The Northern Piedmont is a diverse, rapidly growing, nonmetropolitan region concentrated primarily on the Piedmont and partly on the Coastal Plain. It is generally the area encompassed by planning districts 9, 10, and 16.
The economic base of this large region is diverse and defies simple generalization. Employment in construction is important to all three planning districts, due to rapid population growth in the region as well as to long-distance commuting by some construction workers living in the region to jobs in Washington and Richmond. Government is a large employer also. Planning District 16 is second only to the Northern Virginia planning district in the number of workers specializing in public administration; this is largely attributable to residents commuting to Northern Virginia to work.
Another concentration of government workers is located in the Charlottesville metropolitan area. This area has almost 21,200 state employees, many related to the University of Virginia, as well as 1,300 federal workers. Agriculture is a major employer in planning districts 9 and 10. A variety of crops are grown, and livestock--particularly beef and dairy cattle and horses--also contributes to the economy.
Albemarle County-Charlottesville and Spotsylvania County-Fredericksburg are the region's two largest manufacturing concentrations. Interestingly, a disproportionate number of industrial workers in the Northern Piedmont work for foreign-affiliated companies. In particular, in a continuous strip of Piedmont counties beginning with Loudoun (in the Northern Virginia region) and proceeding south through Fauquier, Culpeper, Orange, Louisa, and Fluvanna, ten foreign-affiliated manufacturing plants employ approximately 2,400 workers, or about 39 percent of the manufacturing workers in the six counties.
The Northern Piedmont remarkably accounted for more than 88% of all the nonmetropolitan population growth in the state between 1980 and 1988. Although it should be noted that Stafford County, part of the Washington D.C. MSA since 1983, is still considered part of Planning District 16 by Virginia and in this paper. During that same period growth rates of 28 to 38 percent in Stafford, Spotsylvania and Fauquier Counties constitute a phenomenon more akin to innundation than to growth.
A variety of factors appear to be contributing to this growth. Most of the growth is a spillover from both Northern Virginia and from Richmond. Growth in Albemarle County is tied directly to the growth of the University of Virginia, as well as indirectly to that institution through Charlottesville's attraction of engineering firms, high technology firms, retirees and state and federal agencies.