Rediscovering Lewis and Clark Territory

When President Thomas Jefferson acquired the vast new territory of the Louisiana Purchase, St. Louis, founded in the late 1760s near the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, was the natural launching point for an exploratory expedition. So in May 1804, Lewis and Clark and their Corps of Discovery set out from this city to map the sprawling new American wilderness.

At that point the city had a population of roughly 1,000. As it became the fulcrum for decades of expeditions and migrations west, rapid growth ensued. By the time of the Civil War, St. Louis was a great city: the nation's top river port, our largest flour producer, a key trading center, and home to a burgeoning base of specialized manufacturers (many run by industrious German immigrants, who by 1850 accounted for one out of every three residents). St. Louis made more shoes, bricks, and street cars than any city in the nation. It was the anchor of America's thriving agricultural and industrial heartland.

When it staged its famous 1904 Exposition, one of the greatest parties in American history, St. Louis was at the top of its game. Exactly 100 years after launching the Corps of Discovery up the Missouri River, St. Louis was the nation's fourth-largest metropolis. It was recognized around the world as a sophisticated, technologically advanced city. And it had sprinkled new settlers all across the Great Plains, where in innumerable towns they built homes and businesses, and erected churches, schools, hospitals, and cultural institutions at a rapid rate, profoundly influencing both the economic development and the moral character of the American nation.

Today, many parts of St. Louis are deserted, or forlorn. From a peak of more than 850,000 in 1950, the population has shrunk to barely 300,000 at present. Wide swaths of old city blocks lie abandoned. Further out, in the sprawling expanse explored by Lewis and Clark, many small towns and homesteads are likewise desolate or abandoned. To much of America, this is "passed over country" in every sense of the word.

Recently, however, there have been stirrings of life in the lands of the Louisiana Purchase. Not only neighborhoods of St. Louis, but scores of cities and small towns throughout our Middle West are being rediscovered by a new generation of Americans. Places like Sioux Falls and Fargo in the north, Boise, Casper, and Missoula in the west, and Kansas City and Omaha in the center are out-and-out thriving, despite little or no attention from the national media.

The elements behind the Midwest's recovery from a century-long shrinkage of America's agricultural and industrial economies are many. They include things like the increasing costliness and dysfunction of our larger coastal cities, the liberating power of the digital revolution, and revived respect for what may be called Plains values in our current era of moral confusion.

Over the last ten years, according to analysis by demographer William Frey, there has been a marked decline in the longstanding out-migration from America's Midwest. Since the end of the dot-com boom in 2000, the region's cities, including St. Louis, have done far better than places like San Francisco, San Jose, New York, and Boston, all of which have been losing more domestic migrants than gaining. In addition to attracting "cultural refugees" from other parts of the U.S., many heartland cities have at last begun to attract some immigrants from abroad. In cities such as St. Louis and Kansas City, the numbers of immigrants arriving in the 1990s was more than twice what was experienced in the 1980s.

This demographic resurgence has been supported by an evolution of local economies away from their previous dependency on agriculture and basic manufacturing into new areas like information, business services, and finance. Over the past five years, some of the very fastest growing "new economy" towns in the U.S. have been places like Fargo and Bismarck, North Dakota; Rapid City and Sioux Falls, South Dakota; and Des Moines and Iowa City, Iowa. This has only been spottily reported in our national media, who in contrast could not restrain themselves in coverage of the more coastal-oriented dot-com boom.

Midwestern cities also appear to have weathered the recent tech and financial busts better than ballyhooed "new economy" strongholds like Seattle. Generally speaking, it has been better, of late, to be a software engineer in Fargo than in Seattle or San Jose; a financial analyst or business service professional in Sioux Falls or Omaha than in New York or Boston.

A complex interplay of geography, demography, and economics is behind this turn of fortunes. Perhaps the most obvious factor is the affordability of housing. Many parts of the country, particularly the coastal areas, have become prohibitively expensive for young potential homebuyers. America's growth from 248 million residents in 1990 to nearly 300 million today has placed pressure on housing, particularly in places with regulatory obstacles to growth or lack of available land. In some places, the impact has been so severe that even recessions have minimal effect on house prices.

In places such as Washington, New York, Portland, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle, and even their peripheral suburbs, prices are now so high that half or more of families cannot afford to buy a home. In San Jose, only one in five residents now has sufficient income to become a homeowner, while among San Franciscans only one in ten can hope to buy his own domicile.

By contrast, in the great middle of the country, stretching from St. Louis to Bismarck, more than three out of four families generally qualify to buy a home. This provides those communities with enormous advantages in retaining and attracting workers, particularly younger ones who in previous eras might have headed for the coasts.

Affordability is clearly emerging as an important factor in the regional battle for talent. Recent evidence suggests that high costs have played a major role in the recent "brain drain" from the greater Boston area. One detailed new study found that costs were the reason 27 percent of recent out-migrants left the area. Today fully half of all graduates from the Boston area's vast complex of colleges and universities leave the region, roughly half for locales they never lived in before.

Similar problems now bedevil other "hot" talent environments. In scores of interviews, many skilled, younger workers have told me that the hot cities of the 1990s are now impenetrable to the sinking of roots. "People are coming here to start businesses because they see this as a better place for them to raise their families," suggests Ernie Goss, a regional economist based at Creighton University in Omaha.

Matthew Wyczalkowski, a 30-year-old programmer at Washington University Medical School, moved from the Bay Area to St. Louis's Tower Grove neighborhood, a mixed area south of downtown. "I like the walking environment, the culinary diversity. And we like the prices," he explains. "The opportunities here are extreme. We couldn't dream of buying a house in California. Here the dream can be real."

Lower housing prices often combine with more reasonable office rents and tax and regulatory environments. In today's hypercompetitive business climate, keeping business costs under control is a critical component of viability.

Randy Schilling, president and CEO of Quilogy, a fast-growing software firm based in St. Charles, Missouri, sees his lower real estate costs as part of a business price structure that is increasingly important for competitiveness. "In some ways, the middle of the country is doing to the coasts what China and India are doing to America," he suggests.

In contrast to the late '90s, Schilling reports he now has little trouble attracting skilled programmers from either coast. "We can hire a guy from Chicago or New York, give him a pay cut, and he still lives better," Schilling explains. "The talent that used to flow out to the Bay Area, San Diego, and Boston is now coming to places like this."

In addition to these economic factors, there are also social ones. Since the 9/11 attacks, suggests demographer Frey, there has been a "sharp and immediate flight from population density." Companies have been urged by federal regulators and shareholders alike to spread their operations to less high-profile areas. Much more fundamentally, many individual people seem to be seeking out safer and less stressful environments.

It also seems fairly certain now that the 2000s have produced a more conservative mood--particularly among the young--than the "Sex and the City" 1990s. Recent surveys of college students conducted by researchers at UCLA and the Harvard Institute of Politics find a more conservative, although not necessarily right-wing, mood among young people, including a greater interest in religion and family life. These are goals Midwestern cities are well positioned to satisfy.

These advantages have been further augmented by the rise of the Internet, which now allows companies to compete for individuals and opportunities in remote locations. "I have customers all over the country, but our costs are low and our people can afford to live well here," notes Thane Paulson, president of two growing Sioux Falls business service firms. "We appeal to a lot of people who want to come here to enjoy the South Dakota lifestyle."

Len Hurley, whose Sioux Falls-based firm Hurco manufactures water and sewage treatment equipment, agrees. His company frequently seeks out skilled welders or machinists. "We get e-mails from people all over the country who want to come here," he reports. A chance to raise a family in a place where families are still strong is one powerful appeal.

During generations of agricultural depopulation, the young and ambitious left the Midwest in droves. Well raised by strong families, and effectively educated in orderly schools, this diaspora of Midwesterners seeded the economies of other places ranging from California to the Atlantic coast. But today there is a reverse flow.

The demographic reclamation of America's heartland is a promising development, even for our coastal regions. A shift toward the center of the country could offer a needed respite for crowded urban areas. Growth on the Plains and in other low-cost areas of the U.S. might help the coastal mega-regions to concentrate on addressing fundamental problems of sprawl, failing education, and soaring home prices. The gravest threat to great cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago is not a siphoning of growth to regions like the Great Plains, but rather the giant cities' inability to manage their own growth with effective schools, open housing markets, and so forth.

A renewed heartland could also provide young American families and immigrants who are now increasingly priced out of large metropolitan regions a critical new "field of dreams" for realizing their ambitions for a good life. Rather than growing frustrated in Queens or Montebello, ambitious new arrivals can harvest opportunities and buy homes and raise children in places like St. Louis or Omaha, where their presence and energies would be highly prized.

Perhaps even more important, a revival in our central heartland will reconnect American elites with a part of the country that has offered some of the best elements to our nation's fundamental character. Even during decades when it struggled economically, America's Middle West has remained a source of whole families, bright students, reliable workers, and good neighbors. Rediscovering those traits in the midst of our nation will be good news for all of us, whether we live in Lewis and Clark territory, or in places far away.