Population Changes in the USA: 1980-1985
Abstract: Population estimates for July 1, 1985, when mapped, show that between 1980 and 1985 many Americans moved long distances in response to changed national and worldwide economic conditions. Most metropolitan areas continued to attract migrants, especially to central cities, outer suburbs, and exurbs. Resource dependent areas such as the farm belt and the major lumber producing and metallic ore mining areas lost population while mineral energy rich and amenity areas gained rapidly. Key words: Population movement, metropolitan growth, natural resource use.
Between 1980 and 1985 the conditions under which Americans lived, played, and worked changed dramatically. America’s position in world trade altered, leaving our agricultural and old industrial heartlands in distress. The Reagan administration gave America new policies, some of which resulted in the accelerated growth of many war-related industries in the “Sun Belt”. OPEC shifted its energy policies, making oil and gas explorations in the West, Southwest, and South profitable until November 1985. And Americans, as has been their wont, adopted new ways of consuming both goods and leisure time, being increasingly attracted to the sites of natural amenities, especially sun and water. As a result, yet another version of the United States’ population geography emerged in the 1980s.
The overall rate of change of population between 1980 and 1985 was 5.4% or 1.05 % per annum. This was only slightly less than the annual rate of change between 1970 and 1980 (1.09% per annum) but still the lowest rate since the decade of the Great Depression. However, the patterns of change were very different during the two periods. The extremes, such as the 89% increase in Matanuska-Susitna Borough of Alaska and the 20% decrease in Lake County, Colorado, stand out numerically but the striking reorganization of population in the U. S. is shown by the large areas on the map with more modest changes. To place the changes in a general context, I have compared them to the national increase. If we take an increase of 5.4% as our base point, and increments of 5.4% as category limits, we find that only 7% (128 counties) of the 3,138 counties or county equivalents grew by more than 16.2% (10.8% more than the national average) and only 5% (163 counties) lost more than 5.4% (10.8% less than the national average).
In looking at the map of population change from 1980 to 1985, I noted that all major metropolitan areas grew faster (or lost population less rapidly) than their rural surroundings. Second, I was struck by the existence of large regional variations in rates of population growth–vast regions where population either decreased or became more concentrated. These two observations reflect two different themes in the population geography of the United States.
I believe that the changes in population between 1980 and 1985 show that there is 1.) a metropolitan America where social, political, and economic institutions set the pace of growth and 2.) a non-metropolitan America where the use of local natural resources dominates economic fortunes. In Metropolitan America, demographic destiny increasingly rests on an ability to manage the direction of cultural, social, political, and economic forces in the nation and the world. Many metropolises in America have been successful in this regard, and people have moved to them. For example, increased power of government in Washington, D.C. and Sacramento, the strength of technology and research activities in Boston and Raleigh-Durham, and a concentration of financial and corporate institutions in New York and Los Angeles have been bright lights that have attracted people from all over the nation and the world.
The population geography of Non-metropolitan America is quite different. It is tied to the fate of exploiting local natural resources that will be consumed elsewhere in the nation or the world. While Metropolitan America’s destiny depends on offering more services, ideas, and processed goods, Non-metropolitan America depends on supplying primary materials in the cheapest ways available at the time. The services of Metropolitan America have come to require more hands and minds, and thus the metropolis has become a goal of migrants. The extraction of resources in Non-metropolitan America, on the other hand, has usually come to require less human labor, and thus the countryside continues to lose population.
Most Americans, wherever they live, are caught up in the same basic national images and strivings. They are part of what Pierce Lewis calls the Galactic Metropolis. Essentially a giant urban network, the galaxy extends throughout the whole of the United States tying together all urban functions and ultimately connecting urban services with primary natural resources such as farmland, forests, and mineral deposits.
However, Metropolitan America has become only remotely linked to the exploitation of local natural resources. Instead, imported resources–foods, fuels, as well as both raw and manufactured goods–sustain the industries and support the services that the metropolises provide. Local natural resources no longer dominate the land values of the residents of galactic America, who now view their local landscape primarily as real estate in which resource uses must compete with all other metropolitan land uses.
The residents of smaller urban places of America also value land as real estate. However, in non-metropolitan regions, the intrinsic resource value of land still broadly controls the local real estate market; the real estate value of land in non-metropolitan America rises or falls with the fortunes of local natural resources. When farmers suffer, the real estate values of all parts of their farming area, whether urban or rural, suffer. When the timber industry declines, real estate values in associated mill towns decline.
The metropolitan and non-metropolitan distinction which I make here is not necessarily apparent in the American landscape. Nor is it based on urban-rural dichotomies or even conscious attitudes to land. However, within metropolitan counties, the natural resource value of land is largely subordinate to real estate values; resource uses must compete with many other metropolitan uses. In non-metropolitan counties, the resource uses compete among themselves, but only to a much lesser extent with real estate values set by competing urban uses. There is a population threshold below which natural resources values prevail and above which real estate values prevail. This may be the best distinction between metropolitan areas and non-metropolitan areas.
I have tried to show how the changing values of natural resources of non-metropolitan America and the changing fortunes of managing information and technology within Metropolitan America have conditioned migration in the early 1980s and created a new population map.
Data sources and methodology. New patterns of population distribution can be discerned in the U.S. Bureau of the Census’s Local Population Estimates issued in August 1986. Despite the limits of accuracy of the Census Bureau’s estimates, the report provides the best nationwide basis for mapping the changes in the distribution of the population of the U.S. since the general census of 1980. A visually effective way of showing these recent changes is to map the percentage change, by county, of the growth or loss of population during the first five years of the 1980s.
I first mapped the rate of population change of all the counties in the United States. Upon careful examination of the resulting map, I noted that the major metropolitan areas seemed to stand out from their surroundings. To confirm this observation, I looked at every CMSA (Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas), their 78 constituent PMSAs (Primary Metropolitan Statistical Areas), and all MSAs (Metropolitan Statistical Areas) that had a population of over 300,000. In mapping the percentage growth or loss of population of their component counties, I found that many of the smaller metropolitan areas which have populations greater than 300,000 could not be distinguished easily from the surrounding counties because they were gaining or losing population at approximately the same rate as the surrounding region. However, all of the MSAs that contained a central county of over 250,000 were clearly differentiated from their surrounding rural regions. Therefore I eliminated from further consideration as metropolitan areas those MSAs that did not contain a central county of at least 250,000 in 1985 even though the population of the entire SMA exceeded 300,000. The remaining metropolitan areas clearly stand out from their more slowly growing hinterlands. In general, the greater the MSA and the larger the central city within it, the more likely its rate of population change differs from that of the surrounding rural countryside. The smaller MSAs are closely tied to the fortunes of their surrounding countrysides, much more so than the major metropolitan areas which are command centers of the world and national economy.
I examined every metropolitan border and looked for boundaries between counties that grew more rapidly between 1980 and 1985 than did their adjoining more rural counties–or, in a few cases lost population more slowly than their more rapidly declining, neighboring rural county. The entire boundary of almost every metropolitan area can easily be determined in this manner. Because, in some cases, the area of more rapid growth extended beyond the Census Bureau MSAs I have included those counties where the percentage rate of growth was greater than that of the next outer county within the metropolitan region, even in cases where the actual numerical increase was small. For example, I included Warren and Lincoln Counties, Missouri, as part of metropolitan St. Louis even though the census bureau does not. Warren and Lincoln Counties, grew at 11.9% and 17.2% from 1980 to 1985. The next outer counties all lost population during the same period. See figure 1. In a similar fashion, I excluded Jersey County, Illinois, from metropolitan St. Louis because it lost population while adjacent, more central St. Charles County, Missouri, and Madison County, Illinois, gained population. Their inclusion makes it possible to see where metropolitan real estate values are penetrating or retreating from Non-Metropolitan America. Figure 1 shows the St. Louis Metropolitan Area as an example of the sorts of differences between my boundaries and those of the Census Bureau.
To illustrate the geographic patterns of contemporary America’s population more clearly, I mapped separately 1.) the rate of population change of the major metropolitan regions and centers (Figure 2); 2.) the rate of population change for the rural counties that were gaining population faster than the national average (Figure 4) and 3.) the rate of population change for those rural counties that were actually losing population (Figure 5).
Urban America. Almost exactly two-thirds of all Americans live within the metropolitan areas outlined on Figure 2. By far the larger part of them live in the Atlantic Coast Megalopolis which now extends from southern Maine to northeastern North Carolina. Only a few non-metropolitan counties remain within its boundaries: parts of the Delmarva peninsula and a few small counties between the Washington, D.C. and the Richmond-Norfolk-Newport News metropolitan areas. This first American megalopolis has gradually grown inland to Harrisburg and now includes almost all of eastern Pennsylvania and has spread up the Hudson valley to join the metropolitan centers of Upstate New York.
In the Northeastern U.S. another running together of metropolitan areas has created a huge megalopolis which stretches from Pittsburgh to Grand Rapids and the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. In addition, the region from Columbus, Ohio, to Louisville, Kentucky, contains a series of metropolitan areas that nearly link one with another and, interrupted by a narrow gap northeast of Columbus, to the main Pittsburgh-Lake Erie-Michigan Megalopolis, recently dubbed the “Rust Belt.”
In the West, two large megalopolitan regions will soon coalesce. San Francisco is the focal point of the Northern California Megalopolis that stretches from the Salinas Valley in the south to Lake County in the north, and with the Sacramento metro area as an eastern extension, now climbs well into the Sierra Nevada. Los Angeles County is the center of another vast, oversized, megalopolitan conglomeration, one that extends from the Imperial Valley in the southeast, to San Luis Obispbo in the northwest and Bakersfield in the north. Although San Diego, Sacramento, San Jose and other California urban centers have separate identities and elsewhere might be thought of as cores of discreet Metropolitan regions, I think that they are better considered as sub-centers of the great Southern or Northern California Megalopolises. The Central Valley metropolitan area, focused on Fresno, bounds, but not yet binds, the two California megalopolises.
In the booming Southeast, a Piedmont Megalopolis is emerging. It stretches from the Georgia-Alabama border, through the metropolitan areas of Atlanta, Greenville, Charlotte, and Greensboro to Raleigh-Durham. More diffuse than the other metropolitan agglomerations, the Piedmont Megalopois contains rural gaps between its several urban components. Its landscape is largely rural, yet the area is metropolitan in that real estate values prevail over local natural resource values.
In Florida, two continuous coastal metropolitan areas–Daytona Beach to Miami and the Tampa-St.Petersburg-Central Gulf Coast area–are now tied together by a Central Florida metropolis. Together they may be the core of the newest American megalopolis.
Every state in the East, except West Virginia, contains at least a part of a major metropolitan center. In the West, only Alaska, the Dakotas, and the states of the northern Rockies are still exclusively non-metropolitan
Metropolitan Regions that are Losing Population. Having indicated the location of the megalopolitan and metropolitan regions in which two thirds of all Americans now live, I will now show how Americans have shifted their homeplace in the first five years of this decade.
Only one megalopolitan region lost population–the “Rust Belt”; all of the others burgeoned. The Pittsburgh-Lake Erie-Michigan Megalopolis lost population in all of its major parts except the Grand Rapids area of western Michigan. Scranton-Wilkes Barre, Buffalo, Dayton, Fort Wayne, and Milwaukie are the only other major metropolitan areas in the nation to lose population during the early 1980s. Although some central metropolitan counties’ losses were dramatic–Wayne County (Detroit) lost 163,500, Allegheny County (Pittsburgh), 61,900, Erie and Niagara Counties (Buffalo-Niagara Falls), 55,000, Cuyahoga and Summit Counties (Cleveland-Akron), 58,000, Milwaukee, 28,500, and Genesee County (Flint), 16,500–no major metropolitan SMA lost more than 3.66% (Flint) of its population during the period.
Whereas in the 1970s only the central metropolitan counties of the “Rust Belt” were losing people, in the early ’80s some suburban “Rust Belt” counties were as well. For example, all of the counties in southeastern Michigan except Oakland and Livingston lost population, and Oakland grew but 0.2% and Livingston only 1.6% during the first five years of the ’80s. The rate of growth of every suburban county in the “Rust Belt” (except Orleans County to the west of Rochester NY) slowed or turned into a loss in the first five years of the 1980s. However, even as these metropolitan areas lost population or increased at rates much below the national average, the counties that surround them lost population even more rapidly.
The loss of population, of course, was the result of the inability of the heavy manufacturing industries of the region to compete favorably in a world market where the goods they formerly produced can now be made more cheaply overseas. The steel, machinery, rubber, automobile, and supporting industries closed many plants or moved elsewhere leaving distressed urban areas and workers without jobs. Many of the workers have had to move elsewhere.
With the exception of Buffalo-Niagara Falls, the metropolitan areas of Up-State New York no longer lost population; however, they grew less than the national average rate. Although the core counties of the Albany-Troy MSA (Albany and Rensselaer Counties) and Rome-Utica MSA (Oneida County) continued to lose people, Rochester (Monroe County ) and Syracuse (Onondaga County ) again gained population after having recorded losses in the ’70s. Furthermore, only two Up-State New York suburban counties (Genesee and Montgomery) lost population between 1980 and 1985; by way of contrast, most of the surrounding rural counties continued a decline started in earlier decades.
Metropolitan Regions that are Gaining Population. If the older metropolitan areas surrounding Lake Erie were seen as places to flee, the areas of attraction were the cities of the Atlantic Coast, the South, and the West to which hundreds of thousands of Americans moved in the early 1980s. The creation of new products and industries as well as new services and institutions in these areas resulted in new jobs. New jobs meant the need for new construction–houses, roads, sewers, shopping centers, etc., which created the demand for even more new jobs.
With increased emphasis on managing the flow of information, the dynamic centers of finance, government, and technology in older, established metropolises were revitalized. New York, Boston, Hartford, and Washington, as well as Chicago, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, Dallas, and Atlanta boomed in the early ’80s.
But even as these metropolitan regions grew, some parts of the central cores of American metropolises lost population, continuing patterns set in earlier decades. Philadelphia lost 50,800 people, Baltimore 33,000, and St. Louis 30,200, at the same time as their surrounding areas more than made up for these losses. Essex and Bergen Counties NJ together lost 19,200, while the rest of the New York metropolis gained far more than was lost. And though Washington, D.C. lost 13,900, and some people continued to leave parts of inner Boston both of these anchors of the Atlantic Coast Megalopolis are bursting their old boundaries. All of the Gulf or Pacific Coast metropolises gained population, mostly at rates well above the national average. The five inner counties of the Southern California Megalopolis gained almost one and a quarter million people in the first five years of the ’80s. Dallas-Fort Worth increased by over half a million; Houston gained almost half a million, the San Francisco Bay Area grew by over 400,000, Phoenix a third of a million and Atlanta, San Diego, Miami-Palm Beach, and the Washington-Baltimore region each by more than a quarter of a million. Other places gaining over 100,000 include Seattle-Tacoma, Sacramento, San Antonio, Austin, Hidalgo-Cameron Counties TX (Brownsville), Tampa, Salt Lake City, Denver, Chicago, and New York City-Long Island,
Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Albuquerque, El Paso, Colorado Springs, Jackson, MS, Nashville, Charleston, SC, Miami-Ft. Lauderdale-Palm Beach, and Winter Haven-Lakeland, which grew at phenomenally high rates in the 1970s, gained more slowly in the 1980s. Other areas such as Spokane, Des Moines, Mobile, and Allentown-Bethlehem slowly slipped in relative importance as metropolitan places. The slowing of the rate of growth of Portland OR, Madison WI, Memphis TN, Montgomery AL, Louisville KY, Cincinnati OH, and Harrisburg PA may result from the slowing of growth or loss of population in their home states and a reduced inflow of instate immigrants.
Within all of the nation’s metropolitan areas, suburbs grew more rapidly than the central cities. (See Figure 2.) While the inner suburbs of Atlanta, Phoenix, and Austin grew most rapidly, the outer suburbs of the metropolises of a) Florida, b) New Orleans and Baton Rouge, c) Houston, and d.) Dallas-Fort Worth grew fastest. And the remote desert or foothill exurbs of Los Angeles-San Diego and San Francisco-Sacramento were the parts of the California megalopolises to have the highest rates of growth. Yet even these distant exurbs are part of metropolitan America because they are being tied in to the metropolitan real estate market in which local resources have become simply one more competing land use. Beyond the exurbs, rural populations are declining or growing more slowly.
A fascinating picture of inner city revitalization, due in large part to the immigration of hispanics and non-whites, is appearing across the nation. (See Figure 3.) For the first time since 1910, Manhattan’s population is growing. But so is the population of every borough of the City of New York and of Nassau County, reversing the decline that had set in over the past several decades. In a similar reversal from population loss to gain are Passaic County NJ, Boston, Providence, Springfield, Hartford, Schenectady, Syracuse, Rochester, Indianapolis, Chicago, Minneapolis-St.Paul, Kansas City, East St. Louis, Denver, San Francisco, Atlanta, Portsmouth, and Norfolk. And although they did not lose population in the ’70s, the counties that contained the following inner cities once again experienced, in the first half of the 1980s, accelerated rates of growth when compared with the 1970s: Seattle, Oakland, Sacramento, Fresno, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Austin, Corpus Christi, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Tulsa, Little Rock, Wichita, Omaha, Grand Rapids, Columbus, New Haven, Trenton, Wilmington, Knoxville, Charlotte, Raleigh, Jacksonville, Orlando, Tampa, and Pensacola.
The megalopolis and the metropolis are changing. They have grown when they retained or gained importance as the control centers of information flows. In the early 1980s they grew by managing, processing, and consuming the nation’s and world’s natural resources in new ways. Only the “Rust Belt” was less successful in these regards and lost population as a result.
Non-Metropolitan America. Non-metropolitan America differs from metropolitan America in that its population rises or falls in close relation to changes in the ways in which local resource bases are valued or extracted. Agriculture, minerals, forests, recreation, retirement, and local variations in human reproduction rates are the major determinates of population change outside the metropolises. Ease of access by local and national transportation routes strongly influences how these areas are tied to the metropolitan and megalopolitan world of most other Americans.
The most striking changes I see when looking at the maps of gains and losses in non-metropolitan counties in the first five years of the 1980s are 1) the great out migration from some of America’s best agricultural areas, such as the black prairies of Illinois, 2) the rapid in migration to the nation’s regions that are rich in mineral energy, such as the Permian basin in Texas, and 3) the flow of people in search of natural amenities, such as to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.
Rural Areas that are Gaining Population. Rising prices of oil and gas, accelerated government expenditures in defense and space industries, and a continuing search for warmer climates by an aging and wealthier population have stimulated the move to the “Sun Belt”–the shores of the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico and to the South and Southwest. Regionally, other amenities have also attracted new residents. (Figure 4).
The demand in the early ’80s for domestic sources of energy was brought on by OPEC’s dramatic increase in petroleum prices. These policy changes resulted in the movement of people to the gas and oil fields of Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana. The new coal stripmines of the northern High Plains, the Wyoming Basin, and the Four Corner area of the Southwest also attracted many newcomers.
The whole Gulf and Atlantic coastal area grew as the amenity of life-by-the-shore became possible for more and more retirees and those who serve their needs. Within the megalopolises, the coastal counties were extraordinarily attractive; in the north, most of the coast of Maine, Cape Cod, Nantucket, and Martha’s Vineyard MA, Ocean County and Cape May NJ, the Atlantic seaboard of Delaware and Maryland, and most of the seaboard counties from Virginia Beach to Brownsville TX grew faster than the national average. Of the 118 coastal counties, only five lost population–two in Maine, two in Virginia and one in Texas; and only 21 gained at less than the national average.
But it is not only coastal waters that attracted new residents; lakes have become major population magnets. The wooded and lake-covered lands of Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota are growing. And the fastest growing rural counties have miles of lake shore: Houghton and Higgins Lakes are in Roscommon County MI, which grew at more than twice the national average (and is at the junction of two freeways); Calumet County, which contains most of Lake Winnebago, is Wisconsin’s fastest-growing county; and Mille Lac and the other easily accessible lakes of northern Minnesota and Wisconsin hold great appeal to residents of the Upper Mid-West as is shown by the growth of some northern counties at more than the national average in states which experienced a net out migration. The counties that border Lake Champlain in Vermont also grew at a rate exceeding the national average although nearby ski resorts and an IBM plant in Burlington also contributed to the growth.
Reservoirs also attracted residents. The Lake of the Ozarks is surrounded by new residents as are the shores of Lake Cumberland in Kentucky. The many reservoirs on the tributaries of the Arkansas River may have contributed to the rapid growth of counties in eastern Oklahoma.
Of course not only Florida’s shores but the warmth of its winters have attracted migrants to all rural Florida counties, except Hardee and Madison, at rates greater than the national average. And even Hardee and Madison counties gained population.
Other amenities drew people to new homes in the early 1980s. The summer coolness or the snows of winter have encouraged growth of the southern Appalachians, the Ozarks, the Black Hills and many areas in the Rockies, Sierra Nevada, and the Cascades. The ski and summer resorts in the Rockies west of Denver, the Sun Valley area of Idaho, the western slopes of the Wasatch in Utah and the drier eastern slopes of the Cascades of Oregon and Washington have attracted large numbers of skiers, other recreationists, and workers who build the physical facilities and cater to recreationists’ needs directly.
For those seeking sun and dry weather, the Southwestern states of New Mexico, Arizona, and California continued to offer a major resource–the amenity of oases in the desert. The population growth of non-metropolitan counties reflected the magnet of this broad area. In addition, northen California and Josephine County OR are now also seen as amenity and retirement areas for an increasingly megalopolitan California population.
In general the rural counties that grew most rapidly were also more accessible. Freeways attracted growth to many rural areas. Good access is often the key to an amenity region’s success in attracting newcomers. This surely was true of the rural counties that grew most rapidly in Michigan, Wisconsin, Kentucky, and Missouri and probably elsewhere as well.
A few specialized agricultural areas grew in the early ’80s: the irrigated lands of the Yakima Valley of Washington, the Snake River Plain of Idaho, and the Central Valley of California. And the special agricultural lands of Texas and Florida continue to grow but may soon be better thought of as unique industrial/agricultural parts of metropolitan areas. Within metropolitan areas, nursery stock and other ornamental plants were able to compete successfully for land valued as real estate.
A very special category of rapid growth of population is caused by high fertility rates such as that of the Mormons of the rural areas of Utah, and adjacent parts of Idaho and Wyoming shown on Figure 4. Some Indian reservations are also growing more rapidly than the nation as a whole, for example, Menominee WI, Yakima WA, Beltrami MN, Ziebach SD, and Navajo AZ. Higher birthrates among Hispanics coupled with high rates of immigration may account for some of the rapid population growth in the Southwest and Florida.
Rural Areas that are Losing Population. The map of non-metropolitan areas that lost population between 1980 and 1985 (Figure 5) is most striking in that it grew to include much of the best agricultural lands of the Corn Belt and the Mississippi River Valley. The population of the forested region of the Pacific Northwest, scattered mining districts in the Mountain West, the Lake States, and the Appalachians also declined. As well, some towns–rural service centers of areas whose resources were no longer in great demand by Metropolitan America lost residents.
Although the farm population of the United States had been declining for decades, most counties of the Corn Belt grew in the 1970s; by contrast, in the 1980s, most lost population. The richest lands of the Illinois and Iowa prairies were unable to support the existing farm population and both farmers and residents of farm towns were forced to move to survive. The wheat lands of the Plains states mostly continued to lose population in the 1980s.
The crisis of the grain growing areas of the country in the early ’80s is shown by the loss of rural population in all of the the Middle Western States. Within the Corn and Wheat Belt, the only non-metropolitan areas to grow at rates greater than the national average were such small, urban centers as Sioux Falls and Watertown SD and Bismark and Fargo ND, each of great importance within sparsely populated states. A few counties that lay adjacent to growing MSAs also showed above average rates of increase. Access to freeways gave a boost to some counties along the route: many of the counties along I 29 in the Dakotas, along I 80 in Nebraska, along I 70 and I 35 in Kansas, I 57 and I 64 in southern Illinois, and I 64 and I 30 in Indiana. Although they continued to grow somewhat, most of their neighboring counties lost residents.
The wheat growing lands of Montana, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas also lost residents as the demand for wheat exports declined. Losses had already became manifest in earlier decades as the size of wheat ranches increased.
Some of the most dramatic relative declines in population occurred in the irrigated cotton farming areas of the High Plains of Texas. Fifteen Panhandle counties, mostly concentrated to the northeast of Lubbock, lost over 10.8% of their population. The alluvial basins of the Mississippi River flood plain that stretch southward from Cairo IL through southeast Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, Mississippi and into Louisiana, witnessed population losses in almost all counties. There, cotton had been partially replaced by soybeans and farms grew larger as corporate practices gained sway. At the same time, the number of needed farm laborers declined. The result: yet another area of rural population exodus.
Similarly, the old cotton and tobacco lands of the Johnson Purchase of western Kentucky, now concentrating in soybeans, lost heavily, continuing a decline already in progress in the 1970s. Some peanut growing counties of southwest Georgia, southeastern Alabama, and southeastern Virginia also lost population from 1980 to 1985. These areas contained some of the heaviest concentrations of rural Blacks in America. Farming areas of the lower peninsula of Michigan, western New York and Pennsylvania, and scattered rural counties in the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plain also lost residents .
Changes in the softwood lumber industry resulted in the closing of mills and the modernization of others Thousands of workers lost their jobs and towns throughout the Pacific Northwest lost population. Western Oregon and Washington, the heart of America’s timber land, were hit hardest. Other areas that produce timber products in the Northern Rockies of Idaho and Montana also suffered population decreases as did Coos County NH.
After a decade of growth, the Appalachian coalfield areas, especially those of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky, again lost population. Many small manufacturing towns and service centers of western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and West Virginia that formerly depended on the use of nearby Appalachian coal resources also lost inhabitants during the early ’80s.
Changing world prices as well as changing economies of extracting metallic ores left some areas without a major employer, resulting in major out migration from widely scattered parts of the nation. The copper mines of the Butte-Anaconda area of Montana and of Morenci, Arizona, the lead mines of the Idaho Panhandle, the lead and zinc mines of southeastern Missouri, the iron mines of northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan have closed or declined greatly in importance, forcing the emigration of many of the former workers in the mines, smelters, and supporting businesses.
Nevertheless, the population of many rural counties remained little changed during the period. 1160 counties, 37% of the nation’s total, gained population but at less than the national average of 5.4%. In large parts of the rural Southeast, New England, the northern Lake States, the Ohio River Valley, and the Columbia River basin population grew at about the national average; few people moved in or out.
The Emerging America. The world economy vastly reshaped the population geography of America during the early 1980s. Surplus ??? grain production in many parts of the world as well as agricultural subsidies by many nations and groups of nations drastically altered the competitive position of America’s farmers. The most obvious result in the population geography of America was the loss of people in the vast agricultural country sides of America. As these agricultural resources became less valued in the world market, people left the farms and the small towns and cities that served the farms.
During the worldwide recession that ushered in the ’80s, building construction declined radically with the result that thousands of workers in the major lumber manufacturing areas were laid off. As with America’s agriculture resources, the nation’s timber resources are the key to the prosperity or relative poverty of large parts of the country. With some degree of economic recovery, the wood products industry became more competitive by modernizing mills, not by rehiring workers, many of whom had already moved.
World market prices in metals largely determined that American copper, iron, lead, and zinc resources and the areas that depended upon their extraction and processing declined during the 1980s. Most metal ore mining areas in the United States lost population during the period. On the other hand, the hike in the price of petroleum products by the OPEC cartel stimulated the mineral energy producing areas of the American Southwest and West. The rapid increase of population in both the rural areas of extraction and the metropolitan areas that financed, supplied and serviced the wells, pumps, refineries, and transmission facilities was created by a rush of job-seeking immigrants. But with the drop in price of OPEC oil in November 1985, the boom collapsed and once again people had to “talk with their feet.” A fluid and interconnected world market coupled with an increased ease of travelling great distances hearalded a period of interstate migrations comparable to the rapid opening and settling of the western frontier.
Although the maps indicate that great parts of America lost or gained population due to the worldwide fluctuations in the world’s economy, most American were less directly affected by the changing relative values of the nation’s basic natural resources than were the farmers, the miners, and the lumber workers of the United States. In fact, two thirds of all Americans lived in megalopolitan or metropolitan areas, most of which were less dependent on local resources than they were on resources derived from distant lands and on services which could be provided in any of hundreds of places located near areas of large concentrations of consumers. The increasingly international structure of industry, finance, and trade continued to affect the American economy during the period. Many heavy, natural, raw material-dependent industries and their associated secondary manufacturing plants left the United States with the result that most metropolitan segments of the “Rust Belt” Megalopolis lost jobs and saw out migration. Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo were most heavily hit. On the other hand, America’s domination of large parts of the world’s financial, technological, and military industries saw the growth of those metropolises where finance, technology, research, information, and government were concentrated, for example, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Dallas, Atlanta, and Washington. The Texas metropolises, Denver, and New Orleans-Baton Rouge also grew when their oil- and gas-rich hinterlands required increased urban services. Florida, Arizona, and California metropolises continued to be the sunny goal of thousands of people leaving the northern megalopolises.
Within the metropolitan areas, the central cities once again began to receive immigrants. They grew slowly, reversing widely established patterns of earlier decades. Suburbs continued to grow more rapidly than the metropolitan centers. The Atlantic Coast Megalopolis extended its territory into ever more distant rural counties, as did the two California megalopolises, creating extremely fast-growing exurban fringes where metropolitan real estate values became attached to land formerly valued primarily as natural resource. Much of the “flight to the countryside” of the 1970s was simply the forerunner of megalopolitan expansion, a process where exurban and suburban edges joined what were once discreet metropolises.
With increased prosperity, many Americans were able to spend more leisure time in places of great amenity on week-end trips, vacations, or in retirement. This resulted in the growth of the more culturally active metropolitan centers as well as those parts of the rural country endowed with good climate and other desirable natural characteristics. The sea and lake shore, the mountains, and the desert became accessible to more Americans as places to recreate and enjoy life.
The most powerful message I read in these maps is the division of America into two parts–a metropolitan America based on maintaining an important place in managing the world’s economy and political power and a non-metropolitan America based on the exploitation of local natural resources.
The first America is trying to retain dominance within a rapidly changing world economy over which it no longer decisively controls many ingredients–especially cheap energy and a dominant coercive military force, which until now have been essential to insuring future prosperity. People move from one metropolitan setting to another, following the changing sources of power, whether it be industrial, financial, commercial, or governmental. The local natural resources of this first America are not important; the creations of society are almost its exclusive focus..
The second America is at the mercy of Metropolitan America and of a world that exploits natural resources, wherever they may be, and whenever it becomes economic to do so. Because natural resources are the bases for the immediate livelihood of Non-metropolitan Americans, optimism increases locally whenever the local resources are in demand. Conversely, local depression sets in when changed metropolitan demands cause local resources to decline in value or when technology replaces human workers with manufactured substitutes.
When times are bad, the usual response of Non-metropolitan Americans has been to immigrate either to metropolitan areas or to regions where natural resources are increasingly being extracted. This was true of the early 1980s. The general decline in America’s rural population and the growth of its metropolitan population indicated the continuing use of the first response. The movement of people from farms and sawmill towns to the oil and gas fields or to resorts and retirement centers exemplifies the second response. A third response of non-metropolitan Americans was to try to recreate the world of the metropolis in non-metropolitan areas. Many towns within the Piedmont metropolises illustrate that this option succeeded in the 80s, although the failure of hundreds of non-metropolitan communities to attract “high tech” industries was a more common occurrence.
A long-playing tragedy is indicated by these population movements. America’s and the world’s natural resources continue to be used at an increasing rate by a growing galactic metropolitan population, which in its use of increasing amounts of goods remains largely unaware of the diminution of natural resouces through pollution, erosion, or actual consumption. America continues to follow patterns of frontier exploitation of resources long after America’s richest natural resources have been skimmed off. Americans continue to move to new sites of resource exploitation where they attach themselves only as long as the resource remains valuable. Urban populations have generally come to view natural resources as commodities or real estate to be managed, manipulated, and marketed.
Success has been seen as the ability to grow and atttract immigrants. To be successful, America’s metropolitan population must continue to grow and use more imported resources and immigrants. To be successful, America’s rural population must devour the very resources on which it depends for its continued economic existence. Stability within natural limits continues to be cast aside in a neverending search for growth. In the process, the enduring source of the nation’s strength and wealth–its natural resources–continue to be consumed and lost.
Nearly all Americans have come to deal almost exclusively with an artificial world of economics, culture, and human manufacture and do not recognize the limits as well as the possibilities within nature. The compasses that guide the lives of Americans are not aligned with the forces of nature but line up with the fluctuating magnetic fields fixed by lodestones, charged and discharged by the craft and art of human societies. The pathways of galactic America continue to lead towards or away from everchanging humanly created poles of attraction and repulsion. The maps of population change in the America of the 1980s present a simple record of the most recent movements along these paths.
FIGURES
Figure 1. The St. Louis MO metropolitan area as defined by the rate of growth (or loss) of county population between 1980 and 1985. The outer ring of metropolitan counties all grew faster than the next ring of surrounding rural counties. St. Louis is typical with its small central core that lost population, old suburbs that grew very slowly (after having lost population or grown very slowly in the ’70s), and an outer ring of faster growing suburbs which are gradually extending into a rural countryside. In their turn, the rural counties grew slowly or actually lost population. The Census Bureau includes Jersey County IL but excludes Warren and Lincoln Counties MO from the St. Louis MSA. The boundaries of the other metropolitan areas can be determined in similar fashion.
Figure 3. Rate and direction of population change within megalopolitan and metropolitan areas: 1980-1985 as compared with 1970-1980.
FOOTNOTES