Joel Kotkin & Wendell Cox on RCP Podcast

By: Andrew Walworth, Carl Cannon
On: Real Clear Politics Podcast

RCP contributors Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox talk to Carl Cannon about their recent piece in RealClear Investigations, “Revival: Americans Heading Back to the Hinterlands,” looking at the demographic trend of more and more Americans moving to smaller cities and towns. (starts at minute 30)

“Joel Kotkin is a fellow at Civitas, a really exciting new program at the University of Texas at Austin, trying to—really, save higher education. They’re modest about it, but that’s it. And Wendell Cox has a website called Demographia,” Cannon explained. “I won’t say they’re futurists—because they’ve been writing about this for so long. But, the future is here.”

“Wendell and I have been working on demographics for years and have been making the point that most Americans are moving to suburbs and exurbs. Only university professors and reporters at The New York Times never got the memo,” Kotkin explained. “What led us to do this piece was remarkable findings from Wendell which showed that, for the first time in our experience, smaller communities were actually growing faster than bigger ones—and even rural areas. You read for years about these ‘forsaken’ places, but some of them are doing a lot better than people think.”

“We looked at essentially 900 metropolitan areas in the country. I divided it into about eight categories, and among population categories of more than a million (that gets you about 57 metropolitan areas), essentially none of the categories added any population or any net domestic migrants at all. All of the gain in domestic migration—people moving from one part of the country to another—was in metropolitan areas of less than a million,” Cox added. “Right now, California has about 39 million people. It’s been the fastest-growing state going back to 1850. But the state Department of Finance is projecting they will have the same population in 2070. No growth—for 55 years. Los Angeles County is expected to lose a million people.”

“The pandemic really supercharged it,” Kotkin said. “Because of the Internet—because of what we’re on right now—people are able to work, even at very high-end jobs, from remote locations. Wendell’s in St. Louis, I now have editors living in North Carolina. The increase in the ability to work remotely—even at the highest end—is real.”