American Magazine April 2014

Populous, less diverse, and
relatively wealthy, fringing major
metro areas between suburban
and rural America
Benton, WA
pop. 182,398
$60,300 median household income
Fergus, MT
pop. 11,435
0.3% African American
Mostly small towns across
the northern tier, slightly
wealthier and much whiter
than average
Bethel, AK
pop. 17,746
82% American Indian and Alaska Native
Dotting the rural west, the
least white, with low levels
of wealth and education
In Utah and the Mountain
West, young and heavily
white Mormon centers
Box Elder, UT
pop. 50,171
77% Mormon
Primarily southwestern, with
many self-identified Hispanics
and 30 percent of residents
under 18
Yuma, AZ
pop. 200,022
61% Hispanic
Sierra, NM
pop. 11,895
16% under 18
Conservative and fairly rural,
full of retirees and near retirees
with midlevel incomes
Set on the Great Plains, the
whitest, oldest age-wise, and
least populated
Borden, TX
pop. 616
0.7 people per square mile
What’s down the road for the American
Communities Project? Chinni’s
next goal is to build an annual almanac of
communities in this country, an almanac that
would include quarterly reports, probably
online, that would look closely at different
parts of the country through a variety of
lenses. The data exist, he says, to examine
the economy, the politics, the environment,
health, and culture.
One idea that’s clearly emerging from these
data is that in most American communities,
we tend to cluster around people like
ourselves. “You want a certain feel, you want
a certain look, maybe the schools to be a
certain way, maybe you want certain types
of stores near you,” says Chinni. “And when
you live near people that are like you, those
people tend to have the same education
levels, they tend to have the same types of
income levels, they tend to have the same
political views.”
Living in these clustered communities
is like living in little bubbles, he says, and
those bubbles become our lenses for gazing
out on the rest of the world. With different
people clustering into different bubbles, the
end result is different economies, different
politics, and different media habits, Fox News
versus MSNBC.
What’s down the road for the country?
That’s the larger question that a lot of
journalists would like to answer, and that’s
where Chinni’s approach can help. He sees
the country entering an era defined by a new
kind of plate tectonics—with some counties
24 AMERICAN MAGAZINE APRIL 2014