This is the second of a two-part series on the Great Dispersion of Americans across the country. Read the first installment here.
The famous New Yorker magazine cover showing much of civilization ending at the Hudson River, save for Chicago, D.C., and then the West Coast, had more than a grain of truth for much of the 20th century. The term “flyover country” was not just a snobbish put-down but a reality as a handful of core cities – New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco – exerted oversized influence over America’s culture, politics, and economy, with rural communities and smaller cities playing a relatively marginal role in the national drama.
The early decades of the 21st century have altered America’s geographic reality. Moribund small cities have come back to life. Two decades ago, downtown Fargo, North Dakota, was dull and somewhat derelict. Now it boasts loft apartments, a fine boutique hotel, and a panoply of cultural attractions, including art studios and dance venues. Since 2010, about 14,000 Americans have moved to its metropolitan area. That total is small, but it reflects the experiences of many other once withering communities that are attracting people from larger urban centers. The Fargo metro area added nearly double the number of net domestic migrants as the nearest large metro area, Minneapolis-St. Paul, which is 15 times larger.
Some of this can be traced to considerably lower housing prices, which allows millennials to be on their own much earlier; only 5% of millennials in the Great Plains states live at home, less than half the percentage in California, New York, and New Jersey. It’s also a result of a new wealth created by tech, manufacturing, and other industries seeking to reduce costs in less-regulated, less expensive areas where more people are willing to relocate.
Smaller Communities Rebound
Springfield, a metropolitan area of nearly 500,000 people in the southwest corner of Missouri, has blossomed in the past decade. Its economy, anchored by Southwest Missouri State University, is also home to several large firms, including Bass Pro Shops, O’Reilly Auto Parts, and accounting firm BKD. These businesses provide promising opportunities for millennials.
Between 2010 and 2023, a net 38,000 new residents moved into the area from elsewhere in the U.S. Rather than being rejected as outsiders by longtime residents, newcomers are welcome to join local boards and commissions.
“What Springfield attracts are people who are self-starters who want to fast-track their involvement in the community,” says millennial Matt Simpson, chief research and planning officer at Ozark Technical College, who was recently elected to the City Council. “People of my generation are motivated by the fact that you can have a say at an earlier age.”
Much of Springfield’s appeal lies not in culture or consumerism, where big cities are still hard to beat, but in the local habits and traditions found in numerous churches, charities, and civic groups.
More than faux urbanism is driving this shift. For many, there’s a “back to roots” movement to return home or to someplace that seems less anonymous. Millennials, one commentator suggests, may be more “socially conscious,” but they do not necessarily favor the ideal top-down structure embraced by earlier generations; they prefer smaller units of governance to larger ones. A recent National Journal poll found that less than one-third of millennials favor federal solutions over local ones. They are far less trusting of major institutions than their Gen X predecessors.
A Globalized Heartland
Like millennials, immigrants are also moving to smaller cities and towns for affordable opportunities. Their attraction to areas – like the movement of African Americans to the South – belies common media and academic narratives that these areas are rife with intolerance, “dying from whiteness.”
Wandering around a park in downtown Omaha on a Sunday, you can find diversity no less present than in Los Angeles or New York. Once homogeneous cities across the country now feature Indian and Mexican restaurants, Thai ice cream shops, and a variety of hipster coffee shops. Omaha sports both Ahmad’s Persian Cuisine and the African Cocktail Lounge. In West Des Moines, Iowa, the cultural integration can be seen in the growth of cricket leagues, sparked largely by South Asian immigrants.
Consider Mariana Macedo, who moved from Guadalajara, Mexico, to Knoxville, Tennessee, where she owns two Don Gallo restaurants. A decade ago, she had considered moving to the San Francisco area but decided to start her business in Knoxville in part because of traditional southern values, which puts a premium on hospitality.
“We have to remember that people in the South are very nice to you, they wave hello when you pass by, they have that style, a lot has to do with the fact that we live in the Bible belt, so that’s why people are very polite, and very family oriented.”
Small Towns, High Tech
For years, the conventional wisdom has been that tech firms will continue to concentrate in a few select regions on the West Coast or in the Northeast. Yet the soaring cost of living in these regions and the use of remote work have changed the story, spurring a growing movement of tech firms to less heralded places, such as largely rural western Pennsylvania. Today, the area centered in Pittsburgh and extending to its surrounding rural hinterland is making a big play for AI, even as the steel industry is showing signs of coming back to life.
Similarly, Huntsville, Alabama, has experienced strong growth as a result of its longstanding connection to the U.S. space program. Huntsville, which just recently took the center for the U.S. Space Command from its previous base in Colorado, has become a mecca for young, educated people and now stands among the fastest-growing smaller cities in America. Census records show that it has accounted for most of the net domestic migration growth in Alabama over the past decade. In recent years, Huntsville has also seen growth in advanced manufacturing and biotechnology.
Chattanooga is also growing after having cleaned up its environment, implementing one of America’s most famous downtown renaissances and building out a municipal 10-gigabit internet for the city. Like many other older industrial cities, Chattanooga wants a piece of the AI boom, hoping to use its lower energy prices as a lure for new servers and AI-related business.
Tulsa, a major metropolitan area with more than 1 million people, knows that money talks. It has used $10,000 bonuses to entice thousands of relatively well-paid remote workers to relocate there, almost a quarter of whom work in tech. The city and private companies have also invested heavily in creating work and play infrastructure and attractions to convince people to settle there.
This model holds promise for other cities, as one study from the University of Chicago suggests as many as 34% of American workers could do their jobs remotely, an attitude widely adopted by the new wave of startups.
Hope for Reindustrialization
The biggest edge for smaller cities and towns may lie with the country’s prospective reindustrialization, promoted both by the Biden and Trump administrations. Between 2000 and 2005, the Great Lakes alone accounted for nearly 40% of all U.S. industrial job losses; areas like Canton, Ohio, and the Michigan cities of Detroit, Flint, and Ann Arbor experienced 25% declines in manufacturing jobs. In some places, abandoned factories were left as tourist attractions, a kind of American version of Pompeii.
The emergence of affordable domestic energy can provide one stimulus for the reindustrialization. For decades, oil and gas production has been a major boon in places like Pecos and Midland, Texas, the epicenter of the shale oil gusher in the Permian Basin, as well as Lake Charles, Louisiana, the hub of the country’s growing Liquefied Natural Gas exports. Energy investments are now spreading to other regions of the country. For example, Shell in 2022 backed a $6 billion ethane cracker in Monaca, Pennsylvania, to convert the region’s abundant natural gas into plastics.
The blue-collar workers who operate these new facilities have good reason to seek their futures in such smaller communities, which, as Heartland Forward’s Julie Trivitt has shown, offer them the best chance of achieving a middle-class standard of living.
In contrast, expensive states like California, New York, and Massachusetts are among the worst for blue-collar workers. The high cost of living – exacerbated by high taxes and regulation – has been squeezing out smaller industries and other businesses that offer working-class employment in these states. The eight top regions identified by a New York Times survey of best places for good jobs for workers without four-year degrees were cities like Toledo, Ohio; Anchorage, Alaska; Des Moines, Iowa; and Birmingham, Alabama.
Traditional manufacturing powerhouses are also benefiting from reshoring businesses and foreign investment. Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, and Ohio, as well as the more recently industrialized southern states such as Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Kentucky, dominate the list of states with the highest concentrations of industrial jobs.
These states’ lower costs, as well as their skilled workforces, are powering the job growth. “Rust belt regions have far higher concentrations of engineering talent than either New York or Los Angeles,” observes Michelle Comerford, a Cleveland-based site selection consultant.
If President Trump’s tariffs help spark an industrial renaissance, which may take years to materialize in full, the rewards may be most felt in the Rust Belt. The authors of “The Smartest Places on Earth: Why Rustbelts are the Emerging Hotspots of Global Innovation” write that self-driving cars, wearable devices, smart grid, and smart farming are all best developed in regions with a legacy of industrial expertise. For example, Akron successfully reinvented itself from an auto and tire center to a hotbed for polymer research.
That helps explain why Grand Rapids, Michigan, is the fastest-growing large metropolitan area for manufacturing jobs since 2009, adding some 35,000 jobs during that time. The Grand Rapids area in 2000 ranked 7th among metros for millennial population growth, according to a recent study. The city has been cited as having the highest millennial home ownership rate in the nation.
Appalachian Spring?
Perhaps no region in America has been associated with rural decline more than Appalachia. Residents have been moving to cities for decades – some 3 million between 1950 and 1980 – and poverty still persists. About 43% of Appalachian counties have a child poverty rate exceeding 1.5 times the national average, and the region is plagued by drug problems: Out of the top 200 counties in the United States for overdose death rates, half of them (100) are in Appalachia.
Yet there are considerable signs of recovery, particularly in the region south of the northern borders of Tennessee and North Carolina. As analyst Aaron M. Renn notes, over 70% of counties in South Appalachia are growing in population, with over half of counties now boasting more jobs than pre-pandemic levels. Due in part to their proximity to growing cities like Charlotte, Raleigh, Knoxville, and Nashville, over a quarter of South Appalachian counties grew at a rate faster than that of the country as a whole.
This process could accelerate due to Trump’s renewed support for fossil fuels. Natural gas from shale has become big business in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia. Commercial land in the Ohio River corridor has been rising in value, showing that the market believes industrial demand will remain strong.
Perhaps the least appreciated asset for Appalachia lies in its many scenic communities. The lack of development in some cities has allowed them to preserve much of their historic architecture. A number of historic, intact small towns in Appalachia have also been working to revitalize themselves around their town centers and nearby recreational amenities. Marietta, Ohio, along the banks of the Ohio River, was the first American settlement in the Northwest Territory.
The city’s Main Street, once in decline, is thriving with a collection of eclectic businesses. One of them is Just A Jar Design Press, which specializes in genuine woodcut printing and has a national clientele. Another is the high-tech app company Spoken, whose AI-powered software helps non-verbal users with conditions like aphasia or autism to communicate. Downtown Marietta is also home to the Marietta Adventure Company, a bike and kayak store owned by Ryan Smith, a native who returned to open the shop after five years in Lake Tahoe. Smith and other local outdoor enthusiasts established hundreds of miles of mountain biking trails in the area.
Political and Cultural Implications
The shift to less dense and more remote areas shows Americans now acting on preferences that they have long embraced; as early as the 1970s, less than 10% wanted to live in big cities, while the vast majority preferred small cities and towns, with the majority opting for communities of less than 10,000. Fifty years later, the numbers were roughly the same, with only 9% preferring a big city.
These smaller communities throughout the country are poised to play an outsize role in forging our future. They are shedding their reputations as closed and intolerant enclaves while attracting a stream of investment from both domestic and foreign sources. The middle of the country now accounts for the states rated by Site Selection Magazine as the best for manufacturing investments.
In addition to investments, the relocation of educated workers and immigrants to America’s smaller cities augurs a kind of cultural shift as well. In Nashville – the capital of country music – the lyric poetry of small town America is being reshaped by Latino influences, themselves with strong rural roots, including Salvador-born Angie K.
As recently as 1990, barely 2% of the Nashville population was foreign-born, a percentage that increased sixfold in the next 15 years. By the year 2040, one in three Nashville residents will be Latino. Now, the outskirts of the city boasts a Little Mexico.
Inevitably, these trends will also reshape our politics, as they have in the past. Like Jefferson and Jackson did in their era, Trump and the GOP have relied upon rural and small-town voters as their base and are now trying to capitalize on their growth. The Trump administration is advancing plans to shift much of the Agriculture Department’s workforce out of Washington and into the heartland. Republicans are also readjusting the “opportunity zone” incentives to attract more investment to rural areas, while Trump’s plan for “a giant natural gas pipeline” to bring Alaskan energy to the markets of East Asia would expand employment in states like Oklahoma and Pennsylvania.
But Republicans aren’t assured of benefiting from the rise of small towns and cities. As they add more Democratic voters from big cities to their communities, they may become more centrist in their politics and social views, particularly around environmental issues, because access to nature is part of the hinterland’s appeal. The more liberal viewpoints will mingle and collide with the traditional values of family, religion, and thrift, creating a new small-town mindset as part of a constantly evolving political and economic landscape in America, making these once-dismissed places incubators of the American future.
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