Again, these ACS estimates didn't seem to correct for the errors exposed by the 2020 census. In the 2020 census for instance, NYC was heavily underestimated, but the ACS estimates now suggest that the city has lost nearly 600k people since 2020 which I highly doubt, especially when one considers actually tangible stats like housing occupancy rates and subway ridership stats.
One state that stands out here is Idaho. When you plot it (credit to cinyc), it's borders with WA, OR, and WY stand out. What is going on here; is there actually an allure of conservatives self-sorting into Idaho, or could the metrics they use in Idaho somehow be flawed? Obviously buy Idaho is one of the fastest growing states, just confused as to why the divides with the boarders of other states is so stark.
The big theme in the sunbelt def seems to be continued sprawl of the large metros. In many of these cases, the core county in a metro like Dallas, Travis, Fulton/DeKalb, Fairfax, has underwhelming growth in not ourright shrinking, but the suburban counties around them have seen insane increases. Really wonder how geographically big some of these metros can becomes before they become unsustainable - the srpawl of Atlanta and Dallas are geogrpahically huge these days.
I feel like for a least a few of the sun belt metros, the sprawl will continue until they're megaregions like the Bay Area. The ones that come to mind are San Antonio and Austin, as well as Orlando and Tampa.
The biggest ones, like Dallas/Fort Worth and Atlanta will probably simply continue to grow. There aren't any geographic barriers to hinder further sprawl, like mountains and bodies of water in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. And sun belt state governments are spending ever more on road and highway construction, incentivising more suburban sprawl.
