re: 2024 state population totals for SEC states

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I had no idea that Alabama had 1 million more people than Oklahoma.

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I was in Oklahoma last week. Alabama doesn’t have miles of wasteland with basically zero inhabitants like you all have up there.

Alabama has 8 metro areas with at least 200,000 people.

Birmingham- 1,184,000
Huntsville- 527,000
Mobile- 411,000
Tuscaloosa- 278,000
Daphne/Fairhope- 253,000
Auburn- 202,000
Decatur- 159,000
Dothan- 153,000

Oklahoma has two…

Oklahoma City- 1,478,000
Tulsa- 1,045,000

The next biggest metro is Lawton… way down there at just 127,000.

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The state of Louisiana may be losing population, but the area of Louisiana, that I live in has tripled in population over the past 20 years and continues to grow.

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Where do you live?

MSA’s of Louisiana, 2020-2023:

+4.16%- Slidell (+11,000)
+3.69%- Hammond (+5,000)
+1.43%- Lafayette (+6,000)
+0.36%- Baton Rouge (+3,000)
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-2.32%- Monroe (-6,000)
-2.57%- Shreveport (-10,000)
-2.64%- Alexandria (-4,000)
-4.09%- Houma (-9,000)
-4.48%- New Orleans (-45,000)
-5.72%- Lake Charles (-14,000)

Those are some bleak numbers. New Orleans is just on a long spiral downward. Using current metro definitions, population by year:

1980- 1,192,000
1990- 1,141,000
2000- 1,146,000
2010- 956,000
2020- 1,007,000
2023- 962,000

It was looking like NOLA had hit bottoms and was recovering a bit in the late 2010s, but the past 4 years have been brutal.

Birmingham and Tulsa MSAs are now larger, and Knoxville will be within 2-3 years

frick being an "SEC state".

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Living in north Alabama in the Athens/Huntsville/Madison/Decatur area, it's tough to imagine places growing much faster than around here. The growth around here has been insane for the past few years.

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It’s all relative. Huntsville and Nashville people are the worst at thinking their growth is something special when in reality, there are loads of places growing just as fast or faster.

Southern metros (500k+) by growth rate, 2020-2023:

+12.9% Lakeland, FL
+10.1% Port St Lucie, FL
+9.7% Fort Myers, FL
+9.4% Daphne/Fairhope, AL
+9.2% Sarasota, FL
+8.3% Austin, TX
+8.0% Fayetteville, AR
+7.9% Daytona, FL
+7.2% Huntsville, AL
+6.7% Raleigh, NC
+6.7% Jacksonville, FL
+6.2% Charleston, SC
+6.2% Melbourne, FL
+6.1% Dallas, TX
+5.7% San Antonio, TX
+5.5% Killeen, TX
+5.4% Charlotte, NC
+5.4% Orlando, FL
+5.3% Tampa, FL
+5.1% Greenville, SC
+5.0% Houston, TX
+4.8% Knoxville, TN
+4.4% Nashville, TN

The number of friends I have in Nashville who talk as if the growth in their city is unprecedented in human history is nauseating. Yes, it’s grown a lot. But so is most of the South and Mountain West.

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The area we know as the South is being overrun with outsiders. California people are flooding into Tennessee like it is being given away.

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I think we are culturally becoming less, not more homogenous. It feels to me like the people who making choices where to live based on many of these cultural issues.

Remote work allows people to more readily live around like-minded people.

It's a shift from the days when everyone in a community was linked by the local factory but it does allow more choice.

So that's a good thing for people who really want to retain their local culture. The Californian's who are moving to Tenn are throwing off CA culture and want to embrace Tenn culture. That's a good thing if you want their to be enthusiasm for Tenn culture.

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People are crammed together all through those humid mud states. Poor people.

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I know, Houston's a real shithole.
Did you know the western Gulf of Mexico is even more hot & humid than Florida??

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The area we know as the South is being overrun with outsiders. California people are flooding into Tennessee like it is being given away.

With mass media we as a country are much more homogenized than existed when I grew up in the rural South. I still have the voice of someone raised in the rural South. My children and grandchildren were not raised in the rural South and do not have speech patterns of someone that did.

I know people have the right to live where they want to live but I hate to see some aspects of Southern life disappear.

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Agreed. What you describe is more of an issue in Florida, Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, and especially South Carolina. It's less of an issue in the rest of the South outside of some isolated exceptions.

As far as Alabama is concerned, there is definitely some of what you described in Baldwin County (the Daphne/Fairhope/Foley, AL metro area) where I live due to a large influx of people from the Midwest moving to the area. There is also an element of this to a lesser degree in the Auburn and Tuscaloosa metro areas.

Huntsville has always seemed to be an anomaly in the state of Alabama. It has always seemed more like a Midwestern city stuck in a Deep South state to me. In recent years it has added some west coast influence with so many California transplants moving there for a lot of the tech jobs in the area.

Huntsville is far and away the most non-traditional southern city in the state in my opinion. In many ways it would fit in culturally in just about any Midwestern state as much as it does in a southern state

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frick being an "SEC state".

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Texas has always been a "Southern" state. There was a concerted effort to distance itself from the South after the civil war, moreso around the turn of the 20th century to be more western than southern, and it worked. Now that the South is en vogue again and Texas is pretty firmly engrained as a cowboy state in the minds of Americans, it doesn't mind being associated with the rest of the South once again. Texas is very big, so it has distinct characteristics. East Texas is definitely Southern, and back in the 1800's, half of Texas lived East of the Trinity River.

And Texas still hasn’t recovered the Louisianas moving there.

Schools destroyed, violent crime spiking, and social services abused.

Louisiana Cajun people are the greatest of Americans, but they live among the worst. That state will never reverse the decline.

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Some folks acting like it’s a bad thing for states to lose population lol.

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They act that way because it's always true in our economy.

From an environmental standpoint. Yeah, about 3/4 of the people in the world need to die.