×

The following is an excerpt from State of the South: Building an Infrastructure of Opportunity for the Next Generation, published by MDC, a non-profit organization in Durham, North Carolina, dedicated to "increasing educational attainment, connecting people to work that pays, and helping them get then resources they need to become successful," according to the group's mission statement. Here we present the report's introduction; in the coming weeks, The American Prospect website will publish the profiles of cities and towns throughout the South that comprise the full report (PDF available here).

Five years after the Great Recession, the American South has emerged as a region divided. The great sweep of territory from the Potomac to the Rio Grande offers stark juxtapositions of bright hopes and deep distress and discontent. The South has both powerhouse cities, growing in jobs and population, and depressed towns and neighborhoods, where people seem stuck without prospect of upward mobility.

The South has a contradictory economy, polarized politics, an anxious populace, a divided head and a conflicted heart. In much of today's South, economic and demographic vibrancy exist side-by-side, as veritable next-door neighbors, with poverty, underemployment, educational disparities, and stagnant social mobility. The time-worn descriptions of Southern dichotomies-Old South versus New South, affluent urban versus poor rural-do not fully capture the complex set of challenges now facing Southern policy makers, civic and business leaders, and engaged citizens. The persistent inequality and economic uncertainties now afflicting the South are not simply Southern phenomena, but rather national, even international, in scope. Still, the South can learn from its own recent history that it need not be paralyzed in the face of big challenges-that Southern communities can go about fashioning local infrastructures of opportunity to provide uplift for stranded people and places, even as the nation engages in unresolved debates over how to hasten the economic recovery and stimulate the expansion of well-paying jobs.

Lack of Mobility: The South Stands Out

It is the purpose of this State of the South report, the eighth in a series dating back to 1996, to apply insights from national data sources and recent scholarly studies to the American South, complemented by a scan of nine Southern communities, to propel initiatives and innovation to promote economic opportunities, to heighten educational achievement, and to increase our young peoples' chances for upward mobility.

Consider, for example, contrasting rankings indicating that the South has several of the nation's strongest metropolitan areas, yet those places of robust growth contain high poverty and wide income inequality.

In the closely watched Forbes rating of "Best Places for Business and Careers,'' six Southern metros placed in the top 10 among the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the nation. Raleigh, North Carolina, placed first, followed by Nashville, Tennesee (6th), Charlotte, North Carolina (7th), Dallas, Texas (8th), Atlanta, Georgia (9th), and Houston, Texas (10th). In contrast, Raleigh ranked 92nd in a measurement of inequality, Nashville 67th, Charlotte 36th, Dallas 46th, Atlanta 28th, and Houston 31st. A United Nations report recently projected that North Carolina's two powerhouse cities-Raleigh and Charlotte-would grow by 70 percent by 2030, leading the list of U.S. cities of more than 500,000. (Southern cities dominated the top 15 in projected rates of growth.) Meanwhile, Census data assembled by the Brookings Institution showed that the poor population of Charlotte grew from 160,000 to 314,000 from 2000 to 2012, and from 66,000 to 130,000 in Raleigh, nearly doubling in each city. Clearly, robust growth has a double-edge-vibrant places attract both high-paid, well-educated citizens and people of low-skills who take low-paying, part-time service work.

In 2014, scholars from Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, published a paper titled Geography of Intergenerational Mobility. Along with the study came a stunning interactive map that spotlights which American localities offer slim prospects for young people who live in the lowest fifth of household income to rise to the top fifth. Not surprisingly, several old-industry cities in the North ranked low in mobility. But it is sobering to see on that map an expanse of the darkest coloration sweeping across the Southeast, denoting places, including the region's shiniest cities, with the least prospects for upward mobility. "The fact that children who grow up in low-income families in Atlanta and Raleigh fare poorly is perhaps especially striking because these cities are generally considered to be booming cities in the South with relatively high rates of job growth," the Harvard and Berkeley scholars wrote.

Along with their fellow Americans, Southerners have a strong sense that the American Dream has faded in the early years of the 21st century. Fully 77 percent of Southerners responded "not confident'' to this question posed by Hart Research Associates and Public Opinion Strategies for the NBC News/Wall Street Journal in a 2014 poll: "Do you feel confident or not confident that life for our children's generation will be better than it has been for us?'' Only 21 percent of Americans felt confident in upward mobility, while 76 percent were not confident-a 20 percentage-point rise in no confidence since September 2008.

Southerners who are honest with themselves know that longheld sentiments and predispositions compound the challenges posed by the slow recovery from the Great Recession of 2007–09. Even with renewed in-migration of black citizens and the expansion of the black middle class, the South remains a region divided along the fault line of race. Even as most Southerners say they are happy living where they are, the South remains afflicted with an absence of long-range vision and low expectations for too many of its people-a failure to imagine a future for people and places beyond the current trajectory. Southern policy often has rested on the assumption that certain people-whites, blacks, and Latinos-will remain stuck at or near the bottom, that mobility is not in their destiny.

The Paradox of the Metro South: Economic Health Indicators for Southern Metros

THE POST-RECESSION CONTEXT

The United States has engaged in a prolonged, intense debate over income and wealth inequality, over signs of weak social mobility and, indeed, over doubts about sustaining the American Dream. This debate takes place in a context of partisan and societal polarization that the South shares with the rest of the nation. In his influential 2008 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, Bill Bishop, a former writer-in-residence at MDC, described social fractures that impose stresses on U.S. democracy. The 2007–09 recession seems to have done nothing to alleviate, and appears to have exacerbated, conditions and trends that Bishop described six years ago. In June 2014, the Pew Research Center released a major report-based on its largest-ever survey of more than 10,000 adults-that reinforce and extend the findings of The Big Sort. In his outline of the key findings, Carroll Doherty, Pew's director of political research, declared that "political polarization is the defining feature of 21st century American politics, both among the public and elected officials''-and that "polarization is reflected in the personal lives and lifestyles of those on both the right and left." An examination of the Pew findings suggests that the South mostly resembles the nation in political and lifestyle polarization. The survey also provides evidence of the South's divergence from the nation-a tilt toward a more conservative and hardened posture.

Asked whether they prefer elected officials who make compromises with people with whom they disagree or who stick to their positions, 43 percent of Southerners-more than in any other region-rejected compromisers.

The Pew survey asked, "Would you prefer to live in a community where the houses are larger and farther apart, but schools, stores, and restaurants are several miles away, or a community where the houses are smaller and closer to each other, but schools, stores, and restaurants are within walking distance?" Southerners preferred a spread-out community over a denser community by a 55–43 percent margin, wider than residents of any other region. These findings contribute to an understanding of the South's decision-making context and of the region's political landscape. The policy and attitudinal environments across the South erect barriers to sweeping initiatives to address the complex array of factors that produce widening income inequality, softening of the middle class, and stagnant economic mobility.

State by state, the region has experienced a prolonged period of disinvestment, a pulling back from public services. To some extent, the cause can be attributed to the drop in tax revenues resulting from the recession; the states have legal mandates to operate within a balanced budget. But disinvestment also stemmed from policy decisions to cut or hold the line on taxes and to reduce services within limited revenues. While private employment has rebounded in several sectors, state and local government cutbacks have contributed to weaker job markets in the states. Of the 19 states that have not moved forward with Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, nine are in the South-nine that have declined federal funding that would have created jobs and provided healthcare services to people of modest means. In public education, spending per pupil declined in all Southern states, except Tennessee, from fiscal year 2008 to 2014. Spending fell by as little as $60 per pupil in West Virginia and $150 in Florida to as much as $700 in Georgia and $1,200 in Alabama. Meanwhile, across the region, racial re-segregation has proceeded in elementary through high schools. And, according to a calculation by the Southern Education Foundation, half or more of public school students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch in all Southern states, except Virginia.

Similarly, in the fiscal 2008–14 period, state spending per student in higher education declined in all but three states: North Carolina and Tennessee had modest gains, while Texas went up by 8 percent. State support fell by 9 percent in Alabama, 8 percent in Kentucky, and a huge 34 percent in Louisiana. Tuition rose by more than 50 percent in Louisiana, Georgia, and Florida.

The quest for recovery has generated a fierce debate between Southerners who see tax cuts and a slimmed-down public sector as the stimulus to job growth through private enterprise, and Southerners who believe that economic advancement and a high quality of life flow out of investments in education and job training, health insurance, and environmental regulations. Republicans who advocate the limited-government, depend-on-private-enterprise approach have gained the upper hand in most state governments in the region. In 2014, Republicans occupied nine of the region's governor's offices; Democrats, four. Of the 26 legislative chambers, House and Senate combined, Republicans held a majority in 22, Democrats in four.

With both Washington and state capitols influenced more by self-limiting ideologies than basic pragmatism, there is all the more reason why communities, especially growing metropolitan areas with adequate resources, must initiate efforts to give the rising generation of Southerners experiences and life-tools to pursue a future better than their parents. While improving mobility will create more equitable conditions for individuals, it is also instrumental to making the South more globally competitive: our young people, successful or not, are poised to determine the progress of the region.

FOCUS ON 15- TO 24-YEAR-OLD SOUTHERNERS

The South's teenagers and young adults face an economic future fraught with a lack of upward mobility and greater uncertainty than their parents and grandparents encountered as they completed schooling, formed families, and advanced into working age. At the root of the uncertainty lies a pervasive doubt: whether the South can sustain the American Dream of each generation moving up and doing better than previous generations. Today's 15- to 24-year-olds, who constitute about 15 percent of the people living in the region, find themselves buffeted by the still-potent effects of the deepest national recession since the Great Depression, as well as by the powerful forces of globalization and technological change. They approach the beginning of their productive lives in a period of sluggish or stagnant wage growth, eroding middle-skills jobs, high rates of poverty, sweeping income inequality, and significant public disinvestment.

Their grandparents and parents also lived through times of conflict, economic turbulence, and social change. Still, most of them could see a nation and region moving forward through both private enterprise and public investment, providing expanded opportunities and offering the prospects of stable employment and, for many, steadily rising middle-class income.

Southerners born during and immediately after World War II came of age in a society segregated by laws that severely limited the freedom and prospects of black citizens. The South had a low-wage farm-and-factory economy. Still, most high school graduates could look forward to long-term employment in the same trade or for the same employer. The GI bill and federal research grants stimulated an expansion of higher education, while states developed vocational-technical schools that evolved into community colleges. Interstate highways and airports connected the South to the national and world economies, further diminishing the region's pre-war, persistent isolation.

The parents of today's 15- to 24-year-olds are products of the South that blossomed in the wake of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. The lifting of legalized segregation liberated the South economically. Through both public and private investment, the once-laggard region led the nation in population and job growth in the 1980s and '90s. Reversing the Great Migration to the North and West, black Americans moved to the South in greater numbers than to any other region. Simultaneously, Spanish-speakers from Mexico and Central America spread across the region, defining its future as multi-ethnic rather than biracial. Old-economy jobs declined, as newer, higher-wage jobs multiplied. While structural changes left a digital divide and a widening urban-rural gap, public universities and community colleges charged relatively low tuition to prepare Southerners for the newer jobs that required education beyond high school.

Today's youth and young adults face a South transformed by the two recessions since the turn of the century, which exacted a heavy price throughout the region. The 2000-01 recession, though relatively shallow, stifled the South's economic momentum built over the last quarter of the 20th century. Then the Great Recession of 2007–09 reshaped the national-and Southern-labor market in dramatic fashion. There has not been-and is unlikely to be-a return to "normal."

For this analysis, MDC chose to focus on the prospects of 15- to 24-year-olds because the young people in this segment of the population range from students entering high school to young adults recently emerging from college and/or training. In the near term-by 2025 they will, of course, be 10 years older-they should be building careers and families, as well as contributing to their communities' economic and civic lives. They are our next generation workforce and our next generation parents; failure to help them succeed now weakens their long-term prospects for economic security and, for the poorest, increases the chances that their children will grow up in poverty. It serves the South to pay attention to this cohort of people in developing policies to combat intergenerational poverty, as well as to restore confidence that the American Dream lives on.