I Spent A Year Traveling Through America's Fast-Growing Sunbelt

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There's a severe shift occurring right now in the United States. The Northeast and Midwest are ceding people to the South and West, with migrants moving particularly to America's Sunbelt. Like with other global migration shifts, there is an underlying political context to all this. Regulations on housing construction and other economic activities are making certain northern cities hostile to all but high-income groups. Meanwhile, the more open southern economies are receiving the exodus, becoming more economically and culturally dynamic. For the last year, I’ve traveled through this southern slice of the country, witnessing all these changes at street level--and it's been something to behold.

For background on this shift, just note the latest census numbers. Between 2000 and 2010, the South and West combined grew by 23 million people, while the Northeast and Midwest grew by only 4.2 million. This growth was focused in the Sunbelt, moreover, namely major metro areas like Dallas, Houston, Phoenix and Miami.

This trend isn’t new, although the reasons behind it are somewhat ill-defined. The popular explanation is that people are seeking warmer climates. This is likely somewhat true--but regulatory climates also factor in. Economic Freedom rates, which in America have been a driver of population shifts, are generally higher in the Sunbelt. And land-use regulations are looser, leading to more housing and cheaper prices.

"The South has grown not because it is more attractive or more productive," concludes Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, in The Rise of the Sunbelt,  "but because its housing supply is far more elastic, mainly due to a pro-development regulatory system."

This has led to the diverging media narratives we see on various cities. In many northern ones—and for that matter, the more regulated ones along the West Coast portion of the Sunbelt—different cultural groups fight over the rights to scarce housing supply in what they consider “their” neighborhoods. Some people working two jobs are nonetheless homeless. And others have to settle for the far exurbs, or move out of their metros altogether. But across the Sunbelt, people are flooding in and neighborhoods are urbanizing rapidly, filled with large homes that often cost below the national median of $189,000.

My experience with this over the last year has come as a full-time roving urban affairs journalist. As readers may recall, I announced on Forbes awhile back that I was taking a 3-year, 30-city trip—living for a month in each city—to write a book on reforming cities through Market Urbanism. My trip began in Miami and will loop clockwise around the country, traversing the Sunbelt, the West Coast, the Intermountain West, the Great Plains, the Midwest, the Mid-South and the Northeast. I’m now 1/3rd the way through, having lived in 10 Sunbelt stops—Miami, New Orleans, Oklahoma City (which technically sits just outside the Sunbelt), Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Phoenix, San Diego and Los Angeles.

(A map delineating the Sunbelt / wikipedia)

The two most notable changes I've discovered from this rapid growth are in the physical and the human imprint. Physically, these cities have become more developed, often in unorthodox ways. One shining example is Brickell, a neighborhood near downtown Miami that grew in two decades from a low-rise business district with single-family homes to an overnight skyscraper zone and one of America's leading financial centers. Elsewhere, massive mixed-use town-center developments—the Domain in Austin, or the Shops at Legacy outside Dallas—have blossomed, often in under a decade, into walkable communities with thousands of residents and a small city's-worth of retail.

Houston, perhaps America’s least-regulated metro housing market, is the simulacrum of this 21st-century urbanism in all its messy brilliance. The fast-densifying greater downtown area has good Walk Scores and could legitimately be called "urban"; a half-dozen similar job centers--from random edge cities to tasteful towncenters--dot the metro; makeshift settlement communities pop up to house incoming immigrants; and, of course, haphazard single-family and multi-family housing sprawls in every direction. This willingness to build is why Houston can accommodate large population influxes, remain cheap...and perform so well economically.

The human imprint of the Sunbelt’s growth, meanwhile, is just as diverse. It has become a modern American youth magnet, with cities like San Antonio and Austin perennially among the leaders in Millennial growth. Sunbelt cities have also become immigrant hubs, a role previously reserved more for northern cities. Of the 10 metros with the largest share of foreign-born population, 8 are in the Sunbelt. Meanwhile, only 1 of the bottom ten metros for immigrants are in the Sunbelt, while 6 are in the Rust Belt. Sunbelt immigration has historically been driven by Hispanics, but this, too, is changing. For example, in Houston—now the nation’s most diverse metro area—5.6% of the immigrant population is Vietnamese and 4.5% is Indian.

This has caused parts of these cities (and their suburbs) to become the automobile-oriented version of what one might find while walking through Queens. Given strip malls will have 4 or 5 restaurants offering different international cuisines, while business districts with names like "Little Mexico" and "Koreatown" are a stone's throw from each other. Perhaps the quintessential example are these cities' large public universities, which maintain their appeal to top-notch international students. Walk on campuses like the University of Texas-Dallas, or Arizona State University, outside Phoenix, and you'll witness a melting pot of different nationalities, languages, foreign fashion styles and religious customs.

All this is to say that the growth I witnessed this past year unveiled what has, in recent decades, become a seismic shift in America's character. While growth remains mild, and cultural norms conservative, in much of the rural Sunbelt, this is no longer remotely the case for many Sunbelt cities (stereotypes notwithstanding). These places are instead the modern U.S. embodiment of urbanization, economic agglomeration, diversity, multiculturalism, globalism and rapid change. Meanwhile, many northern cities that were built on this—New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, Chicago—seem less enthusiastic about it today. While socially liberal in theory, they have a NIMBYist political climate and a regulatory legal climate that stops growth and pushes people out. Ultimately, this paradigm shift exposes the competing values of being "opened" or "closed", in both the economic and cultural sense. It’s been fun traveling through the part of the country that now embodies the "open" side.

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