The Big Sort (29 page)

The Big Sort has been a national manifestation of the economist's theory—a post-materialist Tiebout migration based on these non-economic goods, as people have sought out places that best fit their ways of life, their values, and their politics. Because I've been concentrating on a group of comic book artists who moved to a high-tech city that tipped solidly Democratic in the 1990s, it might be easy to think of the Big Sort as a liberal phenomenon. That would be incorrect. The Big Sort has traveled in several political directions. Not everyone who moved in the 1990s was a liberal trying to escape the suburbs for a city of bikes, dark beer, and a Democratic majority. Many more people were moving in another cultural direction, toward Bible studies, big backyards, and Bass Weejuns.

People even took their segregated communities with them on vacation. The Catskills resorts in Sullivan County, New York, displayed a special kind of sorting by lifestyle and religion. Beginning in the late 1800s, Jewish immigrants vacationed in the hotels upstate from New York City.
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As that market diminished, in the 1970s the old hotels attracted a more mixed group of patrons: Jews, Italians, and Irish. The re-sorts integrated socially and ethnically. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the Sullivan County tourist trade segregated again, only this time into communities of interests and values. The Foundation for
A Course in Miracles
occupied one lake house. There were Hasidic retreats, Hindu retreats, and Christian retreats. One Sullivan County resident told the
New York Times
that the community had come "full circle." Exclusively Jewish resorts had been replaced by a mixture of people, and now, with the faith-based resorts, "it seems like we're back to segregation."
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Bicyclists and public transportation have an extremely strong political constituency in Portland. A new mayor met with an organization of riders before he sat down with the local business establishment.
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More than 10,000 bikes cross the four Willamette River bridges each workday, and when RE I held a grand opening for a new store downtown, the outdoor equipment company provided valet parking ... for bicycles.
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The word got out, and because of Portland's policy decision to promote bicycle riding and public transportation as alternatives to automobiles, the city began attracting a certain type of citizen. Portland's public transportation authority found in a survey that, unlike the situation in most cities, young, college-educated people in Portland are more likely to ride the city's trains or buses than were their peers with less schooling. In Portland, the probability that a young resident will hop aboard a bus or train rises with years of education. Those who have recently moved to Portland, regardless of age, are more likely to take the train or bus than are natives. Portland economist Joe Cortright's conclusion is that "people who value transit are much more likely to move here than, say, to Phoenix." In Portland, Cortright found, young people with a college degree are more apt to live downtown than in the suburbs. In Phoenix, they have exactly the opposite way of life: they buy houses outside the city and drive in.
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That is the Big Sort. People who move to Portland want good public transportation and city life. People who don't give a hoot about those things migrate to Phoenix, suburban Dallas, south of Minneapolis, or north of Austin. But people don't move to Portland just because of bike trails and metro stops. They are looking for an array of things that make them feel at home. They want to be able to buy certain books, see certain kinds of movies, and listen to particular styles of live music.

Of course, in a strict sense, place no longer limits the availability of goods. People can rent obscure movies through Netflix and buy books at
Amazon.com
that their local stores can't afford to stock.")
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Digital technology and cheap transportation have given everyone access to nearly everything, no matter where they live. In the geography of niche markets, however, people can best fill their lives with the stuff or experiences they want only if they live around others with the same tastes. Those interested in seeing a recently released foreign film or the new documentary on Townes Van Zandt on the big screen need to live in a community that can fill the theater. Similarly, someone who wants to participate in a specialized sport, worship in a less than mainstream church, or catch the latest alt-country acts will be drawn to certain locations. The appeal of the Big Sort is powerful because consumers, believers, and citizens all benefit from living in homogeneous communities.

In an economy of extreme niche markets, location itself becomes a commodity. "There [is] more cultural stuff [in Portland] that I [like] than in Houston, the fourth-largest city in the U.S.," explained Randy Jarrell. "I have access to more bands coming through town, better movie theaters, better bookstores, all that cultural stuff. We get way more limited-release films than if we lived in a comparable-size city in the Midwest." There are also political components to these consumer choices. If a person wants a public job in a town that provides health benefits to domestic partners or schools that teach creation science, he or she will move to a jurisdiction where a majority of the residents favor those kinds of public expenditures. Given these consumer/political demands, Charles Tiebout wouldn't have been at all surprised by the migration of the Big Sort. In the 1990s, people began moving to the places where they could find the amenities—and the politics—that they wanted.

The picture of exurban America most of us conjure is sunny, hot, and southern. The only thing southern about Scott County, Minnesota, however, is its relationship to Minneapolis. The Sun Belt doesn't have a monopoly on the combination of fast-growing counties and Republican politics. Scott County grew 55 percent in the 1990s. In the first four years of the new century, it was the twelfth-fastest-growing county in the United States and one of seven counties around the Twin Cities that were among the nation's top 100 in growth. After the 2004 presidential election, Ronald Brownstein and Richard Rainey of the
Los Angeles Times
reported that 97 of those counties voted for George W. Bush.
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Robert Thibodeaux is a young Republican leader in the Scott County town of Savage. Thibodeaux joked that the Bush campaign would ask its volunteers in Savage to identify voters as Republican or Democrat. The flow of people into Scott County was so politically one-sided, the task seemed silly: if you moved to Scott, you were a Republican. Thibodeaux told me, "We'd say, 'Okay, if you live in Scott County, I'm through with voter I.D.'"

People weren't deliberately moving to Scott County or to the exurban counties west of Houston or north of Atlanta because these places had Republican majorities. When you talk to people in Scott County, they describe a kind of longing for space, for countryside, for something manifestly not urban. No one says it—and probably few think about it so starkly—but they also were looking for a white community. Since the 1970s, white people have been moving in disproportionate numbers to the counties that in 2004 voted overwhelmingly for Bush. Scott is whiter than most. Tom Gillespie, Minnesota's state demographer, ticked through the ethnic backgrounds claimed by Scott County residents—Irish, German, Norwegian, English—and before long he tallied 94 percent of the population claiming to have come from Caucasian stock. Even in white Minnesota, Gillespie said, "those are overwhelming numbers."

Robert Thibodeaux grew up in Grapevine, Texas, a small town between Dallas and Fort Worth. He was shocked by a rape and a rash of pregnancies at his high school. He blamed Dallas, which he felt was reaching out to touch his hometown. "There was this creeping big-city-ness," Thibodeaux said. When he moved north for work, he decided to distance himself from all things citified.

Those active in the Scott County Republican Party have an anti-urban idealization of rural America. Barbara Lerschen was Scott County Republican Party chair in the 1980s. She moved from the Twin Cities because, she said, you can "breathe the freedom [in this exurban county]. South of here, there are still fields. You can get out, and you're not crowded. In St. Paul, you have people telling you what to do." Ben Adams runs a car stereo shop in Minneapolis but lives in Scott County. He moved there with his wife, a schoolteacher, because "we loved the fact that once you drove south of the [Minnesota] River, you had ten minutes of driving where you had fields on both sides of the road. It was the separation from the Twin Cities ... that we liked. We're not urban people."

One Republican I met at a GOP get-together in Savage grimaced when he talked about "places you go [in the Twin Cities] where there are a lot of gray, pasty-faced people. I like it here." I brought up the trendy city neighborhood of Uptown in Minneapolis, a place brimming with young people. Nobody was much impressed. "I have real good liberal friends, and that's where they want to be, right there in Uptown," one Scott County Republican said. Wes Mader, a Bush campaign organizer, told me, "A lot of us are fed up with the urban lifestyle. I would not want to see my grandchildren raised in downtown Minneapolis in an environment that is different from the one out here. I want to split my own wood and be less dependent on government." Randy Penrod, a 285-pound rugby player and Scott County's Republican Party chair, said that Republicans and Democrats have a basic difference: "I have a theory that the farther away you are from another human being, the more likely you are to be a Republican."

New York Times
columnist David Brooks described the exurbs in his impressionistic 2004 book
On Paradise Drive.
After these fast-growing counties appeared to have reelected Bush that year, there was a mini-burst of research into what the exurbs were all about. The research was never particularly rewarding because nobody could agree on how an exurb differed from a suburb or a rural community. But anyone who has visited the outskirts of a U.S. city recently has seen these communities clinging to the hull of the city, just outside the older suburbs. Bob Cushing and I discovered that in counties where populations were growing fast and where a high percentage of people commuted across county lines to work (two-thirds of Scott County's workers leave the county for their jobs), the 2004 presidential vote was heavily Republican. But it was difficult to single out places that were purely exurban. The best study found that a whopping 6 percent of the people living in large metro areas could be found in an exurb—hardly enough of a vote to be changing the dynamics of presidential elections.
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To understand who voted for Bush—and to see how the country was sorting—a more useful calculation is the one proposed by Randy Penrod: population density. Republicans were moving into places where people lived farther apart; Democrats were clustering in places where people lived closer together. According to political scientist Michael Harrington, the average population density for counties voting for Bush was 108 people per square mile in 2000 and no people per square mile in 2004. Counties voting for Al Gore in 2000 averaged 739 people per square mile. Those voting for John Kerry in 2004 averaged 836 people per square mile. "As population density steadily decreases from the urban core to the rural periphery, Mr. Bush's share of the vote increases from 24 percent to more than 60 percent," Harrington wrote.
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Robert Lang and Thomas Sanchez saw a straight-line relationship between population density and the 2004 vote. "At each greater increment of urban intensity, Democrat John Kerry received a higher proportion of the vote," the two Virginia Tech demographers wrote. "There is a metropolitan political gradient in the big US metro areas: the center tilts to Democrats and the fringe to Republicans."
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The phenomenon occurred in staunchly blue and red states alike. In Bush's former hometown of Dallas, Kerry came within a percentage point of winning Dallas County, which voted in a Hispanic lesbian as sheriff in the same election. Bush won all of Dallas's suburban counties by at least 40 percentage points. Republicans didn't spend much time looking for votes in downtown Portland, however. The Bush campaign sent workers to precincts in the "farthest reaches of Multnomah County," one Bush organizer told me. They targeted the neighborhoods with the newest mortgages—and the largest expanses of lawn.

Thirty years ago, before the Big Sort, the spatial arrangement of voters was more balanced. In 1976, the average Democratic county in the presidential election had a slightly smaller population than the average Republican county. Over the next two generations, however, people made choices about how and where they wanted to live. Democrats gravitated toward cities. Republicans moved where there was a bit more grass to be mowed. It wasn't the suburban turf that transformed people into Republicans; nor did the city streets turn people Democratic. Instead, the cheek-by-jowl existence of the city attracted a different kind of person than the wide expanses of the exurbs. The change in geography was really a sorting by lifestyle and, ultimately, by political party.

Doug Breese ranches land his grandfather began piecing together in 1905. Homesteaders who had come to central Oregon realized that they weren't making any money and likely never would, so Breese's granddad was able to pick up land in Crook County at fifty cents an acre. Ranching is a make-do occupation, and ranchers are some of the world's best recyclers. The pipe running water from a spring to the Breese homestead was recovered from San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. The ranch is now a model of flexible production operating in a world market. Breese points from his pickup window to the pasture where he's experimenting with grass-fed beef. He grew peppermint until the Russians and Brazilians undercut his price by a third. He produced garlic seed one year, sold it for twelve cents a pound, and made money. The Chinese then put garlic seed on the market for two cents a pound. "It's okay," he said, in the best manner of a former president of the Oregon Farm Bureau. "They're learning to produce just like we learned to produce."