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Commentary By Allison Schrager

Florida is America's Future: Old, Southern and Retired

Economics, Culture Culture & Society

Why we should be concerned that the fastest-growing cities in the U.S. are retirement villages in the South.

One of the most important trends to emerge from the 2020 Census didn't get much attention last week, but it reveals more about how both the U.S. economy and its politics will look in the coming years than most other details focused on by the news media.

Americans' vision of their city of the future typically involves skyscrapers populated by large new technology companies. Yet the 2020 Census didn't point to San Francisco or New York as the fastest-growing city, or even one of the dozens of smaller metros that emulate them. The fastest growing metro area in the U.S. is the Villages, a retirement community in central Florida. And that's indicative of an economy that's older, less dynamic and more reliant on government benefits. It also points to a growing concentration of political and economic power in the south.  

Continue reading the entire piece here at Bloomberg Opinion

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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.

This piece originally appeared in Bloomberg Opinion