Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

We moved to ATL in 1964.  I recall most of the houses we looked at had central AC, and it was a big factor even though the house we bought (new) did not.  We had a large window unit in the family room and a whole house fan.  My parents installed central air in 1970.  I think by 1970 every new middle class house had central air.

There is a residential area just north of me that was started in 1904.  Nearly every house there has a large front porch, which was their version of AC along with fans.  It's now a rather expensive area so they all have AC today.  Some of the houses have  been demo'd and replaced with new, most were just restored/updated.  They look really nice.

Living here without central air, even today in June, would be ... unpleasant.  I was just out running and I'm soaked.  There are other factors for population growth, in the 1950s there were a lot of cloth mills around, carpet production, etc., because labor was cheap, so was land.  The textile industry then moved to Asia leaving some towns here bereft.

But I think without AC,  the South would have half its current population.

Really?  June?  Realistically speaking, most of the time we have to crank our AC's up in late February or certainly March.  By June it's at least 90+ degrees, and as always the humidity is super high. 

I think a lot of the population increase of the southern states can be traced back to several different factors, not just necessarily AC.  For example, Union labor is much less common in the South, so companies have a much easier time getting things done.  There are lots of other things that I think are "pro-business" but also we're simply less regulated as an individual and also much of the time less taxed.  

There are just natural things that exist in much of the south that you simply cannot reproduce like oil, which leads to oil refineries, which needs shipping which needs ports.  Last I checked there is no ocean front property in Ohio and many of the more northern states.  

Ehhh. More than a few lake ports in those cities.

Also lots of railways connecting them... 

We also had reverse migration as blacks went north for jobs.  When I was a kid, the South was impoverished, mostly, the small towns were suffering, infrastructure was problematic.  The black folks had it worst of course because of the Jim Crow stuff.  There were low taxes and a small tax base.  The Interstate highway system helped a lot, I think.  Every exit on a new expressway soon attracted stuff, often not very pretty stuff, but stuff.  As noted, companies opened factories because labor was cheap, and now transportation by truck became practicable.  DoTs built bypasses around many towns that led to Walmarts which tended to ruin the downtown areas, some of which recovered a bit due to tourism (see freeways).  I think much of north Georgia exists because of Atlanta, it's an easy drive up into the mountains and the tourist towns have stuff to do.

When I was a kid, the South was impoverished, mostly, the small towns were suffering, infrastructure was problematic.  

This would be before you were a kid but my dad talked about this a few times.  His mother's family was from Georgia (where ATL is now located) and he (born in 1940) visited relatives down there in the late 1940s.  

First, just some data:

• Ohio's pop in the 1940 and 1950 censuses was 6.9M and 7.9M respectively.  
• Georgia's was well below half of that at 3.1M in 1940 and 3.4M in 1950.  Note that not only was Georgia less populous, it was also growing more slowly.  
• Atlanta's population in the 1940 and 1950 censuses was 302k and 332k respectively.  
• Akron was nearly as populous as Atlanta with a population of 245k in 1940 and 275k in 1950.  
• Cleveland's was more than double that of Atlanta at 878k in 1940 and 915k in 1950.  

I don't remember when you said you moved from Cincy to Atlanta but Cincinnati's population was more than Atlanta's up until the 1970 census.  This is obviously before you, but in 1920 Cincy's population double Atlanta's.  

My dad said that when he went to Georgia in the late 1940s it was like visiting a 3rd world country.  They had Ox carts bringing produce into the cities at a time when Cleveland/Akron/NE Ohio was functioning as a modern, fully-mechanized economy.  

We first moved to ATL in 1964 (from Augusta).  Metro Atlanta at the time was pretty modern.  The city of Atlanta is still a pretty small slice of metro Atlanta, about 1/12th the population of the whole area.

The rural areas in Georgia, and the South, were pretty "backwards" until perhaps 1970 or so when things perceptibly began to change.  I do think highways was a big part of that.  

My Dad would take me out to Lawrenceville to get a haircut for 25 cents sometimes.  That county was very rural at the time, now it's about to be the most populated county in the state with over a million residents.  It had maybe 40,000 in 1964?  Our house was on the outer edge of populated metro Atlanta, just outside what later was the Perimeter (I285).  I would walk over and watch them build that highway in 1968-9.  It was six lanes at the time it was built and some said that was over doing it.

We would visit our grandparents every summer fairly often, mostly my mom's in rural East Tennessee near Sevierville.  That area of course has changed markedly (not so much for the better in my view).  My Dad's parents lived outside a small town in NE Georgia (where I was born) off a dirt road.  Most of the state highways were paved with this gravely stuff, gravel and some asphalt, but not smooth.  

Yeah, it was all pretty "backward", and I'm talking about how it was for white folks.  I remember in Augusta there was a part of town where the "wealthy" black folks lived, for a 6 year old it was perplexing as the black folks I saw were all maids or porters or shoe shiners, menial labor, but my mom told me they also had doctors and dentists and professional people, all of it an entirely separate life.  In winter, there were times my mom had to drive our maid home because her husband could not drive in our area after dark.  

I was in high school before there was even a handful of black students around, they had to be bussed in.  In Atlanta, some street names still change as they go from north (a white area) to south (black areas), though today the place is more integrated, but the south of Atlanta is mostly black.

We have made a mess of a lot of things.

Rather have 112 which I dont mind than anything below 50 degrees

Seriously?  

Reading through here I realize that I have either a lot less heat-tolerance or a lot more cold-tolerance than the average poster here but even taking that into account this statement strikes me as ludicrous.  50 degrees isn't uncomfortably cold.  There isn't snow nor ice.  You don't need boots and @betarhoalphadelta can still throw away his plastic scraper.  You just need a sweater.  112, to me, is unbearably hot.  I guess there is SOME consideration for what you are doing.  If you are lounging in a pool then 112 isn't quite so unbearably hot (still WAY too hot for me but I'm realizing I'm an outlier here) but if you have to do some work outside like say mowing the lawn I can't believe that anyone would seriously choose 112 degree scorching heat over a cool 50 degree day.  Am I wrong here?