Tag Archives: South

The pandemic gives residents to some places, the years afterward take them away

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What happened to the places that gained residents during the pandemic? Some are now experiencing less growth:

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Flash forward to today, and the big “winners” of the work-from-home reshuffle — metros that drew hordes of footloose workers and disaffected coastal dwellers — have turned into losers. Fewer people are moving to so-called Zoomtowns. Home listings are piling up on the market. Prices are dropping. The anxiety has shifted from buyers trying to elbow their way in to sellers just trying to offload their properties. A new report by the real estate analytics firm Parcl Labs, shared exclusively with Business Insider, shows that home sellers in the lower half of the US, also known as the Sun Belt, are the most desperate in the country…

Housing demand surged early in the pandemic — the country’s homeowning ranks swelled by a whopping 2.2 million people between the first quarter of 2020 and the same point in 2022, an analysis by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies shows. But for all the talk of upheaval, movers more or less stuck to those pre-pandemic flight patterns — just at warp speed. People kept migrating from big-city centers to the suburbs and from the North to the South. Sun Belt states, including Florida, Texas, Arizona, and North Carolina, experienced the largest population gains from domestic migration between mid-2020 and mid-2021, per a Harvard analysis of Census data. The Dallas metro, for example, gained around 63,000 people from other parts of the country that year, a huge jump from just 19,000 the year prior. Phoenix, Tampa, Austin, and Charlotte recorded similar increases. Expensive states with large urban areas, including California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts, saw the biggest losses…

The North-to-South movement still holds, but the North is losing fewer people, and the South isn’t gaining like it once was. The most recent numbers, for the yearlong period ending in mid-2024, show net domestic migration to the South was down almost 38% compared to the first year of the pandemic. Domestic migration to the Midwest, on the other hand, is up about 60% in that same period, though it’s still negative in absolute terms. The Northeast’s net loss was down to 192,000 in the latest tally, compared to a loss of 390,000 at the height of the pandemic. With the migration tide receding, sellers in once-hot metros are getting real. In Denver, Charlotte, Jacksonville, and a smattering of other Sun Belt markets, more than half of single-family homes for sale have seen a price cut, Parcl Labs data shows. In the Boston, Philadelphia, and Buffalo metros, the share of listings in that bucket drops to fewer than a third.

That’s just one metric. To gauge sellers’ desperation these days, Parcl Labs created what it calls the Motivated Sellers Index, which combines four factors: the number of price cuts on home listings, the time in between those cuts, the size of the price decreases, and the length of time homes are spending on the market. The higher the score, the greater the homeowners’ urgency to sell. The lower half of the US, with the exception of much of California, is awash in high scores, indicating sellers are ceding negotiating power to buyers. Same goes for much of the West. The Midwest and Northeast, on the other hand, registered some of the lowest scores in the nation: Sellers there are sitting pretty by comparison.

This is something I have wondered about a lot in recent years and even addressed, with Ben Norquist, in a chapter in my book Sanctifying Suburbia: in today’s world of smartphones, the Internet, and easy travel, why do people and organizations stay where they do when they could be located almost anywhere?

Evangelical non-profits described the benefits of being near other evangelical organizations. They thought they could find employees in certain places and could partner with other actors in the community. Some had long histories in their community while others had made a major move to help their budget.

Residents do not just go where there is cheap housing or plenty of jobs. They have ties to places and people. Moving comes with its own costs.

So some more people moved related to the pandemic following similar patterns in previous decades: away from metro areas in the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West. And that appears to be continuing, but at a slower pace and with some indicators that the rapid growth in the South and West is slowing. What does this all mean?

Perhaps the pandemic years were an aberration. Yes, people can work from home but this is not what all companies and organizations want. Bring a bunch of new people to new places and the housing prices go up and the communities change.

Does this mean all that movement would stop completely? Or that places in the Northeast and Midwest would grow? Not necessarily. Long-term patterns are hard to break.

South accounts for 87% of US population growth from 2022 to 2023

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What parts of the United States are growing in population? Look to the South:

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The Vintage 2023 population estimates show broader trends reflecting pre-pandemic norms, with fewer deaths and an increase in migration spurring growth. The net result was a gain of more than 1.6 million people in the past year, a 0.5% increase that brought the total U.S. population to 334,914,895…

Overall, 42 states saw population increases this year, topped by Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Arizona.

The South accounted for 87% of the nation’s population growth, adding more than 1.4 million residents. The Midwest reversed a two-year slide, adding more than 126,000 people for a modest 0.2% increase. The West region also saw a 0.2% increase, while the Northeast declined by 0.1%, according to census data.

The South is the only region that sustained its population growth throughout the pandemic, fueled by both domestic and international migration.

The ongoing population shift to the Sunbelt continues. It may not last forever but this is a consequential in-process change that affects numerous aspects of American life.

Gen Z headed South looking for cheaper and bigger houses?

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Sunbelt populations are growing. One reason is because Gen Z is moving to the South for housing:

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Traditionally, younger generations have flocked to cities to start their careers and enjoy the hustle and bustle of urban life. However, Gen Z is proving to be a little different, with more and more moving to the South in favor of large outdoor spaces, low cost of living and a slower pace of life…

The Southern region boasts more affordable housing and living space, which is becoming increasingly attractive to Gen Z as well as some Millennials and older adults who are fed up with cramped city life.

According to Storage Cafe, the average floor area of single-family homes sold in the South increased by 60 square feet between 2019 and 2022, meaning the average is now 2,608 square feet…

And since Gen Z is more likely to rent rather than own a home currently, it makes sense that more of the younger generation would be seeking out spaces where housing costs are cheaper.

I would be interested in seeing more numbers here. Are Gen Z movers doing so at similar rates as other Americans?

Is one of the side effects of all this movement a point where housing and opportunities in the South are no longer as attractive?

The final part of the article hints at the possible political ramifications of these moves. I would want to hear more about how younger adults might transform communities and day-to-day life in other ways. Is this a continuation of the American suburban dream with more liberal politics thrown on top?

The growth of the South required air conditioning

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The South is hot during the summer – especially so this year – and architectural adaptations to deal with the heat have given way to air conditioning:

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“They would build homes with transoms over the doors and over the windows,” Dr. Diaz explained. “They would build homes with the front door and the back door in complete alignment — you could basically create a wind current through the house.”

Days were structured around the heat, waking at 4 a.m. to work outside, then taking breaks and eating a big meal in the middle of the day…

The ascendance of air-conditioning was a transformative force in the South, facilitating the rise of suburbs and making the region less forbidding for companies that wanted to move in. Now, transoms and rising early have been replaced with drive-throughs and attached garages and cranking up the A.C. — for people with the means and jobs that allow it.

“People are so completely dependent on air-conditioning,” said Craig E. Colten, a professor of geography at Louisiana State University. “You run around on our campus and you see people going between classes in shorts and sweatshirts because the air-conditioning is so ramped up.”

Even as air conditioning makes inside activity more possible, it would be interesting to see how much activity during the hot months takes place inside compared to the rest of the year. If people in colder climes spend more time inside during the cold months, is the same true in the South during the summer?

And do not forget the importance of air conditioning for office work.

Divine Programming and the last two seasons of a critically acclaimed TV show that takes religion seriously

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In September, I wrote about reading the academic study Divine Programming and watching seasons one and two of the TV show Rectify. I have now watched the final two seasons of the show, seasons three and four, and was interested to see the role religion played. Here are some thoughts.

  1. Religion is certainly not as important to the plot as it was in the first season. The number of times it is mentioned decreases. There is no presence of organized or institutional religion; it is all personal or individual.
  2. The primary religious character has a return to their faith in the final season. This does not mean everything turns out correctly for them or religion helps solve big issues. It appears that their privatized faith emerges again after going through some personal trials.
  3. The final episodes interact with the themes of hope and disappointment. Arguably, these themes run throughout the entire series; when Daniel is released from prison at the beginning, this does not necessarily lead to long-term consequences for the characters as they engage with what happened in the past and their current circumstances. These are themes that certainly fit with a religious theme. Why do bad things happen? Why are we disappointed? What gives us hope? In the end, the themes of hope and disappointment are left more to the individual characters and immediate family to address, not to religion.

Considering the full show, religion did matter in the narrative arc of the show but it was not a primary force, one that even a majority of the characters engaged with, and did not provide hope or disappointment in the end. Other forces and actors were more influential and the show, like many American narratives, puts a lot of hope in individuals and close relationships among family.

Divine Programming and watching two seasons of a critically acclaimed TV show that treats religion seriously

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This summer I read the book Divine Programming: Negotiating Christianity in American Dramatic Television Production 1996-2016. Charlotte Howell argues that television often utilizes two techniques when portraying Christian faith: keeping it at a critical distance or depicting it a cultural feature of Southern life. However, not all television shows do this. One critically-acclaimed show Howell highlighted, Rectify, sounded interesting.

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I have now watched the first two seasons of the show. And it is indeed interesting to see how religion in incorporated as part of the plot. The main character in the drama, a man who has been released from death row even as law enforcement and legal actors are interested in putting him back in prison, finds religion in the middle of the opening season. He has a conversion and a baptism. He is attracted to this faith through the example of his sister-in-law who attends church regularly, encourages her husband to be more faithful, attends a small group, and has a gentle spirit.

Yet, at least through two seasons, the reassurances faith provides have difficulty matching up the problems the characters face. The released prisoner finds that his conversion is perhaps less important to his thriving than interacting with his sister-in-law. The sister-in-law confronts new problems and her faith no longer provides all the answers. The other main characters do not seem to interact with faith much at all and their own self-interest and hurt drives their decisions. Outside of several individual characters engaging religion (a common approach in American religiosity) , it is not present for the other characters or the community.

The faith of this show is not simple or does not always provide an answer or does not even matter to many of them. The characters have religious highs and lows and wrestle with how faith matters in real situations. The faith on the show is not front and center in the way it is in Seventh Heaven (also a case study in Howell’s book) nor is it derided or just a cultural artifact.

At the same time, it is clear that faith or religion is not driving the plot: human desires are. I will keep watching and see whether this is ultimately commentary about the ability or inability for religious faith to intercede in human affairs.

Predicting the ongoing rapid urbanization of the South

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The American South is known for its sprawling cities and one new model suggests this will continue in force in coming decades:

New predictions map the future spread of urban sprawl in Dixie, and it is immense. Basing their model on past growth patterns and locations of existing road networks, researchers at North Carolina State University projected the region’s expansion decades into the future. According to their forecast, the Southern urban footprint is expected to grow 101 percent to 192 percent.

The projected map in 2060:

Read the full paper here. As the discussion section notes, the model doesn’t really account for future decisions in opposition to current patterns. In other words, such a model is not deterministic: it is based on past data but communities could make decisions that continue down this path (and even intensify urban growth beyond the predictions here) or pursue different patterns of urban growth (say if New Urbanism catches on in a big way and exurban growth slows quite a bit).

Put another way, is it possible to imagine an American South that in 50 or 100 years wouldn’t be noted for its sprawl?

Does the South beat out Chicago because of better weather?

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Here is a quick summary of research looking at how weather might affect population changes in Chicago and similarly cold-weather places versus the warmer weather of the South:

Renn pointed me towards the work of Edward Glaeser, the Harvard economist and U. of C. grad who’s become one of the most prominent analysts of the American city in the 21st century. And he thinks there’s a strong correlation. He’s got a whole paper on it, in fact: “Smart Growth: Education, Skilled Workers, & the Future of Cold Weather Cities.”

Cities with average January temperatures under 30 degrees Fahrenheit grew in population only one-third as quickly from 1960 to 1990 as did cities with average January temperatures above 50 degrees. The shift of population toward the Sun Belt can also be seen at the state level: while population in the colder 25 states grew 95 percent between 1920 and 1980, the warmer 25 states saw their average population grow 309 percent…

In short, there’s something of a chicken-and-egg question with the air-conditioning solution that Glaeser cites. Adoption of air conditioning, across the South, was slower than you might expect from the weather. Its availability is a well-established boon to the South, but so is being able to power and afford air conditioning.

It’s significant that Enrico Moretti, like Glaeser an economist interested in how knowledge workers cluster in cities and regions, has most recently turned his focus back to the Tennessee Valley Authority. That’s a government project so ingrained in Southern culture that, as a kid, I thought that the Tennessee River was just called the TVA (emphasis mine):

We find that the TVA’s direct productivity effects were substantial. The investments in productive infrastructure resulted in a large increase in local manufacturing productivity, which in turn led to a 0.3% increase in national manufacturing productivity. By contrast, the indirect effects of the TVA on manufacturing productivity were limited. While we do find strong evidence of localized agglomeration economies in the manufacturing sector, our empirical analysis clearly points to a constant agglomeration elasticity. When the elasticity of agglomeration is the same everywhere in the country, spatially reallocating economic activity has no aggregate effects, as the benefits in the areas that gain activity are identical to the costs in areas that lose it. Thus, we estimate that the spillovers in the TVA region were fully offset by the losses in the rest of the country.

The intensely regressive economic (and cultural) practices of the South damned up potential across its old borders; once they began to fall, it created a flood, draining Yankee knowledge, technology, and workers.

While everyone wants to talk about the weather, it isn’t the only factor nor the most important factor in population and economic growth. To suggest this is the case is to rely on strong ecological arguments, perhaps like those made by Jared Diamond in his more popular books. Yes, air conditioning matters but humans were able to live in both the warmer South and colder North before air conditioning or central heating. More broadly, factors like electricity and water (see the recent troubles in the Southwest) matter more and are essential to even having air conditioning in the first place. Thus, the twist of invoking the TVA, an important adaptation to nature, makes the matter all the much more complex: essential infrastructure makes all sorts of other things possible.

Kotkin argues a rising South could overtake the North

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Joel Kotkin argues that a variety of changes in the South including economic and population growth could help it eventually overtake the North, even with its negative image:

One hundred and fifty years after twin defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg destroyed the South’s quest for independence, the region is again on the rise. People and jobs are flowing there, and Northerners are perplexed by the resurgence of America’s home of the ignorant, the obese, the prejudiced and exploited, the religious and the undereducated. Responding to new census data showing the Lone Star State is now home to eight of America’s 15 fastest-growing cities, Gawker asked: “What is it that makes Texas so attractive? Is it the prisons? The racism? The deadly weather? The deadly animals? The deadly crime? The deadly political leadership? The costumed sex fetish conventions? The cannibal necromancers?”…

While the recession was tough on many Southern states, the area’s recovery generally has been stronger than that of Yankeedom: the unemployment rate in the region is now lower than in the West or the Northeast. The Confederacy no longer dominates the list of states with the highest share of people living in poverty; new census measurements (PDF), adjusted for regional cost of living, place the District of Columbia and California first and second. New York now has a higher real poverty rate than Mississippi.

Over the past five decades, the South has also gained in terms of population as Northern states, and more recently California, have lost momentum. Once a major exporter of people to the Union states, today the migration tide flows the other way. The hegira to the sunbelt continues, as last year the region accounted for six of the top eight states attracting domestic migrants—Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia. Texas and Florida each gained 250,000 net migrants. The top four losers were New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and California…

Bluntly put, if the South can finally shake off the worst parts of its cultural baggage, the region’s eventual ascendancy over the North seems more than likely. High-tech entrepreneurs, movie-makers, and bankers appreciate lower taxes and more sensible regulation, just like manufacturers and energy companies. And people generally prefer affordable homes and family-friendly cities. Throwing in a little Southern hospitality, friendliness, and courtesy can’t hurt either.

Kotkin is determined these days to wave these economic and population figures in the faces of urbanists and coastal residents. That said, the shift to the South is intriguing and significant. Whereas the Northeast and Midwest were ascendent in the early 1900s, the South and Sunbelt have rebounded.

One way this play out with undergraduates is when we discuss how to control for geography in basic regression models. One of the most common ways in sociology to do this is to make a dummy variable for the South. When students ask why this is, I explain that sociologists tend to assume the South is the most unusual region compared to the other three. There are demographic and cultural reasons for this but I wonder if there is some latent feelings about the South…

“The Great Reverse Migration”: blacks move away from northern cities

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The Great Migration brought more than 6 million blacks to the north from the south starting in the early 20th century but now it looks like the population flow might be working in reverse:

The New York Times noticed in the early 1970s that, for the first time, more blacks were moving from the North to the South than vice versa. Last year, the Times described the South’s share of black population growth as “about half the country’s total in the 1970s, two-thirds in the 1990s and three-quarters in the decade that just ended.”

Many of the migrants are “buppies” — young, college-educated, upwardly mobile black professionals — and older retirees. Over the last two decades, according to the Census, the states with the biggest gains in black population have been Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, Texas and Florida. New York, Illinois and Michigan have seen the greatest losses. Today, 57 percent of American blacks live in the South — the highest percentage in a half-century.

Much of the migration has been urban-to-urban. During the first decade of this century, according to Brookings Institution demographer Bill Frey, the cities making the biggest gains in black population were Atlanta, Dallas and Houston. Meanwhile, New York City’s black population fell by 67,709, Chicago’s by 58,225, Detroit’s by 37,603.

Plenty of the migrants have been moving from cities to suburbs, too. “By 2000 there were 57 metropolitan areas with at least 50,000 black suburbanites, compared to just 33 in 1980,” notes sociologist Andrew Wiese. The 2010 census revealed that 51 percent of blacks in the 100 largest metro areas lived in the suburbs. As journalist Joel Garreu describes it, suburbia now includes a “large, church-going, home-owning, childbearing, backyard barbecuing, traffic-jam-cursing black middle class remarkable for the very ordinariness with which its members go about their classically American suburban affairs.”

The article goes on to talk about four reasons why this is occurring: the private sector has been creating more jobs in the south, housing is cheaper in the south, public services in the north like schools aren’t that great, and retirees are looking for better weather.

The suburbs data mentioned above is fascinating: more blacks are in more metropolitan areas and a majority of blacks in the largest metro areas live in the suburbs. While there is some evidence blacks are moving to the south, might there even be stronger evidence that blacks are moving to the suburbs? At the same time, this does not necessarily mean that these suburbs are great places; many inner-ring suburbs face a lot of big city problems and perhaps have even fewer resources to deal with the problem. For example, see this post from last year about blacks moving from Detroit to suburbs that have similar troubles.

This also reminds me of some of the demographic mobility in the United States: 110 years ago, there were relatively few blacks in northern cities. Five decades ago, whites fled many of these cities because they thought blacks were invading their neighborhoods. Now, blacks are moving to the suburbs and back to the south. I have never seen any figures on this but it seems like the United States has a relatively high degree of internal mobility compared to other countries.