"The Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia recently released its latest figures showing how much the population has changed locality-by-locality since the 2020 census. I dealt with the major trends in a previous column: Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads are losing population, the Richmond metro is now the fastest-growing part of the state, but we’re also seeing many rural areas gain population."

However, we do know that Hamilton Lombard, a demographer with the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, says if there’s anything that can dramatically change the migration patterns for rural Virginia, it’s remote work.

Lombard, officially the estimates program manager for the Demographic Research Group at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, spoke last week to the Governor’s Summit on Rural Prosperity in Farmville. He used the occasion to deliver some eye-popping numbers.