A couple of very prominent national pundits have recently declared the Sun Belt to be in its “twilight.”  Atlantic contributor Richard Florida suggested that the region’s boom was a façade of “fictitious housing wealth,” and AP columnist Todd Lewin piggy-backed by predicting that “those Miracle-Gro states” will decay into the “stucco ghettos of the 21st century.”

Here’s the problem with their analysis: The term “Sun Belt” refers to a region that spans from San Jose to Baton Rouge and from Cape Hatteras to Albuquerque, but the only things that culturally unite Scottsdale to Vero Beach are spring training and old people playing golf.

I understand that the authors are writing the obituary for the real estate Ponzi schemes of Phoenix and Florida, but writing off the entire so-called Sun Belt is ham-handed at best.  After all, which city is doing better, Austin or Akron?  Which will make a quicker comeback, Charlotte or Cleveland? And perhaps most importantly, which states are gaining seats in Congress after redistricting?

While some areas of the Sun Belt are certainly looking gloomy, here’s a more accurate regional forecast:

• The Southwest, as defined by the cactus golf course states, is indeed looking dark and stormy;
• The Southeast, as defined by the states with SEC schools (plus NC), has a partly cloudy outlook, with the exception of Florida, which has Cat 5 economic hurricanes bearing down on it;
• And in between Dixie and the desert, Texas looks positively sunny.

Southwest. It’s a total mess out there. “You can make a strong case that the California dream is all but dead,” wrote Californian Joel Kotkin recently. “The state is effectively bankrupt, its political leadership discredited and the economy, with some exceptions, doing considerably worse than most anyplace outside Michigan.”  For the first time since the Golden State was admitted to the Union in 1851, it will not be gaining a seat in Congress after the 2012 reapportionment.

Arizona will likely gain two seats, but it’s not doing too much better. The state’s economy was built on a “growth for the sake of growth” ethos, and so when prices dropped 40% in a matter of months, the economy fell off a cliff faster that Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner. “An economy like Phoenix is like a shark – it can’t stop, it can’t even run slow,” noted Andrew Kirby in a recent column.

Southeast. “The South is much better poised to recover than it would have been a generation ago,” Ferrel Guillory, director of UNC’s Center for the Study of the American South, told me over the phone recently.  In white-collar jobs, Charlotte is the nation’s No. 2 banking center and Triangle rivals Boston as the nation’s biotech hub.  In blue-collar jobs, Tupelo will start producing the Prius soon and Talladega cranked out 800,000 Benz’s last year.  The seaboard South was “marching briskly into the new economy” before the recession hit, according to Guillory, and is well-positioned to rebound.

Florida, on the other hand, is the sick child of the South and has been hit by home foreclosures as hard as the southwest. St. Pete’s Times reporter Adam Smith, who I consider the best political writer in the state, thinks the recession will have political ramifications. “Most observers had long predicted Florida would gain two or even three addition congressional seats with reapportionment,” Smith recently emailed me. “The slow down in population growth could mean Florida gains just one seat.”

Texas.  Austin, Dallas, El Paso, Houston, McAllen, and San Antonio were all listed among the 20 strongest cities in Brookings Institution’s recent report tracking the recession in America’s 100 largest metro areas.   What’s more, Texas is set to gain a whoppin’ four seats in congressional reapportionment!

This map from Daily Yonder shows that most counties in the Lone Star State are either holding their own or actually improving.

So while pockets of the Inland Empire are crumbling and real estate in Ft. Myers is falling, it’s foolish to write off a region that stretches from Orange County, Florida to Orange County, California.