The western cities of America are booming. In the past few decades, the major metro areas of the West – defined as the vast area west of the 98th Parallel and east of Cascade and California Coast Ranges – have outperformed other U.S. cities in terms of attracting people and business and creating opportunities for their residents.
Under-reported is the success of America’s westward urbanization. The cities of the West have been shaped by a unique combination of historical forces, despite their many differences. The West’s cities developed later than other U.S. Cities. When they finally developed, an American capitalism that was uniquely modern fueled their growth.
A third factor also played a major role in the success and growth of America’s west coast cities. This was aggressive federal policies which promoted economic growth. The policy program which helped to build the West is closely linked with the thinking and ideas of Alexander Hamilton and Henry Clary. However, it was only in the West that this tradition reached its full bloom in the years following the Civil War.
According to U.S. Census Bureau’s definitions, there are 63 metro areas between the 98th Parallel and the Pacific Coast Ranges. Seven of these metropolitan areas have more than one million residents, including Phoenix, Denver San Antonio Las Vegas Salt Lake City Tucson and Fresno. The Fort Worth part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area is also worth including, despite it being located a fraction east of the 98th Parallel, given Fort Worth’s strong emphasis on western heritage, and its motto “Where the West Begin.”
The total population of these 64 metros grew by 14 percent between 2010 and 2021. This includes the Fort Worth-Arlington division, but excludes the eastern part of the Dallas Fort Worth area. In contrast, the 385 metros in America grew by 9 percent. This growth is a reflection of varying experiences. The Central Valley of California and the Lower Rio Grande Valley are struggling metros, while the fastest growth occurs in the biggest urban areas.
Between 2010 and 2021, the population of six large metro areas (Phoenix and Denver, San Antonio and Fort Worth, Las Vegas and Salt Lake City) and smaller ones within driving distance, such as Provo and Tucson, Utah, grew by 19 percent. The six largest metro areas in the West are home to about 24 million people, or 7 per cent of America’s total population.
Migration from other parts of the United States is the main driver for the growth in the region. Net migration contributed more than 6 per cent to the growth of all 64 metros from 2010 to 2021. Domestic migration contributed 13 percent to the growth of the Phoenix metro. It also added 12 percent for the San Antonio, Las Vegas, and Denver metros.
This massive influx is changing the demographics of the region, since it involves groups who were previously a small part of the population. Between 2010 and 2021 the black and Asian population in the 64 metro region grew by 21 and 37 percent, respectively. This is a much greater increase than metropolitan America as a whole. Hispanics in the region increased by 22 percent – slightly faster than metropolitan America – and now make up 35 percent of all residents.
Attractions to the West include its dramatic scenery and outdoor recreational opportunities. Economic opportunity is also a major factor. The region, which was slower to develop population and industrial centers than the Northeast or Midwest, was poorer during the first century of its existence in the United States. However, it has caught up.
Arizona, Colorado Nevada, New Mexico and Utah have incomes that are 1 percent higher than the U.S. average today. This is up from 10 percentage points below the median national income in 1950. Phoenix, Denver San Antonio Fort Worth Las Vegas and Salt Lake City have income levels that are more than 10% higher than the U.S. average, up from a 3 % advantage in 1990.
The 64-metro area has seen a significant increase in incomes of Hispanics, Asians, and whites since 2010, compared to the national average for each group. Black incomes, however, have remained in line with national averages. Native Americans, the most mistreated group of people in Western history, earn 5 percent more than the average Native American in today’s West cities.
The West’s advantage in income is due to the fact that its high-value industries are growing rapidly and have reached national standards. In recent years, many companies have moved from coastal cities to Denver and Phoenix. These include Palantir, The North Face and Align Technologies. Taiwan Semiconductor is also building one of the largest chip factories in the world, right here in Phoenix.
Housing prices in the region are modestly lower than national averages due to policies that encourage rapid development. According to federal standards, the share of households that are burdened by housing costs remains lower than overall levels in metropolitan America despite a substantial increase in home prices over the past decade.
Based on studies conducted by Harvard University economist Rajchetty and his colleagues (comparing the population-weighted medians of western metros with metropolitan America in general), western metros have a distinct advantage for upward mobility.
The West’s success is partly due to its distinctive economic model. Its history differs greatly from the major regions of the East.
The standard narratives agree that the economic debates between the Washington administration and the Civil War were centered around two competing visions of the future for the country. One strand of thought, which ran from Hamilton to Clay and Lincoln, stressed the importance of federal action in promoting economic growth. These leaders’ main policy instruments were infrastructure investment (“improvements” as Antebellum Americans referred to them), modern finance, centered around the Bank of the United States, and promotion of modern technology and innovation.
Lincoln, who was a passionate advocate of the program throughout his career, called it “the American System”. Hamilton and his supporters embraced modernity, especially in the economic realm.
In opposition to the Hamilton-Clay-Lincoln vision was a radically different program advanced by Thomas Jefferson and his Virginia Dynasty successors. Jefferson’s plan envisioned a nearly entirely agricultural economy. The program was hostile to the federal government, as well as cities, finance and industry. Jefferson combined this regressive economic vision with his expansive views of political freedom in rhetorical terms. Once in power, Jeffersonians devoted themselves, with a steady and ruthless purpose, to expanding slavery-based plantations as far as possible, including the Gulf of Mexico, and possibly the Pacific Coast.
The Jeffersonians saw westward expansion as a necessity because soil erosion was causing plantation owners to lose their wealth in Virginia and Carolinas. They could only maintain their wealth by either moving to the unspoiled west or selling their slaves to western buyers. The industrial revolution in Britain, and Eli Whitney’s cotton-gin, seemed to offer vast opportunities for the South to expand its Cotton Kingdom across the continent.
The nation was enormously successful in expanding westward, with the Hamilton-Clay-Lincoln model predominating north of the Ohio River and the Jeffersonian model triumphant south of the river as far west as East Texas. The westward expansion was a huge success for many reasons, including the economic and political vigor and strength of the nation. It also benefited from the rapid growth of immigration and the economic integration enabled by the best navigable waterways system in the world.
Jefferson and Virginia Dynasty was the major winner in the early years of Antebellum America, from 1801 until 1861. Jefferson and James Madison built a coalition that was committed to their program, while also looking out for the interests of New York and other Northern states. After Jefferson left office, the Democratic Party installed presidents who were fervently loyal to Jefferson’s policy, such as Jackson, Van Buren and Tyler, who was a Whig in name but a loyal Virginian when it came to policy. They also included Polk, Pierce, Buchanan, Pierce, and Polk.
The Jeffersonians, and the slave oligarchs that they represented, got almost everything they wanted in the years before 1861. From the Fugitive slave act and slave constitutions for every state in the West that was contested to the closing of the Second Bank of the United States as well as blocking the majority of internal improvements preferred by Clay and his cronies.
Then something unexpected happened. The westward expansion of American civilisation crashed into a formidable invisible barrier at the 98th or 100th parallels, depending on who you ask. The climate became arider as you moved west across these lines. The rain is usually between 10-20 inches per year, less than 5 inches at some places. This compares to 40+ inches of rainfall in the East. In these conditions, agriculture without irrigation can be difficult or even impossible.
Other factors that impeded westward expansion were the fierce Native populations of the Great Plains, including the Comanches Apaches Navajo Cheyenne Sioux and others.
Aridity and hostile natives prevented Imperial Spain for almost 300 years from colonizing the American West, except in a few small settlements. In New Mexico the Spanish began retreating from their settlements in the north around 1610. They eventually fell back to Santa Fe. Spain also began to retreat from Texas in the 1690s. The missions in San Antonio, Santa Fe and along the California coastline remained isolated, beleaguered outposts for hundreds of miles after the permanent Spanish settlement.
Major Stephen Long was sent by James Monroe in 1818 to explore the Rocky Mountains. He found no reason for the U.S. to do better than Spain on the drylands. Long coined “Great American Desert” which appeared on American maps throughout the 20th century. Oregon Trail pioneers pointedly traveled 2,000 miles to get across the Plains and Rocky Mountains to more appealing areas west of the Cascades, rather than settling in the western interior. In the South, aridity largely blocked the expansion of plantation agriculture after the 1846-48 Mexican War, according to the great western historian Walter Prescott Webb.
America failed to replicate its earlier successes when it first tried to expand past the 98th parallel. The frontier of settlement in Texas actually fell backwards from the 1850s until the U.S. Army’s final defeat of the Comanches in 1875. The northern Great Plains frontier retreated hundreds of miles in the wake of terrible droughts in the 1880s and 1890s, with massive depopulation of the Plains states.
Successive enterprises celebrated in western mythology failed one after the other. Gold miners mostly returned to the East or drifted into western towns penniless. The western cattle drives, a temporary expedient to connect excess beef supplies in Texas with booming Midwest demand in the 1870s, came to an end the next decade. Farmers following the fraudulent theory that “rain follows the plough” often lost everything in the West.
America finally reversed this long record of European-American failure in the West through a massive exercise of federal government power. In the decades following the Civil War, the U.S. Government implemented the Hamilton-Clay-Lincoln program far more thoroughly than it had ever managed to do in the East.
Federal initiatives in the West started, of course, with the conquest of the Native peoples in the 1870s and 1880s and their removal from most western lands. But three pieces of legislation passed by Congress at Lincoln’s urging in 1862 made a decisive difference in shaping the modern West: the Pacific Railroad Act, which put the government’s power and resources behind transcontinental expansion of the railroads; the Homestead Act, which together with the 1877 Desert Land Act enabled small farmers to acquire cheap western land; and the Morrill Act, which created land-grant universities in every state, jumpstarting western education systems. Each of these were expressions of the American System, and they became possible only because Southern Jeffersonians were no longer present in Congress to block them after 1861.
But the most transformational initiative in the West was federal investment in water infrastructure, creating the greatest hydraulic civilization in history. Federal engagement in western water challenges began with John Wesley Powell, who famously explored the Grand Canyon in 1869 and went on to become the founding head of the U.S. Geological Survey. Powell reported that agriculture would only work in the West with irrigation, and that even then available surface water would only allow settlement in small portions of the region.
Most privately financed irrigation efforts in the late 19th century failed, due to inadequate funding and technical expertise. A notable exception was the Mormons, who started irrigating Salt Lake Valley drylands within days of arriving there and, as of 1900, accounted for more than half of the irrigated farmland west of the 98th parallel.
The turning point came with passage of the Reclamation Act of 1902, committing the federal government to western dam-building and irrigation. The Act’s chief architect was Theodore Roosevelt, heir to the Hamilton-Clay-Lincoln tradition, who championed federal support for western settlement to advance both national economic growth and U.S. geopolitical power in the Pacific.
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Over the next seven decades, the federal government would build more than a thousand dams, completely transforming the West. Federal investment in waterworks and other infrastructure made American civilization in the West possible.
In one of history’s profoundly consequential ironies, however, policies to promote western agriculture were at best a modest success. The main achievements of these policies, it turned out, were the West’s cities. The American System gave rise to what western author Wallace Stegner called an urban “oasis” civilization in the West. And this civilization grew larger and more successful than virtually anyone had imagined in the 19th century.
This article is part of the American System series edited by David A. Cowan and supported by the Common Good Economics Grant Program. The contents of this publication are solely the responsibility of the authors.
