Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, February 28, 1994 TAG: 9403040017
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"Searching for the Sunbelt: Historic Perspectives on a Region," a collection of essays by historians and other social scientists, was published in 1990. In a preface for a new edition this past October, editor Raymond A. Mohl notes that 1990 census results, now in, altered little. Rather, they produced additional evidence of ambiguities that already were perplexing students of American regionalism.
Political analyst Kevin Phillips came up with "Sun Belt" back in 1969, as a label for areas he thought ripe for Republican gains. By the mid '70s it had become a convenient shorthand - a cliche, some say - for ... well, for what?
The phrase has come to refer not simply to a political insight but to the economic, cultural and demographic life of a vast section of America. The connotation is positive: of growth and prosperity, of a region on the move. The derivation "Rustbelt," with its negative connotation of stagnation and decay, arose as a label for the North and Midwest - the other vast section of America that clearly wasn't in the Sun Belt.
But where are the boundaries between Sun Belt and Rustbelt? And how accurate are the connotations?
Conceptually, the Sun Belt marries traditional regions of South and West (or much of it). For Southerners, "Sun Belt" was a way to upgrade their region's lousy image of poverty and ignorance.
Those who deny the Sun Belt's existence, or at least the durability of the label's usefulness, argue that South and West remain distinctive regions. To the extent the two are becoming more alike, they say, it is simply part of the general homogenizing of the entire country.
Still, population and jobs in the West and South continued growing in the '80s at a rate several times faster than in the Northeast and Midwest. The idea of a South-West commonality of some description is hard to dismiss. A common thread noted in one essay, for example, is the impact of air conditioning on the ability of warm places to attract new businesses and people.
Although Southwest Virginia isn't in the frigid zone, neither - as veterans of winters here can attest - is it a hot-weather region. If climate is the defining factor, Southwest Virginia has a hand grasped to each belt.
Carl Abbott, an urban-studies specialist, cites the 37th parallel as a consensus border. In the West, it's the boundary between Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma to the south and Utah, Colorado and Kansas to the north. In the East, not cogruent with state lines, it's a less workable definition.
Even so, it's worth noting where the 37th runs in Virginia: From the middle of Hampton and Newport News on the coast, through Southside below Petersburg but north of Danville, to Rocky Mount and then through northern Floyd County and southwest Pulaski County, through northern Wythe County, and then to just north of Wise before entering Kentucky. If the 37th is the boundary, Roanoke isn't in the Sun Belt but Martinsville is; Blacksburg isn't but Wytheville is.
That seems arbitrary, but using the 37th serves the purpose of excluding from the Sun Belt the Rocky Mountain states and the Pacific Northwest - regions that, because they've also exhibited the sort of economic and demographic trends that the Sun Belt is supposed to be enjoying, are included in some definitions of the Sun Belt. The trouble is that this comes perilously close to rendering the phrase no more than a trite restatement of the truism that some places do better than others.
Conversely, many parts of the Sun Belt by any geographic definition fail to meet the image definition: South Texas, the lower Mississippi River Valley, the rural South generally. Nor, it might be added, is the economic weather in recession-plagued California looking very sunny these days.
Sun Belt prosperity, in short, is uneven; for that matter, the Rustbelt isn't entirely desolate. Less than a belt, say Mohl and others, the Sun Belt is a collection of "sunspot cities" with a lot of shadow in between. Roanoke may be neither a Sun Belt nor a Rustbelt city. But, as a goal for the city and the region, becoming a sunspot has its attractions.
by CNB