The Sun Belt Buckled -- It Didn't Break
For Throwback Wednesday, another prognostication proven
A little over a decade ago, I predicted that the Sun Belt’s post-Great Recession rebound was for real, and sustainable.
Even Bloomberg and Axios admit that I was right.
Enjoy!
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As the traumas of the housing bubble gave way to the broader calamities of the Great Recession, a refrain arose from America’s elites: The Sun Belt is finally getting its comeuppance.
For decades, reporters, pundits, and academics in the D.C.-to-Boston corridor grumbled as their region hemorrhaged jobs, investment, residents, and political influence. The rise of the Sun Belt, a region identified by Kevin Phillips in The Emerging Republican Majority, appeared unstoppable. A 2001 Fannie Mae Foundation analysis found that between 1950 and 2000, the population below the 37th parallel grew by 156 percent, compared to a nationwide increase of 86 percent. Clark County, Nevada (2,749 percent), Arizona (584 percent), and Florida (477 percent) ranked at the top of the territory’s eruption.
But when home prices began to sag in 2006, and the mega-recession arrived in late 2007, the Sun Belt’s streak fizzled. By the spring of 2009, the Associated Press declared that the boom was over, “replaced by a bust that has left some swaths of the region suffering as severely as anywhere in the current recession.” USA TODAY wrote that economic implosion had spawned “an about-face in where Americans choose to live,” with “New York [registering] the smallest outmigration since at least 1990.” In September 2011, The New York Times noted — gleefully, perhaps? — that “the highest unemployment rates” were in the South and West.
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