Revival: Americans Heading Back to the Hinterlands

This is the second of a two-part series on the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country. Read the first installment here.

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^th century. 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^st century 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.

Continue reading at RealClear Investigations.