton, and Marshall in Huntington could go a long way towards boosting the whole region. A similar partnership exists for many schools and programs in the DC metro area, so cross-state partnerships are possible. They just require some degree of peer-ship among universities, while Marshall is the undoubted flagship in the region. So to make it really viable, Ashland and Ironton need big inputs. They need to have some class offerings sufficiently appealing that all 3 institutions would be swapping students for some classes, which is a big ask, especially for ACTC. But with backing from Marshall to make it happen, it seems possible those cities could get their local institutions expanded or upgraded by lobbying state governments or committing some local government or philanthropic resources.
Okay. This is all a lot of general thoughts about Huntington. But let’s jump to the real reason I’m writing this post: Huntington is facing budgetary problems.
Over the last few months, Huntington was facing over $2 million in budget shortfalls on a $50-$54 million budget. That’s substantial. To cover it, they laid off some workers. The next budget will be at about $50-$51 million. They don’t want to raise taxes; which makes sense to me, as their municipal taxes amount to about 3% of personal income in Huntington, vs. about 2.8% throughout West Virginia, and their local sales tax is already maxed out at 1%, and property taxes in Cabell County are well above the statewide median.
But here’s the problem. If you won’t raise tax rates, then you have to increase the size of the tax base. The tax base is basically “economic activity” in one way or another. You can increase economic activity in two ways: by increasing the activity per person, or by increasing the number of people. But Huntington has fewer and fewer people. The 2015 population estimates already gave it a declining population estimate. The 2016 estimates for cities aren’t in yet, and won’t be until May, but we can make a fair forecast of them by extrapolating from Cabell County trends. And if we do that extrapolation, here’s what we get:
Population estimates were cut for most years, with meaningful cuts beginning in 2013. If you add up “person-years” I expect to be cut from Huntington’s population 2010–2015 just due to revisions, it’s a -144. So prior official data understated the losses of recent years, contrary to what many local advocates will claim when they said I was telling some debbie-downer story and actually the reality was better: sorry, the reality was worse than I described. And it’s getting worse again.
To be clear, it’s not out-migration that’s doing this. Census gave a really steeply negative 2016 net migration figure for Cabell County, but actually revised back-years up. For Cabell County on the whole, revisions in 2010–2015 came in at +280 for domestic migration, boosting population. But on the other hand, births were revised down -170, and international migration was revised down -113. Deaths, meanwhile, were revised up 195. In other words, Census realized, whoops! those people we thought had moved out? Actually, they died or were never born.
There is a tiny silver-lining, however. Birth rates ticked up ever-so-slightly in 2016, while death rates did fall somewhat from 2015. Now, sure, out-migration went super-duper negative (-0.76%), but, pending further revisions, 2016 saw the birth rate exceed the death rate in Cabell County for the first time since 2012.
Why does all of this matter?
Any revitalization plan needs to face reality: population growth is unlikely barring a major comeback in logistics employment or a large university expansion. Population stability isn’t even guaranteed; further decline is likely even if new initiatives are put in place successfully. The Huntington revitalization plan opens with a kind of fan-fiction 2021 where all these initiatives did amazing work and the opioid epidemic is beaten back and everyone is celebrating in the streets because they’re so prosperous. Okay, cool, but, uh, in 2021, your population is may be different. Being quite frank, my expectation is that it will range somewhere between 46,900 and 47,600 in 2021, down from probably about 48,300 in 2016. So if really wonderful new programs are put in place, but there are fewer taxpayers to pay for them… well, they may not last. If you want to raise revenues of $50 million from 48,300 people, you need $1035 from each person. If you want to raise the same amount in revenue from, say, 47,300 people in 2021, you need $1058 per person in real dollars. Well, that means you either have to raise taxes, or incomes per capita have to grow a minimum of Inflation + 0.43%. If the worst population forecasts I’ve come up with are true (graphs below), then you need Inflation + 1.37%. From 2008 to 2014, the Huntington metro area managed to post 0.36% per capital income growth per year, adjusted for local-area inflation. In other words, it’s not growing fast enough to keep the budget stable with falling population.
Of course, the goal of these programs is to draw more people in. But a key part of the problem isn’t migration at all, but births and deaths!
Huntington needs more baptisms and fewer funerals even more than it needs fewer outflows and more inflows.
This means attracting more young people who have babies and die less, which means expanding university recruitment and regional cooperation, as well as ensuring there are good entry-level jobs for a variety of skills. It especially means adding MA and PhD programs related to local economic clusters.
It also means reducing deaths by boosting local health and combating “deaths of despair” with programs aimed at boosting the economic and psychological wellbeing of the long-term unemployed.
That means key pieces of any revitalization plan will have to include serious policies aimed at reducing opioid abuse, helping people at risk of suicide and self-harm, strengthening local community institutions, and ensuring local public health services are well-staffed and funded. That also means key pieces of any revitalization plan will have to include a component addressing Marshall University’s recruitment and admissions targets, as well as long-term plans for program offerings and technology transfer policies.
The current revitalization plan is all well and good, but it is not solving the problem of single-sector dominance: Huntington will be saved from the Coal-and-Steel collapse by Polymers-and-Solar… but will that really last? What if Rubberlite goes bankrupt?
Look, I’m cheering for Huntington to get polymer and solar businesses! I’m on your side, really! But those businesses will boom and bust too, and if Huntington hasn’t invested in basic durable infrastructure like a thriving nonprofit and philanthropic sector, aggressive university recruitment, an efficiently organized built environment, and good public health and wellness, then any benefits of a new business will be fleeting.
I hope Huntington wins the competition. I hope they get $3 million to use. And I hope to god they spend a lot of it on drug rehab, bike paths, out-of-state university recruitment, faculty endowments, or other projects more durable than business incentives.
PS- Huntington’s biggest tax revenue source is a Gross Receipts Tax. These taxes destroy entrepreneurship, create excess costs for companies with long supply chains, encourage monopoly-formation, are untransparent and complex, and destroyed the Spanish Empire. Huntington should try very, very hard to find literally any other source of revenue than this awful, terrible, no-good tax.
PPS- Here’s my forecasts for Huntington until 2021. This is a two-stage estimation process. First, I estimate a range of possible birth, death, domestic migration, and international migration rates for Cabell County. In this case, I took the most growth-positive rate from 2010–2015 for each factor, the most growth-negative, and the average as my three estimation conditions. I used those to produce three different population scenarios for Cabell County. I then estimated a range of Huntington City shares of Cabell County population, ranging from an improvement in share vs. recent trends, approximate stability in Huntington’s share improvement, a continuation of Huntington’s declining share, and an acceleration of Huntington’s share decline. I then for each year multiply each of these share estimates by each county population estimate, and that gives me the lines you see. The main dark line is a hybrid estimate that is the one I personally think most likely. As you can see, if Cabell County gets fast growth and Huntington’s share of the county doesn’t decline further, it’s possible Huntington could grow between 2016 and 2021. However, most specifications, and crucially all the specifications that most match recent trends, show declining population. The worst specification, which is no less plausible than the best one, shows the loss of more than 3,000 people between 2016 and 2021.
Here’s how these estimates fit into Huntington’s long-run population history:
As you can see, the very best population forecast is still just a return to something near 2012 population levels, while the worst is a level not seen since 1917.
PPPS- Appalachia is often portrayed as deeply hostile to outsiders, and especially people who aren’t straight-rural-white-Christian-conservative-males. In various times, places, and contexts there are varying amounts of truth to this, and in some places, quite a lot. However, Huntington is not such a place. The Human Rights Campaign scored it at 85/100 for LGBTQ-identifying individuals. Nationally, the average score is 55. People who think that Appalachian cultural closedness is the source of its poverty have a test case in Huntington. We’ll see how it goes.
Check out my Podcast about the history of American migration.
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I’m a native of Wilmore, Kentucky, a graduate of Transylvania University, and also the George Washington University’s Elliott School. My real job is as an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, where I analyze and forecast cotton market conditions. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research.
