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Lexington Kentucky goes over 360,000 in the current census

In 1960 Raleigh, NC was about the same population as Huntington, WV.

Raleigh is now at 431,000+. That is just the city of Raleigh not the county or surrounding area which puts it well over a million.

Huntington is in sad shape. I hate to see it. Read something today that the Heroin death rate in Huntington area is 13 times higher than the national average.

I hope they can turn it around and make Huntington the nice place it once was. But, I doubt it will happen for a long time. Huntington and WV has lost a generation or more of its best and brightest. That can only happen so long before it hurts.

Don't know what it means for Marshall, but it can't be good.
 
Lexington was progressive enough to combine with Fayette County. I don't see that happening in WV. If Huntington combined with Cabell and northern Wayne our population would be well over 100,000.
 
EPA is not the issue - the problem is the entire state is still addicted to coal sludge koolaid, and no one cares enough to start building another economic pillar, just concerned about craft breweries or industrial hemp! Where Obama has lost my respect is not in tightening environmental regs, but in not being smart enough to help find a way to replace the jobs & capital being lost.
 
West Virginia is the woods. Their problem is they want to be the big city. Everybody's unhappy unless they get all this money. You can't get it living in the woods. So you move to the concrete and get the money. There's nothing to buy with it since there aren't any woods, but this is what it's supposed to be all about.

If people want to stay in WV, they'll change their way of thinking into just being proud of living on and working for a lot less money. I'd move back and do it myself, but what I've got is way too good to give up. I'd move back and be shamed for leaving all that money on the table. Money that I don't even know what to do with here. Look at it, I guess.
 
Bigger isn't always better. Personally, I'm still trying to increase the population of Huntington by two. A lot of back-and-forth with the bank, loan company, and appraiser about the house we made an offer on in early February.
 
Everybody's mad back there, because they just want a bigger check. The people are what ruin the place. You never understand until you leave and come back why they get the most depressed award. Instead of being happy to be in the hills living a simple life, they all want $500 cell phones and to act like they're all New York.
 
ToesMU said:
EPA is not the issue - the problem is the entire state is still addicted to coal sludge koolaid, and no one cares enough to start building another economic pillar, just concerned about craft breweries or industrial hemp! Where Obama has lost my respect is not in tightening environmental regs, but in not being smart enough to help find a way to replace the jobs & capital being lost.
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Not only is there no plan in place to replace the jobs being lost, it seems like Obama resents this state. By folks voting for that convicted felon instead of Obama, en masse, it was a rather embarrassing rebuke. However, there are still thousands in WV that voted for him that will still suffer because of his policies. You know how many times Obama has been in West Virginia?
 
wisemaniac said:
Not only is there no plan in place to replace the jobs being lost, it seems like Obama resents this state. By folks voting for that convicted felon instead of Obama, en masse, it was a rather embarrassing rebuke.
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The residents knew about his conviction prior to voting for him?
 
Agree, Wise - the President seems to have written WV a long time ago, to his huge detriment. He had a great opportunity to create a legacy for rural & small town redevelopment, but I guess he felt it was too closely aligned with the Clinton wing of the party & turned his back. Beyond sad, becuase he blew a major positive legacy moment.
 
Obama and WV are like oil and water. Even if they weren't, what kind of economy can you build in the woods? Miniature scale stuff that all the cities in surrounding states already have, plus the added bonuses of trying to build it on hilly, isolated terrain with an unfavorable tax and business climate.

It's a no brainer that there's no way and no how. The only thing to attract anybody to that would be whatever you could extract. You're not going to build miniature Cincinnatis and Columbuses on hills and in holes.
 
herdfan06 said:
The residents knew about his conviction prior to voting for him?
Click to expand...

Yes.

If there was ever a case of people practically putting on a white sheet at the polls, this was it.

ThunderCat98 said:
And 100+ years of democrat rule on the state and county level.
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Kentucky has some of the most jacked-up tax and corporate laws in the country, no matter who is in charge.

Lexington was always a wealthy city. Pre-Civil War, it had the largest concentration of slaves in Kentucky.

What you must remember is Huntington was an old industrial economy. Steel. Glass. Stuff that is dying in the USA. Lexington at that time began the transition into being a regional financial center. Lexington had land to develop (most of the city's growth is over old tobacco land). Lexington has a large, flagship land grant research university. I-75 is a much more important highway than I-64, connecting to large industrial cities, while WV's biggest product, coal, is shipped by rail to where I-64 ends up, and by river; it opened no new markets to Huntington.

It is the same story as much of the South. Agricultural areas that transformed into having new industrial investment as the old industrial stock of the north aged.
 
Unfortunately for WV, the prevailing question most people there ask when an opportunity presents itself..."Why would that work here?" For other growing regions in the country, the same opportunity comes around, and the question becomes "Why not give it a shot?"
 
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