How declining cities can reverse their fortunes - The Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail reports that the fastest growing metros in the US are doing so because of lower local and state taxes.
How declining cities can reverse their fortunes - The Globe and Mail

My response:

The correlation between lower taxes and high growth rates in some metropolitan areas in the US is spurious at best. While it may be true that metros with the highest population growth had a slightly lower average tax rate of 9.4% (against 10.6% for the lowest population growth metros), one cannot ignore the fact that the high growth metros are located in the US Sunbelt.

It is, therefore, not the lower tax rates, as Cato Institute would have us all believe, but the cheap air conditioning and oversupply of new housing that enabled rapid growth in metros located in the US Sunbelt.

Professor Edward Glaeser of Harvard University in 2007 observed that while the metros located in the Sunbelt have experienced above average increase in housing supply, the price of new housing increased at a slower pace in the Sunbelt than the rest of the US, which is indicative of an oversupplied housing market.

Furthermore, seven out of 10 highest population growth metros, reported in the Cato Institute’s paper, are located in States with the highest foreclosure rates, i.e., Nevada, California, Arizona, Georgia, and Florida.

"Why Are Some Cities Growing While Others Are Shrinking?," Cato Journal, 31, 2 (Spring/Summer 2011), 285-303.

Diversying United States: The melting pot

Image via WikipediaFINDINGS

An analysis of data from the 1990, 2000, and 2010 decennial censuses reveals that:

• New minorities—Hispanics, Asians, and other groups apart from whites, blacks, and American Indians—account for all of the growth among the nation’s child population. From 2000 to 2010, the population of white children nationwide declined by 4.3 million, while the population of Hispanic and Asian children grew by 5.5 million.
• In almost half of states and nearly one-third of large metro areas, child populations declined in the 2000s. White child populations dropped in 46 states and 86 of the 100 largest metro areas, but gains of new minority children forestalled more widespread overall declines in youth.
• In areas of the country gaining children, Hispanics accounted for most of that growth. Fully 95 percent of Texas’s child population growth occurred among Hispanics. Los Angeles was the only major metropolitan area to witness a decline in Hispanic children from 2000 to 2010.
• Ten states and 35 large metro areas now have minority white child populations. Child populations in the Atlanta, Dallas, Orlando, and Phoenix metro areas flipped to “majority minority” by 2010.
• Segregation levels for black and Hispanic children are higher than for their adult counterparts, despite a general reduction in segregation over the last 10 years. The average black or Hispanic child lives in a neighborhood where whites make up 10 percent less of the population than in the neighborhood of the average black or Hispanic adult.
• The accelerating growth of new minority children heralds an increasingly diverse future child population and labor force. While this transition presents challenges for America’s social and political systems, it also represents a clear demographic advantage for the nation and its regions versus its developed peers, one which savvy leaders will capitalize upon in the years and decades to come.

Related articles

• New Faces of Childhood - Wall Street Journal (news.google.com)