Sunbelt

The Sunbelt is an imprecise popular region, most often characterized as the 13 states of the southern tier of the conterminous United States that lie south of roughly 37 degrees north latitude (Figure 1). Also included is the part of California that extends southward from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Mexican border as well as southernmost Nevada. Geographers would never choose to define such an amorphous area as a single region because it does not exhibit the unifying criteria specified by the discipline's regional concept. Nonetheless, wide popular use by the media has led social scientists to at least consider the merits of the Sunbelt idea. Overwhelmingly, they were unimpressed but came to realize that more attention needed to be paid to the relentless migration of people and activities to the fast-developing South and West during the final decades of the 20th century. By 2000, human geographers had begun to focus more of their studies on this part of the country, but such studies have produced no evidence showing that the southern tier states are developing collectively as a coherent[Page 471] unit of spatial organization. In fact, the term Sunbelt has almost disappeared from the popular media, whose dominant view of the broad partitioning of the United States in 2005 centered on the “red states/blue states” politico–geographic split in the aftermath of the two most recent presidential elections.

Figure 1 The Sunbelt Region of the United States

The term originated during World War II with military planners who pursued the strategic advantages of dispersing defense industries from the Northeast to the “Sunshine Belt” of the South and West. A quarter of a century later, political commentator Kevin Phillips first popularized the Sunbelt notion in his writings on the South's emerging Republican majority, but its broader implications did not take hold in the national imagination until the publication of Kirkpatrick Sale's Power Shift in 1975. Although scholars soon began to explore the consequences of the intensifying southwestward shift, most of their work has concentrated on localized impacts, particularly the transformations at the metropolitan scale that have shaped key urban complexes such as southern California, Phoenix, Houston, the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, Atlanta, and Florida's Interstate 4 corridor and southeastern Gold Coast.

Several forces underlie the recent growth and rising prosperity of the southern tier states. The increasing footlooseness of manufacturing and higher-order services allowed employers to take advantage of cheaper land, labor, energy supplies, and other costs of doing business. Globalization accelerated the relocation trend, especially the emergence of the West Coast as a major player in the burgeoning Pacific Rim. Amenities, notably the warm winters and recreational opportunities, played a leading role as well. And the technological innovations of the past half century also reinforced the break with the nation's historic northeastern core, particularly the revolutions in air and highway travel, telecommunications and information processing, personal computing, and universal air-conditioning.

After four decades of unremitting growth, the increasingly besieged southern tier states exhibit trends that are converging with those in the rest of the United States, especially problems of income inequality, social conflict, congestion and sprawl, and environmental degradation. Internally, most of these states resemble an economic–geographic checkerboard marked by stark contrasts between spaces of poverty and affluence, [Page 472]with the latter comprising a constellation of “sunspots” that prosper amid vast overwhelmingly rural areas still untouched by Sunbelt development.

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