The Sunbelt

by

Andrew Busch

• LAST MODIFIED: 17 April 2025
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190922481-0084

Introduction

The Sunbelt is generally considered to be the area of the United States spanning from the Southeast coast to California, although no formal geographic definition exists and not all researchers accept the concept. Before World War Two, the area was largely rural and its economy was based in agriculture, resource extraction and processing, and localized industrial manufacturing. The New Deal and World War Two saw the federal government invest heavily in the area, at first to modernize it with infrastructure such as dams and electric systems and then to support the war effort with heavy manufacturing and military installations. Since World War Two this area has experienced high levels of demographic, economic, and urban growth driven by continued federal investment; lower costs in land, labor, and taxes; technological development; and a warmer climate. Beginning in the 1970s researchers started to identify traits that made Sunbelt metros different from metros in the “Rustbelt” or “Frostbelt,” and to attempt to account for the demographic and economic shifts they saw in the data. Among the main characteristics they identified were lower density development and sprawl, commerce-oriented municipal governments that promoted a “friendly business climate,” a higher level of military and defense-related economic activity, and an emphasis on leisure and tourism. In the 1970s the term also became popularized by mass media, who tended to paint the Sunbelt in a positive light because of its relative growth in an era of stagnation and decline among cities in the Northeast and Midwest. Changes that hurt those areas—the migration of production and the decline of organized labor; technological advancements such as air conditioning and cheap commercial air travel; and the growth of retirement communities—also benefited the Sunbelt. Since roughly the 1990s, researchers have focused less on attempting to define the Sunbelt and more on thinking about the Sunbelt’s role in the United States’ changing political, economic, and social landscapes. Historians have contributed most to this literature. Their studies have tended to focus on one or several cities within the region rather than on the Sunbelt as a whole, although several important edited collections have addressed the Sunbelt concept and drawn essays from a wide geographic and methodological range. Their focus has been eclectic, with major themes focusing on the Sunbelt’s role in promoting a rightward political and social turn; a new type of segregation based in property rights and suburbanization; a business-centric political economy that exacerbates inequities; globalization and migration of people and business; the rising power of evangelical Christianity; environmental justice; and planning and urban sprawl. Los Angeles and Southern California have played an outsized role in the literature and many scholars, notably those from the so-called Los Angeles School of Urbanism, considered Los Angeles as the paradigmatic Sunbelt city and a model for how late-20th-century American cities were growing. Atlanta is also heavily studied as a similar model in the South.

General Overviews

The texts listed in this section provide important theoretical and bibliographic contributions to the ongoing discussion of the Sunbelt and address the core issues associated with studying a nebulous though impactful region. Abbott 1981 and Bernard and Rice 1984 offer comparative analyses of different Sunbelt cities focusing especially on federal investment and the role of local business groups in metropolitan economic development. Sawers and Tabb 1984 takes a comparative perspective at the regional level and offer studies of Sunbelt and “Snowbelt” cities. Mohl 1990 builds on this study by arguing that the Sunbelt is becoming less distinctive from other regions in several ways. Lyson 1989 examines how urbanization and economic development engendered social and cultural divergence between urban and rural Sunbelt. Schulman 1994 provides a comprehensive picture of the political economy of the postwar South, emphasizing federal investment and business’s efforts to attract industrial development with cheap costs. Carleton 1993 offers a short overview of the Frostbelt-Sunbelt debate. Dear 2001 offers a theory of urbanism that argues Los Angeles should be considered the paradigm of urban development for the late twentieth century, rather than Chicago. Dochuk and Nickerson 2014 helps to reinvigorate debate on the Sunbelt by presenting a wide-ranging set of essays from leading scholars of politics and conservatism, race and inequality, and globalization. Lassiter and Crespino 2010 similarly engenders new and expansive debates about the nature of Southern exceptionalism. Lassiter and Kruse 2009 and Guberman 2015 offer concise reviews of recent literature on Sunbelt urbanism and suburbanism.

• Abbott, Carl. The New Urban America: Growth and Politics in Sunbelt Cities. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981.

  This classic work examines five diverse cities, Atlanta, San Antonio, Portland, Norfolk, and Denver. Abbott finds that in the wake of World War Two aggressive growth-oriented coalitions sought to use federal urban renewal investment to reshape their cities in ways that favored business and economic development. The results were uneven among the cities, but most efforts to resist suburbanization and capital flight were largely unsuccessful, leading to fragmentation.

• Bernard, Richard M., and Bradley Robert Rice. Sunbelt Cities: Politics and Growth since World War Two. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984.

  A compilation of twelve essays, each focusing on a specific city in the Sunbelt. The editors provide an overview that emphasizes the role of federal investment in defense and infrastructure, the creation of good business climate, and quality of life. In sum, the book’s strength is in its deep dive into numerous Sunbelt cities, which allows for comparing and contrasting.

• Carleton, David J. “The Sunbelt Debate Revisited.” Journal of Urban History 20.1 (November 1993): 114–122.

  DOI: 10.1177/009614429302000106

  Reviews two books on Sunbelt development within the framework of the “Frostbelt-Sunbelt” debate that characterized the early Sunbelt historiography.

• Dear, Michael, ed. From Chicago to L.A: Making Sense of Urban Theory. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2001.

  This urban planning collection argues that Los Angeles, and with it Southern California, provides the best model of late-20th-century urbanism. The editor argues that Los Angeles, once seen as an urban anomaly, is now characteristic of how US cities are growing. The essays are wide-ranging and fall under four broad headings, “Los Angeles and the ‘L.A. School’”; “City of Industry”; “Reconsidering Community”; and “Revisioning Urban Theory.”

• Dochuk, Darren, and Michelle Nickerson. Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.

  This collection of essays analyzes the Sunbelt from a variety of historical perspectives. The editors argue that the early twenty-first century requires a rethinking of what the Sunbelt is and why it is important to study, pointing to continued growth and development in the South and West. The essays are divided into four sections, covering political conservatism, race, geography and inequality, and globalization.

• Guberman, Rachel M. “Is There a Sunbelt After All? And Should We Care?” Journal of Urban History 41.6 (November 2015): 1166–1174.

  DOI: 10.1177/0096144215611628

  This short essay reviews several key history books on Sunbelt urbanism, frames the wider debate about whether the Sunbelt remains a functional category of analysis, and provides a brief historiography.

• Lassiter, Matthew D., and Joseph Crespino, eds. The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

  This ambitious edited collection seeks to better integrate Southern history into the national narrative by arguing that the South is and has been more similar to the rest of the nation than historians have claimed. The essays are separated into in four sections that focus on regional similarities between North and South, ideologies of Southern exceptionalism, federal investment in the South, and the political and social shifts that characterized the South and nation after World War Two.

• Lassiter, Matthew D., and Kevin M. Kruse. “‘The Bulldozer Revolution’: Suburbs and Southern History since World War II.” Journal of Southern History 75.3 (August 2009): 691–706.

  Argues that Southern urban history must focus more on suburbs, especially regarding Southern politics. Also provides a useful review of key texts in Southern politics and suburban history.

• Lyson, Thomas. Two Sides to the Sunbelt: The Growing Divergence between the Rural and Urban South. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1989.

  Explains the growing socioeconomic and cultural divergence between the urban and rural Sunbelt, particularly in the South, as well as between places that are majority white and majority black. While Southern metropolitan areas grew dramatically during the 1970s and 1980s, poverty and other indicators of distress remained among the nation’s highest in Southern rural areas. The author calls for more federal attention to bolster the prospects of these neglected places.

• Mohl, Raymond, ed. Searching for the Sunbelt: Historical Perspectives on a Region. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.

  This edited volume features twelve essays that collectively make the case that the Sunbelt is becoming less distinctive from the North and East due to regional convergence. Chapters are diverse, focusing on the ways that national political and social movements, technology, migration and immigration, and government investment have made the Sunbelt more like the rest of the nation.

• Sawers, Larry, and William K. Tabb, eds. Sunbelt/Snowbelt: Urban Development and Regional Restructuring. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

  The collection of essays focuses on structural factors in explaining the shift of people and capital from North and East to South and West. One notable aspect of this book is its focus on both Sunbelt and Snowbelt, which allows for comparisons and contrasts. Contributors study diverse places, from Silicon Valley to New England, and diverse topics, from racial inequities in plant closures and deindustrialization in Detroit to federal industrial policy.

• Schulman, Bruce J. From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938–1980. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994.

  DOI: 10.1515/9780822399964

  This classic book focuses on the role the federal government played in transforming the Southern economy from primarily agricultural to more urban and diversified in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1930s Roosevelt’s New Deal invested heavily in the South in an effort to modernize the region and improve labor conditions. In the aftermath of World War Two a new generation of growth-minded politicians marshalled these investments for economic development purposes, leaving the South overall wealthier but also more divided by class and race.