Word: sunbelt
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...that some Michiganders are giving up and returning to Michigan after trying to find a better life only in Houston. Don't they realize that there are plenty of other thriving Sunbelt cities to choose from? The Horkenbachs aren't the only people who don't care for Houston; many Texans would never want to live there either...
...used to pushing buttons on an assembly line is not trained for the complicated work done by oil-industry machinists. White-collar workers also face problems. Detroit's Wade Cook, 48, a former railroad employee with 16 years of management experience, has sent scores of resumes to the Sunbelt without result. The difficulty, explains University of Houston Sociologist William Simon, is that the Texas economy is highly technical at the upper end and menial at the lower end, without much in between. The newcomers, he says, "cannot articulate with our economy. A lot of them are obsolete people from...
...Horkenbachs of Royal Oak, Mich., agree. "We hated it," says Renette, 31, of her family's seven-month, $7,000 experiment in Sunbelt living. In Houston, her firefighter husband "had to pay extra to get us on his health insurance," their utility bills were "exorbitant," and Yankees were unpopular. So when Robert Horkenbach was offered his old job back in Royal Oak, he took it. "No way" will they again leave their familiar Michigan turf, says Renette-even though Robert again faces a familiar Michigan layoff. -By Claudia Wallis. Reported by Christopher Redman/Detroit and Robert C. Wurnrtstedt/Houston
...accused of a shooting that, perhaps even to him, is a surprise; the first openly extraordinary act of his life. This son of Sunbelt affluence -blond, blue-eyed, with the fleshy good looks of a country club lay-about-had never been outwardly quirky or unpleasant. His unremarkability confounds the desire for tidy, comforting explanations...
Smith is now in the process of collecting data for his next novel, set in the Sunbelt. It is, once again, a thriller. "The format," he feels, "is inexhaustible. We don't need farfetched plots: 'What if the President were a midget and his wife were a man?' All we have to do is ask, 'What if the President were Ronald Reagan? What if the leadership of Russia were over 80?' The drama is there. All we have to do is get it down on paper...