Chapter 36: The New Appalachia — Immigration, Remote Work, Tourism, and Reinvention

"People keep asking what's going to replace coal. The answer isn't one thing. It's a hundred things. The question is whether the people who've been here all along get to be part of the hundred things, or whether they get priced out of their own towns by people who just discovered the mountains last Tuesday." — Community organizer, Asheville, North Carolina, 2022

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Document the demographic transformations reshaping Appalachia — including Latino immigration to agricultural and meatpacking communities, the COVID-era remote work migration, and the growth of tourism and outdoor recreation economies
2. Analyze the tensions between economic reinvention and displacement — between the arrival of new investment and the pricing-out of longtime residents
3. Describe the broadband gap, the housing affordability crisis, and the challenge of gentrification in mountain communities, connecting these contemporary issues to the region's historical pattern of extraction
4. Evaluate who benefits from the "New Appalachia" and who gets left behind, applying the extraction framework developed throughout this textbook

Introduction: The Old Question in New Form

The coal economy is dying. This textbook has documented that death in detail — the market forces, the job losses, the community devastation described in Chapter 32. The opioid crisis has ravaged the region, as described in Chapter 33. The political landscape has been transformed, as described in Chapter 34. The stereotypes persist, as described in Chapter 35. These are the stories that the national media tells about Appalachia: decline, despair, and dysfunction.

But there is another story — or rather, a hundred other stories — unfolding simultaneously across the region. Stories of new people arriving, new industries taking root, new money flowing in. Stories of mountain towns that once emptied now filling up. Stories of economies that once depended on a single commodity now diversifying into tourism, technology, outdoor recreation, renewable energy, and remote knowledge work. Stories of change.

The question is not whether Appalachia is changing. It is. The question — and it is the oldest question in this textbook — is: Who benefits from the change? Who controls it? Who pays the costs? And will the pattern that has defined the region for a century and a half — outside forces extracting value while leaving communities with the bill — repeat itself in new form? Or will this time be different?

This chapter examines the forces that are reshaping Appalachia in the twenty-first century: immigration, remote work, tourism, the outdoor recreation economy, technology investment, and renewable energy development. It asks who is coming, why they are coming, what they are building, and what happens to the people who were already here. It insists on holding two truths simultaneously: that economic change can bring genuine opportunity, and that economic change without community control repeats the extraction pattern. Both things are true. Both things must be reckoned with.

The Changing Face of Appalachia: Latino Immigration

Drive through the small towns of northwestern North Carolina, northeastern Tennessee, or the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, and you will see something that would have been unimaginable a generation ago: Mexican restaurants next to Baptist churches. Tiendas next to hardware stores. Children on school playgrounds speaking Spanish. Signs in two languages at the health clinic. The face of Appalachia is changing, and the change is driven, in large part, by the same force that has driven every demographic transformation in the region's history: the demand for labor.

Beginning in the 1990s, the poultry processing industry and the broader meatpacking industry in Appalachia began recruiting workers from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and other Latin American countries. The work was brutal — standing for hours on production lines in refrigerated plants, wielding knives, repeating the same motions thousands of times per shift, enduring injury rates that were among the highest of any industry in America. It was also work that native-born Americans increasingly refused to do, because the wages were low, the conditions were dangerous, and the communities where the plants were located offered few of the amenities that mobile American workers expected.

The companies — Tyson Foods, Pilgrim's Pride, Perdue Farms, and others — needed workers. The workers — driven from their home countries by poverty, violence, and the economic dislocations of trade agreements like NAFTA — needed jobs. The result was a wave of immigration that transformed communities across the Appalachian region. Towns like Morganton, North Carolina; Harrisonburg, Virginia; and Chattanooga, Tennessee, saw their Latino populations grow from negligible to significant in the space of a decade. By the 2020 census, Latinos constituted more than 10 percent of the population in numerous Appalachian counties that had been virtually all white or Black a generation earlier.

The transformation was not smooth. Longtime residents — many of whom had never encountered Spanish-speaking people before — reacted with a range of responses from warm welcome to hostile rejection. Language barriers created difficulties in schools, hospitals, and courtrooms. Housing was tight, and some landlords exploited undocumented workers by charging inflated rents for substandard conditions. Anti-immigrant sentiment, amplified by national political rhetoric, found fertile ground in communities that were already anxious about economic change.

But the transformation also brought revitalization. Latino workers and their families opened businesses — restaurants, grocery stores, construction companies, landscaping services. They enrolled their children in schools that had been losing students for decades. They attended churches — both Catholic parishes that had been shrinking and new evangelical congregations that conducted services in Spanish. They bought houses, paid taxes, and became part of the fabric of communities that had been losing population for a generation.

The experience of Latino immigration in Appalachia echoes, in striking ways, the immigrant experience described in Chapter 19 — the wave of Italian, Hungarian, Polish, and other European immigrants who came to the coalfields in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Those immigrants, too, were recruited by industry to do dangerous work for low wages. Those immigrants, too, faced hostility from native-born residents. Those immigrants, too, transformed the communities where they settled — adding new foods, new languages, new religious practices, and new cultural traditions to the mountain mix. And those immigrants, in time, became Appalachian — their grandchildren and great-grandchildren as rooted in the mountains as anyone.

Whether the same process of incorporation is underway for the current wave of Latino immigrants remains an open question. The political climate around immigration is more hostile than it was a century ago, when European immigrants could at least claim the advantage of whiteness in the racial hierarchy. Undocumented status creates a permanent vulnerability that earlier immigrants did not face. And the meatpacking industry, like the coal industry before it, is an extractive enterprise that takes the most productive years of workers' lives and gives back wages that barely sustain a family. The question is whether Latino immigrants in Appalachia will follow the path of earlier immigrants — becoming full members of the community over generations — or whether the structural barriers to incorporation will keep them permanently marginalized.

The Remote Work Migration: New Arrivals from the Laptop Class

The COVID-19 pandemic, which reached the United States in early 2020, did not create the remote work phenomenon. But it accelerated it from a niche practice to a mass transformation, and one of the places where that transformation landed hardest was Appalachia.

When offices closed across America in March 2020, millions of knowledge workers — software engineers, financial analysts, marketers, writers, consultants, designers — discovered that they could do their jobs from anywhere with a reliable internet connection. Many of them looked at the rent they were paying in New York, San Francisco, Washington, or Austin and asked a question that would have seemed absurd a year earlier: Why am I living here?

The answers they found led some of them to the mountains. Asheville, North Carolina, had been attracting newcomers for years, but the pandemic accelerated the influx dramatically. Blacksburg, Virginia, anchored by Virginia Tech and already connected to the tech economy through the university's research corridors, saw an influx of remote workers drawn by the combination of a college town's amenities and the mountains' beauty. Smaller communities across the region — from Lewisburg, West Virginia, to Abingdon, Virginia, to Brevard, North Carolina — experienced their own versions of the same phenomenon: people with high-paying remote jobs moving to places where the cost of living was a fraction of what they had been paying in major cities.

The newcomers brought money, skills, and energy. They patronized local businesses. They started new businesses. They enrolled their children in local schools, adding students and, in some cases, tax revenue to systems that had been shrinking. They brought a cosmopolitan sensibility that, in some communities, enriched the cultural landscape — new restaurants, new arts events, new perspectives.

They also brought problems. The most immediate and most devastating was the impact on housing affordability. Remote workers earning Silicon Valley or New York salaries could afford to pay prices for mountain real estate that were trivial by big-city standards but astronomical by local standards. A software engineer making $150,000 a year could easily pay $400,000 for a house in a community where the median household income was $35,000 and the median home price had been $120,000 a year earlier. The result was a classic demand shock — a sudden increase in demand that drove prices beyond the reach of existing residents.

In Asheville, median home prices increased by more than 50 percent between 2019 and 2023. In Buncombe County, which contains Asheville, the gap between median income and median home price became one of the widest in the southeastern United States. Long-term renters were evicted as landlords converted rental properties to short-term vacation rentals on platforms like Airbnb and VRBO. Families that had lived in the same neighborhood for generations found themselves unable to afford the property taxes on homes they owned outright, as rising assessments followed rising market values.

The pattern repeated across the region. In every community that attracted significant numbers of remote workers, the same sequence unfolded: newcomers arrived with money, prices rose, existing residents were squeezed. The service workers who cooked the food, cleaned the houses, and mowed the lawns that the newcomers enjoyed could not afford to live in the communities where they worked. Teachers, nurses, firefighters, and police officers — the essential workers of any community — were priced out.

This is gentrification — the process by which an influx of wealthier residents transforms a community's character and displaces its existing population. Gentrification has been studied extensively in urban contexts — in Brooklyn, in San Francisco, in Washington's Shaw neighborhood. But gentrification in a mountain town has particular dimensions that urban models do not fully capture. In a city, a displaced person can move to a different neighborhood. In a mountain community, there may not be a different neighborhood. The geography that makes the place beautiful — the ridges, the valleys, the limited buildable land — also makes it finite. When the prices rise, there is nowhere else to go that is still home.

The Tourism Economy: Blessing and Burden

Tourism has been part of the Appalachian economy since the construction of the railroads in the late nineteenth century, when resort hotels in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, and Asheville, North Carolina, catered to wealthy visitors from the eastern seaboard. The creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (1934) and the Blue Ridge Parkway (1935-1987) created public amenities that drew millions of visitors annually. But tourism as the dominant economic force in entire communities — as the replacement for the extractive economies that once sustained the region — is a newer phenomenon, and its consequences are complex.

Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee — the gateway communities to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, the most-visited national park in America — represent the most extreme version of the tourism-dependent economy. These towns, which have a combined permanent population of fewer than 10,000, receive more than 12 million visitors a year. The economy is almost entirely built around serving those visitors: hotels, restaurants, attractions (Dollywood, Ripley's Aquarium, the Titanic Museum), outlet malls, and an endless strip of souvenir shops selling mountain kitsch.

The tourism economy generates jobs and tax revenue. It provides employment in communities where other economic options have dwindled. In that sense, it is genuinely valuable. But it also generates a particular kind of economy — one characterized by low wages, seasonal employment, limited benefits, and a fundamental dependence on the decisions of outsiders (tourists) who have no stake in the community's long-term well-being.

The parallels to the coal economy are uncomfortable and instructive. The coal economy made a community dependent on a single commodity whose price was set by distant markets. The tourism economy makes a community dependent on a single commodity — the visitor experience — whose volume is determined by factors beyond local control (gasoline prices, airline schedules, national economic conditions, weather, pandemic restrictions). The coal economy extracted a physical resource and left environmental damage. The tourism economy extracts a cultural and natural resource — the beauty and character of the place — and, when managed poorly, can degrade the very qualities that attract visitors in the first place.

The environmental pressures on the Great Smoky Mountains — traffic congestion, air pollution, overcrowded trails, stressed wildlife habitat — are the direct consequence of success. The cultural pressures are equally real. When a community's economy is built around performing an identity for outsiders — serving "authentic" mountain food, selling "handmade" crafts, performing "traditional" music — the line between culture and commodity becomes dangerously thin. The same dynamic that Chapter 27 described in the commercialization of Appalachian music plays out in the commercialization of Appalachian place: the product that sells is a simplified, stereotyped version of reality, and the pressure to maintain that product can distort the living culture it claims to represent.

The Outdoor Recreation Economy

Alongside traditional tourism, a newer and in some ways more promising economic model has emerged: the outdoor recreation economy — the economic activity generated by hiking, mountain biking, rock climbing, kayaking, fishing, and other recreational activities in natural settings.

The outdoor recreation economy is enormous nationally — more than $800 billion in consumer spending annually, supporting millions of jobs. In Appalachia, the potential is significant. The region has the natural assets: thousands of miles of trails (including the Appalachian Trail, the most famous long-distance hiking trail in America), world-class whitewater rivers, extensive mountain biking networks, and climbing areas that attract enthusiasts from across the country.

Communities that have invested in outdoor recreation infrastructure have seen genuine economic benefits. Fayetteville, West Virginia, home to the New River Gorge — designated as America's newest national park in 2020 — has built a local economy around rock climbing, whitewater rafting, and trail-based recreation that provides employment and attracts visitors without the strip-mall aesthetics of Gatlinburg. The Virginia Creeper Trail, a 34-mile rail-trail in southwestern Virginia, generates an estimated $2.5 million annually for the small communities along its route. Mountain biking networks in places like Snowshoe, West Virginia, and Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina have created economic activity in communities that had few other prospects.

The outdoor recreation model has several advantages over traditional tourism. It is less capital-intensive (a trail costs less to build and maintain than a theme park). It is more compatible with environmental conservation (the product is nature itself, which creates an incentive to protect it). And it tends to attract visitors who are interested in the place as it actually is, rather than visitors who want a packaged, stereotyped version of "mountain culture."

But the outdoor recreation economy has its own equity issues. The equipment is expensive — a quality mountain bike costs thousands of dollars, and the gear required for rock climbing or backcountry hiking is not cheap. The clientele is overwhelmingly white, affluent, and college-educated. The businesses that serve the outdoor recreation market — gear shops, coffee roasters, breweries, farm-to-table restaurants — tend to cater to visitors rather than longtime residents, and their prices can be exclusionary. A community that reinvents itself around outdoor recreation may create an economy that serves newcomers and visitors while marginalizing the people who have lived there all along.

Broadband: The Infrastructure of the New Economy

None of the economic opportunities described in this chapter — remote work, tech investment, telehealth, online education, digital entrepreneurship — is available to communities without reliable high-speed internet. And in much of Appalachia, reliable high-speed internet does not exist.

The broadband gap in Appalachia is severe. According to the ARC and the Federal Communications Commission, large portions of the region — particularly in central Appalachia (eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, southwestern Virginia) — lack access to internet service that meets the federal definition of broadband. The terrain that makes the mountains beautiful also makes them expensive to wire: running fiber-optic cable through narrow hollows and over steep ridges costs far more per mile than running the same cable through flat urban or suburban terrain. Private internet service providers, which make investment decisions based on expected return, have little financial incentive to build infrastructure in communities with small, dispersed populations and limited ability to pay premium prices.

The result is a digital divide that mirrors and reinforces every other inequality described in this textbook. Communities without broadband cannot attract remote workers. They cannot support telehealth services (see Chapter 38). They cannot offer online education. They cannot participate in the digital economy. They are, in a very real sense, cut off from the economic future — not by the mountains themselves (the physical isolation that supposedly defines the region) but by the failure of public and private investment in the infrastructure that connects.

The federal government has recognized the problem. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021) allocated $65 billion for broadband expansion, with significant portions directed toward rural and underserved areas including Appalachia. The ARC has made broadband a priority, funding feasibility studies, pilot projects, and infrastructure grants across the region. State governments have created broadband authorities and incentive programs.

But the gap between authorization and implementation is wide, and the history of federal infrastructure investment in Appalachia (see Chapter 23) provides grounds for both hope and skepticism. The ARC highway system, built over decades, did improve connectivity — but it also facilitated the out-migration of young people and the arrival of chain stores that undercut local businesses. Infrastructure investment is not inherently beneficial. Its effects depend on who controls it, who designs it, and whose interests it serves.

Tech Investment and the New River Valley Model

The New River Valley of Virginia — centered on Blacksburg, home of Virginia Tech — represents one model of what the "new economy" in Appalachia might look like. Virginia Tech's research programs, particularly in engineering, computer science, and agriculture, have created a tech ecosystem that includes startups, research facilities, and corporate partnerships. The university is the largest employer in the region, and its presence has attracted a population of educated professionals who support a diverse service economy.

The New River Valley model demonstrates that "Appalachian" and "technology hub" are not contradictions — that a community can be in the mountains and in the twenty-first-century economy simultaneously. Blacksburg has coffee shops and a farmers' market, a vibrant music scene and a broadband network, hiking trails and a tech incubator. It is, in many ways, the Appalachian community that the optimists envision when they talk about the region's future.

But the New River Valley model also has significant limitations as a template for regional transformation. It depends on a major research university — an institution that not every community has or can create. It has benefited from decades of federal research funding and state investment. And even within the New River Valley, the benefits of the tech economy are unevenly distributed. Blacksburg thrives; the surrounding rural counties remain economically fragile. The university town and the mountain hollows twenty miles away might as well be in different centuries.

A different kind of tech investment has arrived in Appalachia in recent years: data centers — the massive server farms that store and process the digital information on which the modern economy depends. Companies like Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft have built data centers in Virginia, North Carolina, and other Appalachian states, attracted by cheap electricity (often generated by coal or natural gas), access to water for cooling, and the relative affordability of land.

Data centers bring investment and some jobs — but fewer jobs than their physical scale might suggest. A data center that occupies hundreds of acres might employ a few dozen people. The jobs that do exist tend to be either highly technical (requiring skills that most local workers do not have) or low-wage maintenance and security positions. The data centers consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, placing demands on local infrastructure that can strain community resources. And they represent, in some readings, a new form of the extraction pattern: an outside corporation using the region's natural resources (electricity, water, land) for its own profit, while leaving the community with minimal economic benefit.

The parallel to the coal economy is not exact, but it is not trivial. An extractive industry arrives. It uses the region's resources. It employs some people, but not as many as the scale of the operation might suggest. The profits flow to corporate headquarters elsewhere. The community bears the environmental and infrastructure costs. The question — is this development, or is this extraction in new form? — is the question that Appalachian communities have been asking for 150 years.

Demographic Transformation by the Numbers

The demographic transformation of Appalachia is visible in the census data, though the aggregate numbers conceal as much as they reveal. The Appalachian region as a whole — the 423 counties designated by the Appalachian Regional Commission across thirteen states — gained population modestly between 2010 and 2020, but that modest gain masked a profound divergence within the region. The northern tier (Appalachian Pennsylvania, New York, and Ohio) continued to lose population. Central Appalachia (eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, southwestern Virginia) experienced accelerating population decline, with some counties losing 10 to 15 percent of their population in a single decade. Meanwhile, the southern tier — the Appalachian portions of North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee — experienced significant growth, driven by the economic forces described in this chapter: tourism, remote work, and the general southward migration pattern that has reshaped American demographics since the 1990s.

Within individual counties, the changes are even more dramatic. Burke County, North Carolina — home to the Case Farms plant described in Case Study 2 — saw its Hispanic population grow from less than 1 percent in 1990 to more than 10 percent by 2020. Buncombe County, North Carolina — which contains Asheville — grew by more than 10 percent between 2010 and 2020, but the growth was concentrated among affluent newcomers while the county's Black population, as a proportion of the total, declined. Montgomery County, Virginia — part of the New River Valley — remained relatively stable in total population but experienced significant shifts in educational attainment and income as Virginia Tech's expanding research enterprise attracted a more educated workforce.

The age structure of Appalachian communities is shifting as well, though not uniformly. The communities losing population are losing young people — the 18-to-35 age cohort that represents the workforce, the tax base, and the biological future of the community. The communities gaining population are gaining a mix of young professionals (remote workers, tech employees, outdoor recreation enthusiasts) and retirees (drawn to the mountains by beauty, affordable living, and proximity to healthcare). The resulting age distribution creates different challenges for different communities: shrinking communities face a labor shortage and a shrinking tax base, while growing communities face demands on schools, infrastructure, and social services that their existing capacity cannot meet.

The racial and ethnic composition of the region is changing more profoundly than at any point since the coalfield immigration era of the early twentieth century. The arrival of Latino communities has been the most visible change, but it is not the only one. Hmong refugees, settled in parts of Appalachian North Carolina and Virginia through federal resettlement programs, have established communities that add yet another cultural dimension to the region's diversity. African American communities, long present but often invisible in the dominant narrative (see Chapters 6 and 12), are experiencing complex dynamics — displacement in gentrifying communities like Asheville, but persistence and, in some cases, cultural renewal in other parts of the region.

These demographic changes challenge the stereotype of Appalachia as a homogeneously white region — the stereotype described in Chapter 35 and critiqued by Elizabeth Catte. The mountains have always been more diverse than the national imagination acknowledged. But the twenty-first-century transformations are making that diversity visible in ways that can no longer be ignored, and the region's ability to incorporate new populations — to make room for them, to respect their contributions, to include them in the community's self-understanding — will be one of the defining tests of the decades ahead.

The New Economy's Geography: Corridors and Dead Zones

The new economic forces reshaping Appalachia are not distributed evenly across the region. They follow geography — specifically, they follow interstate highway corridors and cluster around anchor institutions (universities, medical centers, federal installations) that provide the critical mass of infrastructure, talent, and connectivity that the new economy requires.

The I-81 corridor through the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia illustrates this pattern. Communities along the interstate — Harrisonburg, Staunton, Lexington — have experienced economic diversification, population stability or growth, and the kind of investment (broadband, higher education, healthcare) that supports continued development. Communities fifteen or twenty miles from the interstate, in the hollows and on the ridge roads, have experienced none of these benefits. The same highway that connects some communities to the new economy isolates others from it.

The I-40 corridor through western North Carolina — connecting Asheville to Knoxville and, ultimately, to the broader southeastern economy — has created a similar dynamic. Asheville and the communities along the interstate have thrived. The communities in the mountains above and below the interstate corridor have not.

Anchor institutions — particularly land-grant universities — create islands of economic activity in otherwise struggling regions. Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, West Virginia University in Morgantown, Appalachian State University in Boone, East Tennessee State University in Johnson City — these institutions provide stable employment, attract educated populations, generate research funding, and create the infrastructure (broadband, cultural amenities, healthcare) that supports broader economic development. But their economic impact drops off sharply with distance. A community twenty miles from a university town may as well be two hundred miles away in terms of economic opportunity.

The result is a region of increasing internal inequality — a patchwork of relative prosperity and deepening distress, separated by distances that are short in miles but vast in economic opportunity. The interstate towns and the university towns are the "new Appalachia" that the optimistic narratives describe. The communities in between — the hollows, the remote counties, the places where the interstates and the universities and the hospitals are not — are the old Appalachia, still waiting for the new economy to arrive. Whether it ever will is one of the open questions of the region's future.

The Cannabis Economy: An Emerging Question

A newer and still-uncertain economic force has entered the Appalachian conversation: cannabis. As states across the country have legalized marijuana for medical and/or recreational use, some observers have pointed to Appalachia's agricultural heritage, its favorable growing climate (in the southern portions of the region), and its desperate need for economic diversification as arguments for the region's potential as a cannabis producer.

The history is complicated. Appalachian communities have a long and ambivalent relationship with marijuana cultivation. For decades, marijuana was one of the most valuable cash crops in parts of eastern Kentucky and southwestern Virginia — grown illegally in remote hollows and on national forest land, providing income for families that had no other economic options. The "marijuana economy" was an open secret in some communities, acknowledged by everyone and discussed by no one. It was also a source of violence, incarceration, and community division — law enforcement campaigns against marijuana growers disrupted families, filled prisons, and created a dynamic in which people who were growing a plant to feed their families were treated as serious criminals.

The legalization of hemp (the low-THC variety of cannabis) under the 2018 Farm Bill created a legal pathway for Appalachian farmers to grow a cannabis crop. Several Appalachian states, including Kentucky and West Virginia, have promoted hemp as a potential replacement crop for tobacco — another agricultural commodity whose market has declined. The results have been mixed. The hemp market proved to be volatile, with supply quickly exceeding demand, and many farmers who invested in hemp found that the promised returns did not materialize.

The broader question of marijuana legalization remains politically charged in Appalachia, where cultural conservatism (see Chapter 34) creates resistance to legalization even in communities that might benefit economically. Virginia legalized recreational marijuana in 2021. West Virginia has medical marijuana but not recreational. Kentucky followed its own path. The patchwork of state laws creates uncertainty for farmers and entrepreneurs who might otherwise invest in cannabis cultivation.

Renewable Energy: Promise and Complication

The energy transition described in detail in Chapter 37 is part of the "new Appalachia" story, and it contains both genuine promise and familiar complications.

Appalachia has significant renewable energy potential. The ridgetops of West Virginia, Virginia, and North Carolina have wind resources that could support large-scale wind energy generation. The flat, open expanses of reclaimed mine land — the scarred landscapes left behind by mountaintop removal (see Chapter 24) — are well-suited for solar installations. Battery manufacturing, a key component of the electric vehicle revolution, has attracted investment in Appalachian communities with the manufacturing infrastructure and workforce skills to support it.

But renewable energy development in Appalachia faces the same fundamental question that every economic transformation in the region has faced: Who owns it? If the solar farms on reclaimed mine land are owned by corporations headquartered in New York or San Francisco, and the electricity they generate is transmitted out of the region to power distant cities, and the profits flow to shareholders who have never seen a mountain — then the energy transition is just the latest version of the extraction pattern. The resource changes. The power dynamics stay the same.

The alternative — community-owned renewable energy, local ownership models, cooperative structures that keep the benefits in the region — exists in concept and in scattered pilot projects. But scaling these models requires capital, expertise, and policy support that remain inadequate. Chapter 37 examines this question in detail.

Who Gets Displaced: The Gentrification of Mountain Towns

The most immediate and most painful consequence of the new Appalachian economy is displacement — the process by which longtime residents are pushed out of communities they have called home for generations.

The mechanisms of displacement vary. In Asheville, it is primarily housing costs — rents and purchase prices that have risen beyond the reach of people who work in the local economy. In smaller communities, it may be the conversion of rental housing to short-term vacation rentals — a phenomenon that reduces the supply of housing available to permanent residents while increasing the demand from tourists. In some communities, it is the closing of businesses that served local needs (the grocery store, the hardware store, the laundromat) and their replacement by businesses that serve visitors (the boutique, the tasting room, the art gallery).

The emotional dimension of displacement is as significant as the economic dimension. When a family that has lived in a hollow for five generations can no longer afford to stay, the loss is not just financial. It is the loss of place, of continuity, of the web of relationships that constitute a community. The grandmother who lived down the road. The church where three generations were baptized. The creek where you learned to fish. These things cannot be replaced by a relocation to a cheaper town an hour away. They are specific to a place, and when the place is lost, they are lost.

The people being displaced are disproportionately the people who are least visible in the optimistic narratives about the "new Appalachia" — the service workers, the elderly on fixed incomes, the disabled, the working poor. They are the people who clean the vacation rentals but cannot afford to rent an apartment. They are the people who serve the craft cocktails at the new downtown bar but cannot afford to eat there. They are the casualties of an economic transformation that, in its aggregate statistics, looks like progress.

THEN AND NOW: Extraction, Old and New

Then (1900): A land agent from a Philadelphia investment company arrives in a mountain county. He buys the mineral rights from families who do not understand what they are signing away. The coal is extracted. The profits go to Philadelphia. The community gets low-wage jobs and environmental devastation. When the coal runs out, the company leaves. Nothing remains.

Now (2023): A data center company from Seattle arrives in a mountain county. It buys land and negotiates tax incentives from a county government desperate for investment. The data is processed. The profits go to Seattle. The community gets a few dozen jobs and higher electricity bills. When the company finds a cheaper location, it may leave. What remains?

Discussion: The resources are different (coal vs. data). The technology is different (mine shafts vs. server racks). The scale of employment is different (thousands of miners vs. dozens of technicians). But the structural pattern — outside capital extracting value from a region while leaving the community with minimal benefit — is strikingly similar. What would it take to break this pattern? What would "data extraction" look like if it were designed to benefit the community as much as the corporation?

Community Land Trusts and the Fight to Stay

In the face of the housing affordability crisis, some Appalachian communities have turned to a tool that offers a structural response to a structural problem: the community land trust (CLT).

A community land trust is a nonprofit organization that acquires land and holds it in trust permanently, removing it from the speculative market. The CLT sells (or rents) houses on the land to qualified buyers at affordable prices, retaining ownership of the land itself. When the homeowner sells, the resale price is restricted — the homeowner earns a modest return, but the house remains affordable for the next buyer. The CLT model breaks the cycle of speculation and displacement by permanently removing housing from the forces that drive prices beyond the reach of local residents.

In Asheville, the Asheville-Buncombe Community Land Trust has provided affordable homeownership for hundreds of families who would otherwise have been priced out of the market. The model is not a complete solution — the number of CLT units is small relative to the scale of the affordability crisis — but it demonstrates that alternatives to market-driven displacement exist.

The Fahe network — a collaborative of housing and community development organizations across Appalachia — has been working to scale CLT and other affordable housing models across the region. Fahe's member organizations operate in communities from Alabama to West Virginia, providing affordable housing, financial services, and economic development support. The network represents one of the most sophisticated efforts to address housing affordability at a regional scale in Appalachia.

Other communities have experimented with different tools: inclusionary zoning ordinances that require developers to include affordable units in new construction; short-term rental regulations that limit the conversion of long-term housing to vacation rentals; employer-assisted housing programs that help workers in tourism and service industries afford to live in the communities where they work. None of these tools, alone, is sufficient. Together, they represent a toolkit that communities can deploy to manage growth without displacement.

The fundamental challenge is political will. Affordable housing policies require trade-offs — restrictions on property rights, limits on development profits, public investment in housing infrastructure. In communities where growth is recent and where the political culture valorizes individual property rights and free markets, these trade-offs are difficult to make. The communities that have been most successful in managing growth — including some mountain communities in Colorado and Montana that face similar pressures — have been the ones that recognized early that unmanaged growth would destroy the very qualities that made the community desirable, and that acted preemptively rather than reactively.

The Young People Question: Staying, Leaving, and Coming Back

The oldest question in modern Appalachian life — a question that has been asked in every generation since the Great Migration described in Chapter 20 — is the question of the young people: Will they stay?

For most of the past seventy years, the answer has been no. The young people of Appalachia have left — for college, for jobs, for the wider world that the mountains seemed to exclude. They left because the economy could not support them. They left because the educational opportunities were elsewhere. They left because the culture told them that leaving was the mark of ambition, that staying was the mark of failure, and that the mountains were a place to be from, not a place to be in.

The out-migration of young, educated people — sometimes called "brain drain" — has been one of the most consequential demographic forces in the region's modern history. When the young people leave, they take their energy, their skills, their tax contributions, and their childbearing potential with them. The communities they leave behind grow older, smaller, and less able to sustain the institutions (schools, churches, businesses, volunteer fire departments) that make community life possible.

But the "new Appalachia" is beginning to complicate this story. Some young people are choosing to stay — not because they have no other options, but because they want to live in the mountains, because they have found or created work that sustains them, and because they value the quality of life that mountain communities offer. Others are coming back — returning to communities they left a decade or two earlier, bringing skills, savings, and a perspective shaped by experience in the wider world.

The return migration phenomenon is small but significant. Young professionals who left for college or early careers are returning to the mountains in their thirties and forties, drawn by family ties, by the affordability of housing (relative to the cities they left), by the desire to raise children in a community rather than a suburb, and by the remote work revolution that allows them to earn urban salaries while living in rural places. These returners bring both opportunity and tension — they are simultaneously insiders (they grew up here) and outsiders (they left and came back changed), and their relationship to the community is complex.

The question of whether the young people will stay — and on what terms, and with what support — remains the most important question about Appalachia's future. A community without young people is a community without a future. A community that retains its young people, or attracts them back, has a chance.

The Tension Between Preservation and Change

Not all change is progress, and not all preservation is stagnation. The communities of Appalachia are navigating a tension that has no easy resolution: the need for economic transformation (because the old economy is gone) and the desire to preserve what makes the community worth saving (because economic transformation without cultural continuity produces a place that is prosperous but soulless).

This tension is visible in every community described in this chapter. In Asheville, residents celebrate the new restaurants and the live music scene while mourning the loss of affordable neighborhoods and the displacement of Black communities from historically Black neighborhoods. In Blacksburg, residents appreciate the university's economic contribution while worrying about the cultural gap between "town" and "gown." In the poultry towns of North Carolina, longtime residents acknowledge the economic contributions of Latino immigrants while navigating the cultural adjustments that immigration requires.

The most thoughtful observers of Appalachian change insist that the tension is not between old and new, or between preservation and progress. It is between community-controlled change and externally imposed change. A community that chooses to develop a tourism economy, manages the pace of growth, implements affordable housing policies, and ensures that existing residents benefit from the transformation is not the same as a community that has tourism thrust upon it by market forces it cannot control. The difference is not in the outcome but in the agency — in who is making the decisions, who is setting the pace, and who is bearing the costs.

This is the distinction that the entire history of Appalachia has been building toward. The extraction pattern is not defined by what is extracted. It is defined by who controls the extraction. Coal extraction controlled by outside corporations destroyed communities. Coal extraction controlled by community-owned cooperatives might have built them. The same principle applies to tourism, technology, remote work, and every other force reshaping the region today. The question is not what happens. The question is who decides.

PRIMARY SOURCE: Community Voices on Change

Source A — Longtime Asheville resident, 2022: "My grandmother lived in this house. My mother lived in this house. I grew up in this house. My property taxes have tripled in five years because the house next door sold for $600,000 to a couple from Brooklyn who are going to turn it into an Airbnb. I can't afford to stay in my own family's house. Where am I supposed to go?"

Source B — Remote worker who relocated to Appalachian Virginia, 2021: "I fell in love with the mountains. The pace of life, the community, the beauty — it's everything I was missing in the city. I know people are worried about newcomers changing the character of the place, and I understand that. But I'm not here to change anything. I just want to live here and be part of the community."

Source C — Meatpacking plant worker, northwestern North Carolina, 2019: "I came from Guatemala eight years ago. The work is hard — you stand all day, the line moves fast, your hands hurt. But my children go to school here. My daughter speaks English better than she speaks Spanish. This is home now. Some people look at us like we don't belong. But we work. We pay rent. We buy groceries at the store. We are part of this town."

Discussion: These three voices represent three different relationships to "the new Appalachia." What does each person want? What threatens each person? Is there a framework that could address all three sets of needs simultaneously? What would a community look like that welcomed newcomers without displacing existing residents?

COMMUNITY HISTORY PORTFOLIO CHECKPOINT — Chapter 36

For your selected Appalachian county:

Demographic and Economic Portrait: 1. Using Census data, document the demographic changes in your county between 2000 and 2020. Has the population grown or declined? Has the racial or ethnic composition changed? Has the median age shifted?

2. Identify the top five employers in your county. How have they changed over the last twenty years? Has the county experienced any of the economic transformations described in this chapter (tourism growth, remote work migration, tech investment, immigration)?

3. Research housing costs in your county. What is the median home price? How has it changed in the last decade? Is there evidence of gentrification or displacement?

4. Interview (or find published accounts from) a longtime resident and a recent arrival. How do their perspectives on the community's future differ? What do they share?

This checkpoint builds toward the modern portrait section (Chapters 32-38) of your final county history.

Conclusion: The Pattern and the Possibility

The "new Appalachia" is real. People are coming. Money is flowing. Economies are diversifying. The mountains that were once dismissed as barriers to progress are now valued as assets — as beautiful places to live, to visit, to work from, to invest in. This is, in many ways, a reversal of the story that has dominated this textbook: the story of a region from which wealth was extracted, people were driven out, and communities were left with nothing.

But reversal is not the same as justice. A community that was poor because its coal was taken and is now poor because its housing is too expensive has not been liberated. It has merely been subjected to a new form of the same dynamic. The resource changes. The pattern persists. Outside forces arrive, extract value, and leave — or, in the case of gentrification, stay, but on terms that displace the people who were there first.

The possibility — the genuinely hopeful scenario — is that Appalachian communities can harness the new economic forces without being consumed by them. This requires tools: affordable housing policies, community land trusts, local ownership models, broadband infrastructure, workforce development programs designed by and for the people who will use them. It requires political power: the ability to negotiate with outside investors from a position of strength rather than desperation. And it requires the hardest thing of all: the willingness of the rest of America to treat Appalachian communities as partners rather than as resources — as places whose people have expertise, agency, and the right to shape their own future.

The mountains are changing. The question is whether the people who have lived in them the longest will be part of that change — or its casualties.