America's midsize, 'inner Sun Belt' cities grow
One example is Murfreesboro, Tenn., which grew 51 percent in the '90s and has surged 26 percent since then.
By Mark Trumbull | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitorfrom the July 11, 2007 edition
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Murfreesboro, Tenn. - It's not dinner time yet, and it's past lunch hour, but the Slick Pig BBQ on the outskirts of this small Southern city is hopping with customers.
And anyone who's not buying a pork sandwich is out driving down the main commercial street that arcs through Murfreesboro.
Once a sleepy Tennessee town with a Civil War past, it's now a booming mini-metropolis poised for continued growth. Population here grew 51 percent in the 1990s and has surged another 26 percent since then.
This small city near Nashville, in the center of the state, typifies a broader pattern nationwide. Everyone knows about the rapid rise of Sun Belt cities like Atlanta, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. But a sizeable share of the nation's population growth is also happening in smaller cities that might escape notice unless one stops to look.
Often these cities, too, are in the Sun Belt – and the fastest growing ones now are overwhelmingly not on the gold coasts but in affordable inland areas. A recently released list of the fastest growing US cities, as tracked by the Census Bureau, makes the point.
"All but one or two [of the top 10] were in the South or in the West … the 'inner Sun Belt,'" says demographer Kenneth Johnson of Loyola University in Chicago. And almost all, he says, are "on the outer edges of a bigger city."
The rise of this inner Sun Belt is driven by affordable and available land – and the jobs that are gravitating to it. Here in Rutherford County, Tenn., within an easy drive of Nashville, home prices have avoided both boom and bust.
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