That’s not all the provocative news about the Iowa city. Going back a decade, Des Moines has been the fastest growing metro area in the Midwest. Its real GDP increased by more than 30 percent. Employment in those years was up 13.3 percent, first among its Midwest peer urbanized areas.
Why has this been happening? I’ll offer some thoughts later, but this isn’t an essay on Des Moines. I want to talk about some seemingly improbable things that have been taking place in different parts of the Midwest.
Take Grand Rapids, Mich., for example. It grew up as a manufacturing town, specifically a furniture-making town, and when the furniture industry declined and/or left, the city seemed to be headed for long-term stagnation. In 2011 it found a place on Newsweek’s list of America’s dying cities. That death was greatly exaggerated, to say the least. By 2013 it had climbed its way off the mortality list, and it started growing again. Not by a great deal, but to an extent that was hard to ignore. In the past five years, Grand Rapids and surrounding Kent County recorded the fastest growth of any Michigan metro. It’s not growing by leaps and bounds, but it has more than held its own.
That mirrors what has been going on in the smaller counties above it in northern and western Michigan. These rural outposts have consistently led the state in population growth for the past several years. Unlike much of the country, they have had a small positive domestic migration; more Americans have been moving in than moving out. The results are similar, as the demographer John Johnson has pointed out, in northern Wisconsin and even the Iron Range of northern Minnesota, long considered a declining backwater of played-out mines and dying small towns.
Then there’s Omaha, Neb. It isn’t growing like Des Moines or Grand Rapids — in fact it hasn’t been growing much at all. But during the past decade, Omaha has enhanced its cultural role as the center of an indie music scene that attracts thousands of visitors. It’s become a magnet for young people all around the Midwest. That’s a small piece of evidence that population growth isn’t everything.
THESE SNAPSHOTS AND OTHERS LIKE THEM have convinced some urban policy specialists that the Midwest as a whole might be a rising and not a setting sun. “The Midwest,” says demographer Diana Lind, publisher of the New Urban Order newsletter, “will become the fastest-growing region of the country by the end of the decade.”
All of this has to be placed in a national context. The population of the United States rose by 1.78 million between 2024 and 2025, an increase of 0.52 percent. That’s more than many of the largest cities, especially coastal metros, expanded during the same period, but it’s less than the growth in quite a few midwestern cities and some of the most rural places.
Altogether, most of America’s 3,143 counties suffered a slowdown in growth from 2024 to 2025, including many that had grown substantially during the previous year. The numbers were down in coastal parts of the country because of a dramatic decline in foreign immigration. California was down nearly 70 percent in new arrivals from foreign countries.
The growth areas during the 2024-2025 year were mostly in Sun Belt states. Texas grew the fastest, adding more than 390,000 residents, and most of the fastest growing counties were in southern states. Most of the 10 fastest county gainers were in Florida alone.
But it depends which areas of the Sun Belt you are talking about, even which areas of Florida or Texas. While many of those states’ smaller counties were growing, Tampa and Orlando were slowing down. In Texas, the southern counties closest to the Mexican border were seeing sharp declines from the previous year. The picture was somewhat brighter further to the southwest: Phoenix and Las Vegas were still growing significantly last year. But again, much of the Midwest was competitive with them when it came to population numbers.
SO WHY IS THE MIDWEST, including much of the rural Midwest, continuing to grow at least slightly while so much of the rest of the nation stagnates? Some of the growing places could make claims based on scenery, but not most of them: I’ve never known anyone to move to Des Moines for its scenic beauty. Earlier in this decade, some small towns in diverse parts of the country were picking up new residents fleeing big cities because of perceived COVID risk, but that threat had petered out well before 2024.
Some of this seems to be due to the increased numbers of Americans working from home. It’s been estimated that as many as 22 percent of employed Americans are working remotely at least part of the time, and this enables quite a few of them to seek new horizons they perceive as quieter and safer — perhaps one of the rural counties in northern Michigan. But it does not appear to be the driver of any sort of mass re-sorting of population.
One factor that seems to make some sense is real estate, and specifically housing prices. The median cost of a home in the Midwest was $319,500 in 2025, dramatically lower than in any attractive city on one of the coasts. Housing that is nowhere close to affordable in New York City is affordable in the Midwest. Mortgage costs are lower as well: 27.4 percent of household income in Pittsburgh, 29.8 percent in Detroit.
Whatever the reason or reasons might be, the nudge to the Midwest is more than an illusion. A list of hot housing markets compiled by Zillow included such seemingly unlikely towns as Rockford, Ill., Toledo, Ohio, Dearborn, Mich., and South Bend and Carmel, Ind. The moving company United Van Lines compiles transfers in and out of states where it operates. For most of the past decade, Illinois has been United’s No. 1 outbound state. Last year, its inflow and outflow of customers was roughly even.
We can say with confidence that something is happening in the Midwest. It may not be the full-blown resurgence that Diana Lind predicts, but it is a documented awakening in places that most of the country has grown accustomed to ignoring. Real estate doesn’t explain it all, any more than scenery or tranquility do. Some localities seem to be recovering through the swing of a pendulum, even if they haven’t done a great deal to bring it about.
But some midwestern towns have recovered by reinventing themselves. Des Moines has made itself into a high-tech center. Grand Rapids has moved beyond its furniture-making dependence and built on biomedical research. Omaha has morphed into a regional entertainment mecca.
Not all struggling midwestern towns and cities will show progress like that. But some will. And for the rest, there may be more reason to hope than there was just a few years ago.
Governing's opinion columns reflect the views of their authors and not necessarily those of Governing's editors or management.
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