America Stands on the Precipice of a “Decade of Reckoning”
State of Metropolitan America: On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation
Highlights of the Report:
A new report by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, focuses on the major demographic forces transforming the nation and large metropolitan areas in the 2000s. It previews what we will learn from the results of the 2010 Census, as well as supplements those results in important ways.
The State of Metropolitan America: On the Front Lines of Demographic Transformation knits together research and analysis to document a decade of the most important and compelling trends across a range of subject areas such as: population, race, immigration, aging, household makeup, educational attainment, wages, poverty and commuting. The analysis foreshadows five sharp and clear patterns that will change American society over the coming decades: an aging population, a growing immigrant presence, wide disparities in educational attainment, polarizing incomes, and population’s impact on the environment.
Conclusion:
The pace of change and complexity of U.S. society only seems to multiply with each passing decade. Now, as the nation and its major metropolitan areas reach a series of critical demographic junctures, forging a constructive path forward to the “next society” is as much about helping communities manage the velocity of that transformation as it is about responding to its specific character. Failure to maximize shared responses to the inevitable challenges of change, and common ownership of the solutions, will only serve to sow the seeds of intergenerational, interracial, and inter-ethnic conflict. Understanding—from the ground up—who Americans are, and who they are becoming, is a critical step toward building constructive bridges before they become impassable divides.
This report marks the inaugural edition of a regular summary report in Brookings’ State of Metropolitan America series.
Website on State of Metro America
Download full Brookings Report