Revival: Americans Heading Back to Hinterlands

The famous New Yorker magazine cover showing much of civilization ending at the Hudson River, save for Chicago, D.C., and then the West Coast, had more than a grain of truth for much of the 20^thcentury. The term “flyover country” was not just a snobbish put-down but a reality as a handful of core cities – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – exerted oversized influence over America’s culture, politics, and economy, with rural communities and smaller cities playing a relatively marginal role in the national drama.

The early decades of the 21^stcentury have altered America’s geographic reality. Moribund small cities have come back to life. Two decades ago, downtown Fargo, North Dakota, was dull and somewhat derelict. Now it boasts loft apartments, a fine boutique hotel, and a panoply of cultural attractions, including art studios and dance venues. Since 2010, about 14,000 Americans have moved to its metropolitan area. That total is small, but it reflects the experiences of many other once withering communities that are attracting people from larger urban centers. The Fargo metro area added nearly double the number of net domestic migrants as the nearest large metro area, Minneapolis-St. Paul, which is 15 times larger.

Some of this can be traced to considerably lower housing prices, which allows millennials to be on their own much earlier; only 5% of millennials in the Great Plains states live at home, less than half the percentage in California, New York, and New Jersey. It’s also a result of a new wealth created by tech, manufacturing, and other industries seeking to reduce costs in less-regulated, less expensive areas where more people are willing to relocate.

Smaller Communities Rebound

Springfield, a metropolitan area of nearly 500,000 people in the southwest corner of Missouri, has blossomed in the past decade. Its economy, anchored by Southwest Missouri State University, is also home to several large firms, including Bass Pro Shops, O’Reilly Auto Parts, and accounting firm BKD. These businesses provide promising opportunities for millennials.

Between 2010 and 2023, a net 38,000 new residents moved into the area from elsewhere in the U.S. Rather than being rejected as outsiders by longtime residents, newcomers are welcome to join local boards and commissions.

“What Springfield attracts are people who are self-starters who want to fast-track their involvement in the community,” says millennial Matt Simpson, chief research and planning officer at Ozark Technical College, who was recently elected to the City Council. “People of my generation are motivated by the fact that you can have a say at an earlier age.”

Much of Springfield’s appeal lies not in culture or consumerism, where big cities are still hard to beat, but in the local habits and traditions found in numerous churches, charities, and civic groups.

Note: This is the second in a two-part series of the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country. Read part one here.

Read the rest of this piece at: Real Clear Investigations.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Wendell Cox is principal of Demographia, an international public policy firm located in the St. Louis metropolitan area. He is a Senior Fellow with Unleash Prosperity in Washington and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Winnipeg and a member of the Advisory Board of the Center for Demographics and Policy at Chapman University in Orange, California. He has served as a visiting professor at the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers in Paris. His principal interests are economics, poverty alleviation, demographics, urban policy and transport. He is author of the annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey and author of Demographia World Urban Areas.

Photo: Diedrich via Wikimedia, under CC 4.0 License.