The common media view of the South is as a regressive region, full of overweight, prejudiced, exploited and undereducated people. Yet even as the old Confederacy’s political banner fades, its long-term economic prospects shine bright.
For one thing, Americans continue to head south attracting the most domestic migrants of any U.S. region. Last year, six of the top eight states in terms of net domestic migration were from the old Confederacy — Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina and Georgia. The top four losers were deep blue New York, Illinois, New Jersey and California.
In the 1950s, the South, the Northeast and the Midwest had about the same number of people. Today, the South is almost as populous as the Northeast and the Midwest combined. This dominance will be further assured because Southerners are nurturing families, in contrast with residents of the Great Lakes, the Northeast and California. Greater Atlanta’s child population, for example, rose by at least twice the 10 percent rate of the rest of the country over the past decade, while the New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston and Chicago areas experienced declines.
Why are people moving to, and breeding in, what the media tends to see as a backwater?
The South’s economic growth has outpaced the rest of the country for a generation. With their history of poverty and underdevelopment, Southern states generally have lower taxes, and less stringent regulations, than their primary competitors in the Northeast or on the West Coast.
A portent of the future can be seen in new investment from U.S.-based and foreign companies. Last year, Texas, Louisiana, Georgia and North Carolina were four of the six leading sites for new corporate facilities.
In the long run, some critics suggest that the region’s historically lower education levels limit its ascendancy. Every state in the Southeast falls below the national average of the percentage of residents aged 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree.
Yet this education gap is shrinking, particularly in the South’s growing metropolitan areas. Over the past decade, the number of college graduates in Austin and Charlotte easily eclipsed the performance of New York, San Francisco and Chicago. Greater Atlanta alone added more than 300,000 residents with bachelor’s degrees over the past decade, more than Philadelphia and Miami and almost 70,000 more than Boston.
Over time, these trends will have consequences. In the future, more Americans than ever will be brought up Southern. The drawls may be softer, and the social values, hopefully less constricted, but the regional loyalties are likely to persist. Rather than fade way, Southern influence instead will grow over time. It’s the culture of the increasingly child-free northern tier and the slow-growth coasts that will, to evoke the past, be gone with the wind.
Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University in Orange, Calif. A version of this article previously appeared in Forbes.
