Sun Belt cities are driving much of our urban growth. Let’s study them

Charlotte shares many urban problems with other boomimg Sun Belt cities. Photo: Daniel Weiss/Unsplash

This article has also been published by my former employer, the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. Read more of the institute’s offerings.

The U.S. population, like that in Charlotte, is growing, and much of the growth is in the cities of the Sun Belt. A new report from a Houston university research center says the country should be paying more attention to Sun Belt cities like Charlotte – treating them as a specific genre that needs its own body of research.

“Unfortunately, much of American urban policy is crafted – and, indeed, much urban policy research is conducted – with traditional Northeastern and Midwestern cities in mind,” says the report from the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University.

Released June 11, “The Urban Sun Belt: An Overview,” (download it here) lays out reasons why Sun Belt cities differ in key ways from other regions’ cities and deserve more attention – including the cities’ dramatic growth in recent decades.

Here’s one small example of why Sun Belt cities may need their own research: The term “Sun Belt” itself has no official definition. It was coined in 1969 by political analyst Kevin Phillips. So demographers and others must craft their own. For this report, the Kinder Institute defined the Sun Belt as spanning the continent from Los Angeles to Miami, below the 36’30º parallel. That takes in metro areas in North Carolina, Tennessee and Oklahoma but leaves out, for instance, California cities north of the Los Angeles metro area and Nevada cities north of Las Vegas. The report focuses on metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) of 1 million people or more.

And it concludes with an ominous analysis: Sun Belt cities may be particularly hamstrung, compared with older cities, in dealing with urban problems.

Chart: Rice Kinder Institute for Urban Research

Why should the rest of the nation care? For one thing, more and more of the nation now lives in those Sun Belt cities. The report offers some astounding facts:

Between 2000 and 2016, the 22 Sun Belt metro areas with more than 1 million people accounted for