Indianapolis

The Midwest Climate Critique is Bogus

Pete Saunders — Mon, 07 Jul 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Every so often I see that someone makes the claim that people are leaving the Midwest because the weather sucks. That claim is bogus.

X poster Hunter (@StatisticUrban) made this claim in a tweet sent Monday:

“Nobody wants to hear this but one of the reasons the midwest is struggling is that the weather just sucks.

It's freezing cold, dark, and snowy in the winter, and hot and humid in the summer. The truly "nice" parts of the year are limited to a few weeks in the spring/fall.”

One parenthetic note, here: the OP’s location on X is given as the United Kingdom. Assuming they are from London, perhaps the best climate in an otherwise climate-challenged nation, I find it odd that someone from a place so cloudy, misty and perpetually cool would make this point. Nonetheless, London’s weather has not kept it from becoming one of the world’s premier global cities.

Let me say I don’t completely disagree with this person. The Midwest’s weather is not, uh, optimal. There are better places climate-wise. And that’s fine. However, it’s not the principal reason people leave the Midwest.

I’ve always maintained that there’s little difference in climate between Midwestern and Northeastern cities. I looked at climate data listed on the Wikipedia page of several cities, and here’s what I found. A quick one-on-one comparison between cities at similar latitudes makes the point. Here in this data comparison of the climates of Boston and Chicago, they’re essentially the same:

The climates of New York City and Indianapolis? The same:

Guess what? Comparing Washington, DC and St. Louis, they’re the same:

In every comparison, there’s virtually no difference in annual precipitation, annual snowfall, record high and record low temperatures, average annual relative humidity, or the amount of annual sunlight and cloudiness. Midwestern cities have slightly higher maximum temperatures and slightly lower minimum temperatures, due to their inland locations. Otherwise, at similar latitudes, the cities are quite comparable.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo source: Snow on Boston Common Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

A Case For The Great Lakes Region As America’s 12th Regional Culture

Pete Saunders — Sun, 25 May 2025 20:28:38 -0400

I love the book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard. In it, he outlines the regional cultures of America and the impact that each has had on the development of the United States. I think it’s fascinating, mostly because I’m a firm believer in the Shakespearean phrase “what’s past is prologue.” History tells us so much about what could possibly happen in the future.

But I think Woodard got one thing wrong in his book. There should be 12 American nations, not 11. The Great Lakes should be its own regional culture. Furthermore, it should be recognized as the first purely American culture in American history.

Here are the eleven nations as identified by Woodard:

Yankeedom (New England and the upper Midwest). Settled by English Puritans, they valued education and communal decision-making.
New Netherland (the greater New York metropolitan area). Founded by the Dutch in the 1600s, this nation has maintained a multicultural and commercial perspective since being established.
Midlands (stretching from Pennsylvania to the Great Plains of Nebraska and Kansas, widening as it moves westward). Established first by English Quakers and later the Pennsylvania Dutch, it’s been a “go along to get along” kind of region for most of its existence.
Tidewater (the Chesapeake Bay area). Founded by English who were perhaps most sympathetic to the British Crown, it’s where the plantation economy got its start.
Greater Appalachia (starting in central Pennsylvania and West Virginia and extending southwestward into Arkansas, Oklahoma and north Texas). Settled by Scots-Irish immigrants, who were accustomed to difficult terrain, the region might be the most ruggedly individualist of them all.
Deep South (the lowlands just south of the Appalachian Mountains). Tidewater might be where the plantation economy got its start, but the Deep South took it to another level. Probably the most hierarchical region as a result.
New France (in the U.S., mostly southern Louisiana; in Canada, the most populated parts of Quebec). Not much of this is left in America today, but Cajun culture has left an indelible imprint on the nation.
El Norte (the length of the U.S./Mexico border, extending into southern California). Founded by Spanish Catholic missionaries, once part of Mexico. An influx of settlers from the Deep South and Appalachian nations turned it into a unique transitional region.
Far West (generally the area in the U.S. between the Missouri River and the Rocky Mountains). The settlers of the Deep South, Midlands and Yankeedom who wanted more land and just to be left alone moved here.
The Left Coast (central California up through the Bay Area, beyond Portland and Seattle, and continuing into southeastern Alaska). Probably owes its northern orientation to being founded by New Englanders and the Midlands. But the influence of El Norte and Greater Appalachia is also felt.
First Nations (the parts of Canada south of the Arctic Circle that include the northern portions of the Prairie Provinces, northern Ontario and northern Quebec). The First Nations influence is much stronger in Canada but can still be felt in the northern Great Lakes.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Michigan City lighthouse by Matt Morse, via Wikimedia under CC 3.0 License.

Masking Urban Weaknesses

Pete Saunders — Mon, 16 Sep 2024 20:28:58 -0400

In a recent post I noted problematic city/suburb relationships that harm Midwestern cities and metros. Urban problems are on full display for all to see. But there’s a flip side to the poor city/suburb relationship dynamic I spoke about, too. It’s this: some cities and metros are quite good at masking their weaknesses from the eyes of residents and visitors. And their metro perceptions benefit from it.

The Indianapolis Story

Let’s talk about Indianapolis.

Indianapolis is a city that doesn’t get a lot of nationwide coverage on much of anything. Indianapolis might be the archetype for what many people view as a Midwestern city – a decent, midsized city with a good quality of life, affordable, with some of the hallmarks of good urban living but not all. A nice place, but if you’re looking for sizzle, this isn’t it. Somewhere along the way it garnered nicknames like “Naptown” and “India-no-place” and it hasn’t quite shaken the perceptions that come with it.

If there’s anything positive that outsiders recognize about Indianapolis is that it avoided the deep decline experienced by cities like Buffalo, Cleveland and Detroit. In fact, Indianapolis might be better known for adopting a Sun Belt-style growth profile over the last fifty years or so, allowing it to grow in a similar fashion as modestly-sized similar Sun Belt upstarts like Nashville, Jacksonville and Oklahoma City. For people in the Midwest, especially in the Great Lakes, back in the ‘80s and ‘90s it was held up as an example of how to reverse decades of decline and become an urban success story.

But there’s more to Indianapolis’ perceived success than adopting another region’s growth profile.

Indianapolis following World War II was on the same trajectory as many other Midwestern cities. It was troubled by increasing crime, poor school performance, strained race relations and white flight to suburbia. However, Indianapolis took a path that few Midwestern cities did – it pursued a consolidated city-county government that changed its perceptions and trajectory.

In the late 1960’s, mayor (and later Indiana Senator) Richard Lugar proposed Unigov, or unifying the city of Indianapolis with its suburban communities in Marion County. It was mostly pitched as a way to expand the city’s tax base, putting the city on strong financial footing. It would reduce local government redundancies like police and fire service. However, there were pretty big carve-outs for communities and school districts that chose to remain independent.

The strongest dissenters to Unigov were in Indianapolis’ Black community, which made up about 23 percent of the population at the time. Black concerns centered on the overt omission of the consolidation of suburban school districts with Indianapolis Public Schools,, and Unigov’s reduction of political power for a growing Black community. Unigov supporters said that school district consolidation was a nonstarter that would doom consolidation in the minds of suburban residents, despite the fact that school segregation was already an issue that was vexing the metro area.

The proposal was approved by the Indiana General Assembly in 1969 and went into effect the following year. A legislative act added some 60 percent to Indianapolis’ population (about 475,000 pre-Unigov, 744,000 after) and quintupled its area (71 square miles to 350).

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Photo: Boundaries of Indianapolis Public Schools and other schools districts in Marion County, IN. The IPS boundaries correspond to the city of Indianapolis’ boundaries prior to Unigov city/county consolidation in 1970. Source: indyencyclopedia.org

Envisioning Rust Belt Success

Pete Saunders — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 20:28:38 -0400

My Defining Rust Belt Urbanism piece three weeks ago, in which I discuss the themes of what would drive Midwest urban rebirth, prompted a great question. Bloomberg Opinion columnist, CSY subscriber and avowed Sun Belt enthusiast asked me on X (formerly Twitter) – what does Rust Belt success look like?

It’s a good question, because there are lots of people who don’t think there is much of a path to success for the urban centers of the nation’s heartland. Most of today’s urbanists seem to believe the templates have been set already. One is to get with the program forged by the coastal cities, leaning into a winning economic sector you’re uniquely suited for, or continue to fall behind. Another other option is to get with the program touted by Sun Belt cities. Market lifestyle, climate and affordability, and watch the people roll in.

In reality, urban rebound is much more complex than either of those examples would imply. Yet the fact remains that the path to success has to be tailored to the place. Before going into the ways that Rust Belt cities can turn around, let’s dig a little deeper into how coastal and Sun Belt metros reversed their fortunes and made economic leaps. (A parenthetic comment: I’m using the term “Rust Belt” here, but really writing about the largest metros within the twelve-state region most people generally call the Midwest – Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas. I often use the terms interchangeably.)

The Coastal Cities Template

There’s one key difference between coastal cities and Rust Belt cities that is rarely recognized. Through the middle of the 20^th century, coastal cities indeed had strong manufacturing economies cities like those in the Rust Belt. Yet they also grew and developed with stronger corporate and service economies. Using the three-sector model of economic activity, from their beginning coastal cities were able to develop a blend of primary (resource extraction), secondary (manufacturing) and tertiary (sales, transport and distribution) economic sectors. That allowed coastal cities to build on their assets from tertiary economic output (universities, hospitals, financial services, media and publishing) that formed the foundation of the knowledge or creative class economy that drives them today. With a weaker tertiary sector that didn’t produce quite the same output as that of the coastal cities (and probably an implicit acknowledgement made by people throughout the country that the coastal outputs were better than those in the middle of the country), Rust Belt cities lagged.

Coastal cities were then ready for a period in which the global economy leaned in their favor. That economic shift allowed them to stabilize local economies more quickly. It allowed them to focus more on quality-of-life improvements that led to reduced crime, improved schools and other public services. Coastal cities were ready to appeal to a demographic that was increasingly demanding what they offered.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Chart:courtesy The Corner Side Yard.

The Urban Doom Loop and Experiential Advantage

Pete Saunders — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 20:28:38 -0400

Let’s talk about the “urban doom loop”.

There were quite a few pundits who believed that the Covid pandemic would be the catalyst for a profound transformation of cities. Work-from-home opportunities will diminish the demand for office space in downtowns, they said. The loss of downtown office workers would cripple the commercial activity designed to serve them, creating even more building vacancies, they said. The low demand for office space will drive commercial property values down, result in declining property taxes, falling tax revenues for cities, worsening public services, rising crime and the outflow of residents – a downward spiral that would doom cities and favor suburbia, or small and midsize cities.

When I wrote on this topic three years ago, in the midst of the pandemic, I quoted an article from curbed.com written by someone who viewed the pandemic as the last straw:

“My reasons were less dramatic: Mostly, I fulfilled a deep desire for outdoor space. My longing to leave preceded the pandemic. I’ve spent the past eight years — since my second child was born — trying to free myself from our below-market-rate, duct-taped-together-but-beautiful fourth floor walk-up in Brooklyn.”

Yet I see cities that are bouncing back. Even with remote work becoming engrained in our economy now, people are returning to cities. Cities are exploring ways to adapt vacant downtown commercial space into new housing, transitioning downtowns from job centers to actual complete neighborhoods.

The urban doom loop phenomenon always seemed more like a wish by anti-urban types than an accurate take on the future of cities. There have been short-term impacts on cities related to the pandemic, but I believe cities have leaned in on their assets to weather the change.

In other words, the adaptability and experiential advantage of cities is preventing any doom loop from spiraling out of control.

Recently a piece in the Washington Post indicates the narrative might be changing somewhat. Stijn Van Neiuwerburgh, a professor of real estate and business at New York’s Columbia University, was one of the early proponents of the urban doom loop narrative at the start of the pandemic. But he’s since amended his views to focus more on midsize cities, rather than large ones:

“Midsize cities have a much bigger chasm to cross than what New York City has to go through. The situation is worse in those places with so little else in place.” He added, “It is a train wreck in slow motion.”

I think there’s a tacit acknowledgment by Neiuwerburgh that New York is returning to normal, despite its challenges. But in his mind, cities like Indianapolis and St. Louis, or Memphis and Minneapolis, don’t have the amenities and resources to recover in the same way New York does.

Neiuwerburgh, however, misses an important point. Relative to the hinterlands they serve, these midsize cities actually do have more amenities and resources. They’ve learned to capitalize on them.

Read the rest of this piece at Corner Side Yard Blog.

Photo: Chicago is becoming a recognized leader in the adaptive reuse of office buildings for residential use. This image is of the 30 N. LaSalle Street building in Chicago, where a proposal to add 432 apartment units to replace vacant offices is being considered. This is one of several projects on LaSalle Street, the heart of Chicago's financial district, that could add more than 1,600 dwelling units to the Loop. Source: archpaper.com

The Future of Cities: Indianapolis

Aaron M. Renn — Fri, 03 Mar 2023 14:57:11 -0500

Indianapolis was an unlikely candidate to emerge as a midwestern demographic and economic leader. It is an artificially created city, chosen by fiat as a centrally located capital for the state of Indiana. It is not located on a navigable waterway and had no initial economic raison d’être. It grew to be the largest city in the state, but unlike other Midwest cities such as Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and St. Louis, it was never nationally prominent apart from its annual Indianapolis 500 automobile race and lacked signature industries. In built form and culture, it was in essence an overgrown small town. Indianapolis’s residential streets looked similar to what one would find in any Indiana small town, and it never had a unique vernacular architecture. There was good reason it was formerly known as “India-no-place.”

This book is being published as a series, with permission of the American Enterprise Institute. Each week a new chapter will be published, with links to each chapter.

Click or tap a link below to read or download each chapter. (PDFs open in new tab or window)

Indianapolis – Aaron M. Renn (new this week)

Aaron M. Renn is a writer, researcher, and consultant in Indianapolis.

Read the Series:

Introduction: Welcome to the Urban Future – Joel Kotkin

I. The Big Picture for Global Geography

American Aspiration is Metropolitan – Ryan Streeter

The Urban Future: The Great Dispersion – Wendell Cox

The Future of the Big American City is Not Bright – Samuel J. Abrams

II. The Variety of Urban Experiences

The Future of Chinese Cities – Li Sun

Africa's Urban Future – Hügo Krüger and Bheki Mahlobo

Recalibrating Expectations: Lessons from Youngstown, Ohio – Sherry Lee Linkon and John Russo

Politicians Finally Embrace Need to Promote Region

Dale Buss — Fri, 16 Dec 2022 20:28:58 -0500

A critical mass of forces finally may be understanding the benefits of what I’ve been advocating for years: that separate political actors in Flyover Country unite to promote our region as a whole, rather than our cities and states always competing with one another for the fruits of economic development and government favor.

The new dynamics are occurring in two key ways in the Upper Midwest, which is as good a place as any to start. We may soon be seeing several of the region’s governors begin to link arms to promote their states collectively to the growing industries behind the manufacturing revitalization of the heartland.

Also, national-level political leadership from here has caught on to fact that Flyover Country has been dealt out of any significant say in the leadership of Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives. And they want to change that.

As I told Nolan Finley, editorial-page editor of the Detroit News, for a column he posted recently, “There’s a level at which we are dismissed as a region. It’s true in every endeavor. Washington, D.C., controls the government. New York controls finance and marketing. [Hollywood] controls the culture and Silicon Valley controls Big Tech. We’re ringed by power centers.”

So, we must set up one or a handful of new “power centers” of our own, in a fresh strategy to ensure the economic future of Flyover Country. And the best way to do that in the political realm is for governments in our states and municipalities to band together.

Why Now

The need has long been there, but there’s new urgency for two reasons: the economic opportunities available now if we do this right, and the rather sudden recognition that has arisen in people who are in positions to do something about it.

This is not a new idea. The coasts really never have had to break a sweat to promote themselves regionally, given that they’ve controlled all of the power levers in this country. So, when investors as well as immigrants as well as tourists around the world think of America, their minds dart immediately to California or New York City, Washington, D.C., or Seattle, rather than to Pittsburgh or Omaha, Huntsville or Fargo.

But when Amazon was deciding several years ago where to put its “HQ2” — still the most-pursued economic-development prize in America’s history — the region that eventually won the project may have done so in large part because it took a collective approach to wooing the Seattle-based giant. Metro D.C. secured Amazon’s 20,000 new jobs in and around Arlington, Virginia, partly because a Greater Washington Partnership was able to get political ringleaders in the District of Columbia, northern Virginia and southern Maryland to work together to bring it about.

Read the rest of this piece at Flyover Coalition.

Dale Buss is founder and executive director of The Flyover Coalition, a not-for-profit organization aimed at helping revitalize and promote the economy, companies and people of the region between the Appalachians and Rockies, the Gulf Coast and the Great Lakes. He is a long-time author, journalist, and magazine and newspaper editor, and contributor to Chief Executive, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and many other publications. Buss is a Wisconsin native who lives in Michigan and has also lived in Texas, Pennsylvania and Florida.

Graph: courtesy Flyover Coalition.

Is Pro-Life Bad for Business?

Aaron M. Renn — Fri, 09 Sep 2022 20:28:58 -0400

Shortly after Indiana passed a new law restricting abortion, Indianapolis-based pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly condemned the law and announced that it would seek to expand outside the state.

It’s widely argued that social conservative policy is bad for business. Is that actually true, as the Lilly statement would seem to suggest? At some level, yes. But the impact is less than some claim. Today, social policy is a relatively marginal factor in business location decisions.

In 2002 economist Richard Florida published his book The Rise of the Creative Class that became the most influential book on urban policy of the 21^st century to date. He argued that economic success required attracting “creatives,” and he summed up the formula under the heading of three interrelated T’s: technology, talent, and tolerance. Tolerance meant being open to a diversity of people and lifestyles. As he wrote in a follow-up a decade after the book came out, “Our work finds a strong correlation between, one the one hand, places that are welcoming to immigrants, artists, gays, bohemians, and socioeconomic and racial integration, and, on the other, places that experience high-quality economic growth.”

He particularly became known for linking economic success to a high score on the “gay index” created by another researcher. He stressed that nothing about gays per se drove success, but that gays were a proxy for overall tolerance; a city where gays felt welcome was probably one in which other groups felt welcome too.

Florida’s book was probably the single most influential work in convincing state and local leaders of the importance of talent, of human capital, for economic development. It also led many to believe that attracting talent required socially progressive policies.

His model was very powerful and persuasive in that era. This was when big, coastal “superstar” cities like New York and San Francisco were coming into their own after recovering from decades of decline. The dotcom era had just occurred, and high tech had exploded in the Bay Area. There really was wide variation in gay friendliness between cities at that time, which is why gays tended to congregate publicly in only a limited number of cities in America. Many cities in fact did not have many immigrants and not much diversity beyond a longstanding white-black two race mix.

Today, things are different. Most urban areas are very socially progressive, even in red states like Indiana. And their level of diversity has grown. The city of Indianapolis is now only 53% white, for example, and will soon be a majority minority city. Also, we see that the previously high-flying coastal cities and states are struggling with a variety of serious and pervasive governance dysfunctions: rising crime, homelessness, sky high housing prices and an inability to build sufficient new housing, unreliable transit systems, prosecutors who publicly announce they won’t enforce laws, long term school closures, a suffocating woke hegemony, etc. This is sending people and business heading for the exits.

This time, the migration is sometimes going to places with very socially conservative red state governance, including Texas and Florida, which have boomed even as they have passed socially conservative laws. And unlike the traditional middle class Sunbelt draw, this now includes high-end business and the wealthy elite. For example, high finance, a very socially liberal industry, has been migrating to greater Miami. The asset manager BlackRock, one of the major promoters of the progressive Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) movement in corporate America, is opening an office in West Palm Beach. Elliott Capital Management, a huge hedge fund run by Paul Singer, one of America’s biggest promoters of LGBT rights, is moving its headquarters to West Palm Beach as well. Many other finance and venture capital companies have been making similar moves. All of this is happening despite prominent socially conservative moves by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the state legislature.

Read the rest of this piece on American Reformer.

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America's cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Photo: Sean Pollock via Unsplash.

Revisiting Mitch Daniels' "Truce" on Social Issues

Aaron M. Renn — Sun, 08 May 2022 20:28:58 -0400

There’s a myth in Indianapolis Republican circles that goes something like this: back in the good old days, the Indiana GOP was made up of high minded, moderate statesmen from metro Indianapolis like Richard Lugar and Bill Hudnut. Then a bunch of troglodytes from rural Indiana like Mike Pence took over and wrecked the party and the state with extreme social conservative policies that are bad for business.

Reality is very different. Since Republicans retook power in the state in 2005, Indiana has largely been run by Republicans from metro Indianapolis who have operated according to a philosophy Mitch Daniels called “the truce,” or the avoidance of social issues in favor of fiscal and economic development matters.

In terms of actual legislation enacted, Indiana is actually one of the least socially conservative red states. But the economic results have been underwhelming to poor for the state and its people. The Indianapolis GOP elites and their truce both effectively disenfranchised and impoverished the state’s Republican voters, while the left, which never agreed to any part of a truce, made significant advances on its own social policy agenda in the state.

From the standpoint of the average Republican voter, the truce was a thus a double failure. There’s no reason to believe abandoning cultural issues in favor of economics will work anywhere.

The Indiana GOP’s Record on Social Conservatism

Daniels’ truce idea got big press back in 2010 and 2011 as he was exploring a bid for President. Though I don’t recall him using the term with regards to how he governed Indiana, this is basically how he operated for eight years. We see this in his own top 100 accomplishments list that’s still on the state web site. Not one of them is a social conservative item. I’ve never once heard him speak of a social conservative policy with regards to his tenure as governor since leaving office. A new Indianapolis Monthly article on the state’s GOP candidly says that the social conservatives were “boxed out” during his eight year tenure.

There were a few social conservative moves during the Daniels admin, but they were pretty small ball, and temporary as well. The state denied, then reversed the denial of a special license plate for a gay organization in Indy. (The state has numerous special fundraising plates like this). The state also tried to defund Planned Parenthood, a law that was overturned in federal court.

Most notably, at that time 29 states were passing constitutional amendments prohibiting gay marriage. Daniels and the GOP killed one in Indiana procedurally in a state senate committee. Indiana, one of the reddest states in the country, thus was among a minority of states that never passed a constitutional gay marriage ban.

Mike Pence looms large in the myth, but was only in office for four of the 17+ consecutive years the state the GOP has controlled the governors office. Pence is known almost entirely for the controversy over the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA). This legislation unexpectedly caught the ire of corporations, who threatened to boycott the state if it wasn’t repealed. Indiana quickly capitulated. There was nothing special about this law. It was based on a federal law of the same name signed by Bill Clinton. Many states have RFRA laws on the books today, including Texas. Indiana’s number just came up. Pence also signed some anti-abortion legislation that was overturned in the courts, with the exception of rules requiring the burial or cremation of post-abortion remains.

Read the rest of this piece on AaronRenn Substack.

Photo: Anonymous Indianapolis Social Worker via Wikimedia under CC 4.0 License

Why the 'Old North' States Have Been Economic Laggards

Aaron M. Renn — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 20:28:58 -0500

My latest column is now online at Governing. It is a recapitulation of my analysis in my American Affairs piece on Indiana about how basically all the states and regions of the Old North - a 23 state area encompassing the Great Plains, Midwest, and Northeast - are demographic and economic laggards. Here’s an excerpt:

Since Kevin Phillips coined the term “Sun Belt” in the late 1960s, it’s been widely known that population and job growth have largely flowed to the South and West. The rest of the country has not fared nearly as well. The area we might label the “Old North,” a 23-state region spanning the Great Plains, Midwest and Northeast, as well as some border states like Kentucky, has consistently lagged the rest of the country. In essence, half of our states have prospered, the other half have struggled. Statistically, only one Old North state, North Dakota, has done especially well. And North Dakota’s success has been driven by an oil boom. Aside from this likely temporary exception, most of the Old North is a middling performer at best.

…

The consistent struggles of Old North states to find a fully successful 21st-century model seems to belie differences in demographic makeup, urban vs. rural dominance, or political party control. Vermont may lean more socialist and New Hampshire more libertarian, but they suffer similar challenges in luring new residents. Deep blue Illinois and deep red Indiana are a lot more alike than leaders in either state would like to admit.

Click through to read the whole thing.

This piece previously appeared on Heartland Intelligence.

Aaron M. Renn is an opinion-leading urban analyst, consultant, speaker and writer on a mission to help America’s cities and people thrive and find real success in the 21st century. He focuses on urban, economic development and infrastructure policy in the greater American Midwest. He also regularly contributes to and is cited by national and global media outlets, and his work has appeared in many publications, including the The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post.

Photo: GPA Photo Archive via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.