The coast-ification of America
Even as the rest of the world is urbanizing, so is the United States — and in America’s case, our urbanization is striking: it’s coastal, as revealed in this remarkable graphic from the USDA’s Economic Research Service:
Set aside the gray-blue areas, which are already urbanized. What’s the trend? Where are people moving?
The red sectors are population loss, and they are heavily concentrated in the plains states — the area west of the Appalachians and east of the Rockies. The only non-coastal non-metropolitan counties showing frequent increases in population are in the intra-Rockies resort areas of Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and Montana.
Where the people are leaving
Three states show an especially stark mountains/ plains dichotomy. In Oregon, west of the Cascades, near the coasts, population is growing; east of it, population is shrinking. Montana similarly divides into Rocky Mountain growth (west) and plains shrinkage (east), as does Colorado.
Beautiful flat lands, and no people
Equally striking is the distribution of that population change, as shown below:
In land terms, two-thirds of America is non-metropolitan, but in demographic terms, only one in five Americans lives outside metropolitan areas. (Anyone who thinks America’s overcrowded should consider that 80% of us live in only one-third of the available counties. America is an enormous country; we can and will support a much larger population in the coming decades.) Further, there’s only minimal natural population growth in the non-metropolitan counties (less than 1.1% over five years).
Why are people moving? Because that’s where the jobs are, as shown in this ERS chart:
Unemployment in metro and non-metro areas
People are leaving the farms to find jobs in the cities. This is a pattern being repeated throughout the world, it’s just that in America the causality is reversed. Elsewhere, people move to the cities hoping to find or create jobs; here the cities are creating the jobs, attracting people (including immigrants; roughly 45% of all metropolitan population growth is coming from immigration).
What does this people movement mean?
· America is coast-ifying. The middle is emptying.
The Great Plains’ only rapidly-expanding demographic group
· Today we have more homes in middle America than we will have households to fill them (with some allowance for the elasticity of housing demand). Non-coastal non-metro markets will continue to be weak.
· Infill development, workforce housing, and inclusionary zoning are going to be more and more important.
· The housing policy inversion will continue: local government will have to take the lead designing customized affordability strategies.
· In real terms, long-term housing prices are going in opposite directions:
o Non-coastal areas, Down.
o Coastal areas, Up.
Coastal prices going this way
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