great plains in midst of historic recovery, report says

Fueled by a booming energy industry, heightened demand for farm commodities, a growing manufacturing sector and healthy in-migration, the region appears ready to “take its role at the center stage of American aspiration, innovation and progress,” demographer Joel Kotkin wrote in “The Rise of the Great Plains: Regional Opportunity in the 21st Century.”

“It’s an amazing transformation,” Kotkin, a distinguished presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., said of the region, which stretches across most of the western two-thirds of Texas into the Dakotas.