Urban Lab, for example, found that Austin, Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth accounted for 71 percent of the jobs created in Texas in 2019.Įdward Glaeser, a Harvard economist who studies cities, provided me with data that showed which cities enjoyed rapid employment growth between 20. The growth is in the metro areas - which are often blue cities in red states. When you look inside the red states at where the growth is occurring, you notice immediately that the dynamism is not mostly in the red parts of the red states. So can we tell a simple story here: Republican policies work, Democratic policies don’t? They are moving to economically vibrant red states with lower costs, more conservative fiscal policies and more job opportunities.įifty years ago, few would have predicted that the American South would emerge as an economic dynamo - and that people would be flocking to places like South Carolina and Tennessee, but it’s happening. Perry goes down a range of other factors and concludes that Americans are moving away from blue states with high energy costs, byzantine regulatory regimes and unfriendly business climates. The median home price in those 10 population-gaining states is an average of 23 percent less than that of the 10 biggest population-losing states. That contributes to lower housing prices.

The growing states also have fewer restrictions on home construction. The 10 states with the biggest population loss have an 8 percent average rate. The 10 states that saw the biggest population gains have an average maximum income tax of 3.8 percent. The places they are flocking to have lower taxes. Perry compared the top 10 states people were flocking to in 2021 with the top 10 states people were flocking from. In a study for the American Enterprise Institute, Mark J. Why are these red states growing so rapidly? The short answer is that they are more pro-business. These days we are mostly a Sun Belt nation.

More than a century later, the 18 states that are generally considered to be in the Sun Belt account for about 52 percent of the nation’s population. The Brookings Institution demographer William Frey has noted that in 1920, the Northeast and the Midwest accounted for 60 percent of America’s population. If you go back farther, you see decade after decade of migration toward the more conservative South. During the pandemic, that trend accelerated, and once again, most of the big population-gaining states are governed by Republicans. I have only one question: If we’re right, why are so many people leaving blue states so they can live in red ones?īetween 20, the fastest-growing states were mostly red - places like Texas, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee and South Carolina. There are a lot of us in the Northeastern media who properly spend a lot of time slamming the Republican Party for what a mess it’s become.

Growing things and other stories