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The Sunbelt has aleady proven to not keep up with the population growth. The economy in the region shows signs of weakening since construction and real estate have taken a stall.
What future does the Sunbelt hold?
Keep in mind I'm referring to the SE of the Sunbelt.
Will the Sunbelt realize the same plight as the Rustbelt in the coming decades?
Quote:
Originally Posted by knowledgeiskey
The Sunbelt has aleady proven to not keep up with the population growth. The economy in the region shows signs of weakening since construction and real estate have taken a stall.
What future does the Sunbelt hold?
Keep in mind I'm referring to the SE of the Sunbelt.
Will the Sunbelt realize the same plight as the Rustbelt in the coming decades? The Sunbelt (with some exceptions) was never developed industrially to the same extent as the Rustbelt, so the region has not been devasted to the same extent by the 'Free trade' policies of the Federal Government and its Corporate sponsors. However, the entire country including the Sunbelt will "enjoy" slower growth in the future as we try to compete with 3rd world countries where we buy their stuff but they won't buy ours.
The Sunbelt has aleady proven to not keep up with the population growth. The economy in the region shows signs of weakening since construction and real estate have taken a stall. This is hard to say because alot of the slower growth you describe really has more to do with a recession, oil price sticker shock, the Internet/changing technology and the housing crisis. Long term, our politicians seem to have no real idea about the country's future. IMO, these are more National problems than Sunbelt problems.
What future does the Sunbelt hold? The Sunbelt still has lots of less developed land, but as the population grows rapidly, prices, traffic, taxes, crime etc will increase. There will begin to resistance to uncontrolled growth as people begin to realize that more people does not necessarily = better quality of life. This maybe why crowded places like the Northeast and California tend to be more green or conservationist oriented.
The Sunbelt has aleady proven to not keep up with the population growth. The economy in the region shows signs of weakening since construction and real estate have taken a stall.
What future does the Sunbelt hold?
Keep in mind I'm referring to the SE of the Sunbelt.
No because lots of the cities in the Sunbelt are located on the coast and we've learned from the rustbelt mistakes.
There are cities in the Southeast with fairly diverse economies - Atlanta will do well, Charlotte will do well, the Research Triangle area will do well. The RTP area is very heavily academic, government, and tech/emerging industries/biotech, so I don't see the Triangle running out of gas any time soon. Charlotte has taken some severe hits in financial services, but a lot of the layoffs from the big companies there are translating into financial-services and back-office type start-ups.
Across North Carolina, unemployment is high, but the vast majority of that can be attributed to aspects of North Carolina's economy that were similar to rust-belt industry - furniture manufacturing and textile mills, two industries that have offshored, and were located in smaller, one-industry NC towns. As those towns don't have the dynamic economies the major cities do, they will keep those unemployment numbers up.
Elsewhere - I think the future is a little more clouded for cities with tourist-driven economies, and Florida is in trouble - it's economy has taken major hits, and its' population growth has slowed far more dramatically than any other Southeastern state. There are a few cities elsewhere - New Orleans springs to mind - that have been on the international tourism radar for decades, but I don't know how much actual good it has done for the city. This throws a bit of a question mark into the future of other cities (Charleston and Asheville immediately spring to mind) that are starting to pop up on the international tourism radar - the success of those cities really depends on what else they can do. Tourist-driven economies are deeply unstable - they tend to fuel low-wage (below living wage) service jobs, relative exploitation, and a lot of poverty that starts out hidden from tourists' view, but - as in the case of New Orleans - eventually becomes screamingly obvious.
Some, if not all of the Southern boom towns, and some states, have made something of a cottage industry out of poaching corporate HQ's and large manufacturing plants (automobiles, chiefly) from other states, by waving incentive dollars around; just last week the governor of NC was in Shanghai and Beijing, essentially sucking up to players in the corporate world over there.
That is explicitly NOT how success was nourished at other times, in other parts of the country - much of the success of the Rust Belt cities was based on manufacturing and - in some places - resource extraction and processing - but it was built upon companies that were local in their origins, and grew into major successes (and it should be noted that the great Rust Belt cities all hit their most intense phases of growth during the era of robber barons, which had something to do with it as well). This is also true - more recently - in places like Silicon Valley and Seattle, where the big successes have been what were once tiny start-ups that grew into global powerhouses, without cutting their local ties.
The Southeast is extremely weak in this kind of development. There are pockets of it - Northern Virginia, Atlanta, and the RTP area, but not much else, and the states seem to take local successes (like Red Hat, here in North Carolina) for granted. Start-ups aren't as glitzy as ribbon-cuttings for a new BMW plant, even if the long-term benefit of the BMW plant might be highly dubious at best. That might be - in economic development terms - where the Southeast rises or falls.
And there are cities - like Fayetteville, NC - a city of 200,000+ that has NOTHING but military (Ft Bragg and Pope AFB) going on. If world peace was achieved tomorrow, that city would instantly, immediately become Flint, MI with Southern humidity, because there is zilch for anything else economically happening there.
I don't think there is any way to predict what will happen long term down the road in any region. There are far too many variables. Mind you, there is probably nearly as big of a difference in how some Sunbelt cities are doing as to how some Rustbelt cities are doing.
Your comment about the weakening economy applies almost universally in the United States. The effects are evident almost everywhere...but perhaps its easier to see in some of the Sunbelt areas, where rapid growth instantly turned to slow growth. I think that has less to do with the particular region, and more to do with the economy as a whole.
Some cities are weathering the storm better than others.
who knows. but you're all tying the south's hands together and then saying they're going to slow and stagnate. anybody can predict that when issues like the boeing factory in south carolina fall apart due to complainers in the northwest and the federal government sticking their noses in business it doesn't belong in.
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Will the Sunbelt realize the same plight as the Rustbelt in the coming decades?
