Reactions to the Rise of the Sunbelt
Regional change, long in the making, had finally penetrated the American agenda in the 1970’s. As we presented in our earlier chapter, Sunbelt suburbs and central cities did not mirror their counterparts in the Northeast and Midwest. By the 1980’s and beyond, we need to deal more directly with the question as to whether Sunbelt central cities and/or suburbs exhibit their own distinct patterns of growth, political culture, politics and policy-making and, of course, economic development.
As early as 1971 James Q. Wilson[1] had asserted that the Sunbelt was quite different than the industrial heartland, the old regional Hegemon Northeast and Midwest. Carl Abbott argued that the Sunbelt’s youth and their “speed of growth and the rapid shift of socioeconomic status patterns with suburbanization may have operated to exacerbate conflict among different geographical segments of the Sunbelt metropolis”[2]. To simplify the point, in the Sunbelt both suburbs and central cities developed alongside each other–both simultaneously autonomous and interrelated; there was little, if any, temporal lag. Sunbelt central cities were more rivals to their suburbs than victims of their suburbs. The latter were not the illegitimate offspring of the former.
The horrendous struggle which was playing out in the central cities of the Northeast and Midwest was, for the most part, not evident in Sunbelt cities. We are not suggesting that Sunbelt central cities were all “wine and roses”; that they faced little or no fiscal stress, poverty-impacted populations, racial hostility and discrimination or CBD-Neighborhood conflict. Sunbelt central cities had all of these–but all these problem areas existed within a context of county and regional population and economic growth. The politics and economics of growth proved to be quite different than the politics and economics of decline. Nowhere was this antithesis more evident than in the City of Los Angeles during the 1980’s.
Here’s a Convenient Reason—and Strategy: Rise of the Sunbelt
The fact that the Sunbelt rose and the Snowbelt entered into a socio-economic funk has been well documented and a commonplace by 2013. So our purpose, as always in this historical treatment of our profession, is not to provide additional superfluous documentation and reiteration. The reader is referred to the footnote below for some literature that will provide description and statistical evidence regarding the movement of people and jobs that occurred over a thirty to forty year period[3]. Indeed, the most dramatic periods of Sunbelt growth lie after the seventies. Our purpose in this section is to introduce the concept of regional change, to explain why such regional change did become evident to observers during the 1970’s and to assess how it impacted the profession during the decade of the seventies.
In so doing we want to briefly outline the less appreciated fact that regional change had been in the making for some time and, as we discovered in our analysis thus far, Sunbelt is not a monolithic phenomenon. Sunbelt also exhibits a variety of forms, some subtle, others more dramatic. In describing the acknowledgement during the 1970’s of the Sunbelt’s rise, we hope to set a framework to understand how economic development during the 1970’s was affected. The reader should not try to carry the subsequent post 1980 transformations into our 1970’s discussions. To the greatest extent possible we are trying to see how folks perceived this long-term trend during this limited span of time. Needless to say, we shall carry forward this dynamic in our analysis of the future.
The value of appreciating the composition and impact of regional change in our historical depiction of the economic development profession lies in considerable measure to our sense of how economic development policy-making operates in a long-term environment characterized by serious change and transition to a new order. Policy makers do not have the luxury to wait these changes out; they must respond in virtual time. The attribution of blame is the fixed point by which policy solutions are devised. Attribution of blame reflects a whole host of emotions, philosophies, perceived future fate, and whether one is winning or losing at the moment (as well as other factors such as globalism and affluence). Over the five decades, or more, that regional changes play out, attribution of blame and policy-making will itself evolve and leave a considerable impact on the theory and practice of economic development. One of these forces-trends, deindustrialization, had impacts so fundamental to economic development, that we have decided to isolate it and discuss it separately in the next section.
Why did the regions shift so dramatically? The first and second answers, during the 1970’s, were unequivocally: the Federal Government had done it and capitalist corporations were controlling its and local government policy-making process. How? Through grants-in-aid, World War II Defense Department budgets, massive investment in infrastructure, and the subsidization of innovative, creative new industries like space. This blame it on the Federal government syndrome had already been the preferred explanation for suburbanization (highways, mortgages, etc.) and as regional change rolled out the easy response was “there they go again”. The disruptive role of the Federal government was a key variable and logically, having been the cause of the disruption, it was the responsibility of the Federal government to fix what it had broken. Secondly, political scientists and sociologists (and a few economists for good measure) declared jihad and entered into an ideological war. They tossed into the equation the role of capitalism and profit-seeking corporations and linked it to economic development policy and policy-making. Urban policy-making, economic development and empowerment of minorities/low income individuals/neighborhoods would eventually come to require a recast of capitalism itself–into a neo-liberal state for instance and a breakup of the corporate control of local policy-making. In the later stages of this debate, the concepts of culture and social class, as in creative class, entrepreneurs and big sorts will emerge.
Economists, on the other hand, during this decade stayed at home. Economists, who did not lack for ideology either, were more inclined to look at the “changing national and regional economies”. They would identify sector trends, global impacts and changing firm microeconomic trends. Something called the “regional economic base” would in due course emerge and enter into the policy analysis picture. Many would turn toward a body of literature loosely termed agglomeration economics. Also economists would grapple with the sources and nature of economic growth and decline (call it creative destruction if you will) and conduct internal discussions on the role of labor and innovation as pillars of growth. They debated a possible rejection of convergence or reversion to the mean as an inevitable end point of any period of growth. The Keynesian role of government would also evolve. In the later stages of regional change, globalism and mega regions would enter the fray, as if not being able to solve things locally it is best to enlarge analysis to include everything and anything going on in the entire planet.
All of these disciplinal evolutions (and more) would certainly reshape the theory and over time affect the practice of economic development. These last few paragraphs, however, are more than an introductory overview to the impacts of regional change. More critically, this introduction constitutes our big picture as to how we view and value the underlying impact of the constellation of trends and forces which we define as regional change on economic development. Regional change plays more of a role than mere geographic shifts. Our basic position remains that the big picture changes, subsumed under our rubric of regional change, are the fire under the pot, the energy source underlying the next thirty year evolution of economic development. As will become evident, however, the decade by decade story of regional change is much more tied to specific geographies, is fickle from one decade to the next, and to a large degree ignores or is grossly divorced from our big picture.
In our decade by decade-based discussion and description of regional change we will no longer talk about Sunbelt and Snowbelt. These are artificial concepts which were used in the seventies and somewhat in the eighties. Instead, we will break down these macro regions into geographies like “the new South”, the “old South”, “the Great Lakes”, the Plains states, the North East and Midwest, the Mountain States and the Southwest. Each of these regions is a simplification to be sure and they mask their own internal variations. But they do suit our more general descriptive purposes and do permit some level of order and understanding with the admitted price of some distortion. Importantly, our discussion of regional change allows us to now include jurisdictions which by virtue of their growth in these decades, we have not really discussed or commented upon thus far.
As to elaboration of our component elements included within our notion of regional change we are much less concerned with detailing how flow or which came first or even which is more important at any particular time. Rather, we see the component trends as combining to create a natural flow of people and job movements–a Gulf Stream or a highway flowing across time and geography. The massiveness of all these demographic, social and economic movements dwarfs specific political or economic development actions or programs. They are, for the most part, reacting to the underlying flows as they are felt and perceived. Firms, workers, people, and jobs are making decisions based on their assessment of what is best for them. Economic development activities facilitate, augment, target, or try to limit or block these millions of micro-decisions.
[1] James Q. Wilson, “Los Angeles Is–and Is Not–Different” in Los Angeles: Viability and Prospects for Municipal Leaderships”, Werner Z. Hirsch (New York, Praeger Publishers, 1971)
[2] Carl Abbott, op. cit. p. 12
[3] Summary literature on regional change and rise of Sunbelt and decline of Snowbelt. ACIR
Ron W. Coan 