A Profound Economic Shift is Moving the Nation’s Wealth to Texas

For the first time, six fast-growing states in the South — Texas, Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee — are contributing more to the national GDP than the Northeast, with its Washington-New York-Boston corridor, in government figures going back to the 1990s. The switch happened during the pandemic and shows no signs of reverting.

The Southeast accounted for more than two-thirds of all job growth across the U.S. since early 2020, almost doubling its pre-pandemic share. And it was home to 10 of the 15 fastest-growing American large cities.

“You could throw a dart anywhere at a map of the South and hit somewhere booming,” said Mark Vitner, a retired longtime economist for Wells Fargo who now heads his own economic consultancy, Piedmont Crescent Capital, in Charlotte, N.C. And no one beats Fort Worth, the country’s fastest-growing big city in the latest Census Bureau data.