Troubled Times for Sun Belt Cities

With high foreclosure rates and troubled housing markets, Sun Belt cities are in a tough spot. As Next American City's Willy Staley writes, their future is unclear.

"It is of course no surprise that the poverty rates in the Sun Belt and California and Florida should outstrip the national average; these are the places where the cheap credit which bridged the gap between slow-growing middle-class wages and fast-growing real estate prices helped take our economy down. But these places, of course, were the boom-towns of our last economic expansion. This, I think, poses a real problem to recovery: if there was an inherent, structural flaw in our economy that led to the creation of these places, and if this recession is the market correcting itself, what will happen to these cities?"