Sunbelt growth (1 gen 1950 anni – 1 gen 1980 anni)

Descrizione:

Sunbelt: Name applied to the Southwest and South, which grew rapidly after World War II as a center of defense industries and non-unionized labor.

Suburbanization was a national phenomenon, but its fullest expression came in an emerging region of the country — the Sunbelt, a broad swath of the South and Southwestern states, where defense industry jobs, low taxes, mild winters, and plenty of open space encouraged the construction of sprawling subdivisions (Map 25.2). Florida added 3.5 million people, many of them retired, between 1940 and 1970. Texas combined Sunbelt appeal with expanding petrochemical and defense industries and added 4.5 million people in the same period. Most dramatic was California’s growth, spurred especially by the state’s booming defense-related aircraft and electronics industries. By 1970, California contained one-tenth of the nation’s population and surpassed New York as the most populous state. By the end of the century, California boasted an economy larger than that of all but a handful of countries.

This map shows the two major, somewhat overlapping, patterns of population movement between 1950 and 1980. Most striking is the rapid growth of the Sunbelt states. All the states experiencing increases of over 100 percent in that period are in the Southwest, plus Florida. The second pattern involves the growth of metropolitan areas, defined as a central city or urban area and its surrounding suburbs. Most central cities were not increasing in population, however, so the metropolitan growth shown in this map is evidence of expanding suburbs. And because Sunbelt growth was primarily suburban in nature, that’s where we see the most rapid metropolitan growth, with Los Angeles the clear leader.


A hallmark of Sunbelt suburbanization was its close relationship to the military-industrial complex. Building on World War II expansion, military bases proliferated in the South and Southwest in the postwar decades, especially in Florida, Texas, and California. In some instances, entire metropolitan regions — such as San Diego County, California, and the Houston area in Texas — expanded in tandem with nearby military outposts. Moreover, the aerospace, defense, and electronics industries were based largely in the Sunbelt. With government contracts fueling the economy and military bases providing thousands of jobs, Sunbelt politicians had added incentive to support vigorous defense spending by the federal government.

Orange County, California typified the Sunbelt suburb. Located southwest of Los Angeles, Orange County was until the 1940s mostly just that — abundant groves of oranges. But during World War II, local boosters attracted new bases and training facilities for the marines, navy, and army air corps (forerunner of the air force). Cold War militarization and the Korean War kept those bases humming, and Hughes Aircraft, Ford Aeronautics, and other defense-related manufacturers soon built plants in the sunny, sprawling orchards. Subdivision developers followed close behind, building so many new homes that the population of the county jumped from 130,760 in 1940 to 703,925 in 1960. In the early 1950s, the filmmaker and savvy entrepreneur Walt Disney chose Anaheim in Orange County as the site of a massive new amusement park. His Disneyland became for the postwar generation of Americans what Coney Island in New York had been to the prewar generation — a fantasy world of leisure, spectacle, entertainment, and consumption

Aggiunto al nastro di tempo:

Data: