The Death of the American Sunbelt
By Michael Boyajian
For decades we were conditioned to believe that the future of the country rested in the Sunbelt. The Northeast and Upper Midwest were rusting away as the Sunbelt grew. The idea peaked with the Los Angeles Olympics in the 1980s where the California dream showed off all it had. But the idea reached a plateau with that although the region did continue to grow economically and politically with its population growth.
Today I can announce that the Sunbelt dream is dead and it is the Northeast and Upper Midwest that will once again rise to prominence. California is near bankruptcy and you hear of more and more people leaving the state than going there which was not the case from the 1960s forward till recently.
Even Florida is in bad shape crushed by the housing bubble and an onslaught of hurricanes as well. The Southeast is burdened by on and off drought and tornadoes. Texas is increasingly under the thumb of right wing extremists scaring moderates out of the state. Arizona has become a land of bigots who hate those that built the very land they live in scaring off its valuable tourism trade. The Gulf of Mexico is practically a dead zone and the Gulf Coast is on the edge of becoming a ghost region thanks to Katrina and BP. The entire Sunbelt is lacking in mass transit and infrastructure but for highways.
It is safe to predict that the Sunbelt will begin losing population to the Northeast and Upper Midwest and this will be reflected in the 2020 census. Population will bleed out of the region looking for new opportunities that are created on mass transit infrastructure as found in the Northeast and Upper Midwest. The Sunbelt will also lose congressional seats and so political power will also slip away.
Where once presidents rose to great heights in the Sunbelt in the future only regional politicians will exist hoping to hang on to their limited power and bowing to others for crumbs from the table of the new northern majority. That is what the future holds for the once great Sunbelt of America
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