Old Dominion University’s 2024 State of the Region report called the 2010s “the lost decade” for Hampton Roads. The region was one of the last to recover from the 2008 Financial Crisis — just in time for the pandemic.
“It's like we got there right after last call, like the party was ending, and we finally got back to level set, and COVID knocked us all into a creek,” said Doug Smith, the president of the Hampton Roads Alliance, which focuses on economic development for the whole region.
But things are looking up, according to a new economic playbook published by the Alliance. The next few decades hold more opportunities for the region than it’s had in a long time, Smith said.
The playbook presents economic opportunities that play to the region’s advantages in defense, energy, aerospace and logistics. It also highlights eight projects it says have the potential to transform Hampton Roads.
Though the document is thorough, it doesn’t present a complete picture of economic opportunity in the region, Smith said. Other opportunities include coastal resilience, blue technology, cybersecurity and healthcare.
“Healthcare is 25% of your economy, but we don't treat healthcare as economic development,” he said. “That's a conversation the region needs to have.”
WHRO sat down with Smith to talk through the playbook and what options the region has in front of it.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
WHRO: What inspired the Hampton Roads economic playbook?
Doug Smith: The things that we do in Hampton Roads that we do really, really well — build nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers and now offshore wind turbines — a lot of that has not been valued since the Cold War.
If you think about where the country is and was a couple of years ago, we're trying to rebuild the military industrial base. We're trying to re-industrialize, or reshore. We learned during COVID, we need to bring some manufacturing back to the U.S. We're trying to establish an energy strategy that allows us to meet the just exponentially changing demand for energy.
We're trying to do all those things at once without a whole lot of direction. So that's what drove sort of the need for this playbook and the foundation for it.
WHRO: When I was reading the playbook, it mentions recent economic shifts that play to the strengths of Hampton Roads. Can you talk a little bit about these shifts and what they’ve meant for the region?
DS: Yeah. So, think about just what's happened these last handful of years. So it’s lots of global tension: wars in Ukraine, wars in Gaza. You've got just the after effects of COVID. The just rapid acceleration of technology and AI adoption and the impacts that that has had, not only on the workplace and industry, but also on energy demand. And so all these things kind of swirling around, and the regions that understand this and get themselves positioned to frankly respond and take advantage of that, are going to be the ones that win.
The winners are going to be military metros. We call ourselves America's military Metro. I mean, that's what we are.
WHRO: The playbook talks really about defense, energy, aerospace and logistics as the four sectors. Why these four sectors?
DS: It could be three. It could be five. Just those happen to be the ones that the research that we did validate. I think the most interesting one is the analysis of DoD spending. We're the fifth largest DoD spend. We're the largest DoD per capita spend. We are a maritime industrial defense economy. So that’s the defense piece. And then logistics, we're an incredibly successful, incredibly robust, incredibly important port. If you kind of summed us up, we're a port community. But then energy is so important, but we also have some unique advantages.
To me the least connected, if you will, set of assets, is around that aerospace piece. We think with a little bit of work, we can really connect those. We think about NASA and the things that are happening at the Air Traffic Operations Lab. You think about what's happening at Wallops Island. How we fly is going to change a lot in the next handful of years with uncrewed systems and whatnot, real opportunity for our region.
WHRO: How will these four sectors shape the future of the local economy?
DS: I love the old adage of a high-wage, high-skill job will create low-wage, low-skill jobs — indirect jobs. It doesn't work the other way around. Low-wage, low-skill jobs don't create high-wage, high-skilled jobs. And so these sectors, the people that are going to work in this space, they are high-skill, high-wage jobs. The payoff ultimately is creating economic growth, which creates wealth for Hampton Road citizens, frankly, at all levels.