Tomorrow’s Tumbleweeds: Will 21st Century Boomtowns Go Bust?
- Mark Cromer
- February 25, 2026
- Forum Papers
- Forum Paper
- 0 Comments
Click here for a downloadable, printable PDF version.
An NPG Forum Paper
by Mark Cromer
February 2026
ABSTRACT
Boomtowns are an iconic feature of America’s history, one that often hews to a familiar template: a small burg is rapidly transformed to a bustling center of commerce, usually following the discovery of a precious metal or a fossil fuel. In some notable instances, the boom turned to bust seemingly just as fast. The skeletal remnants of some boomtowns are ingrained in the American iconography of the Wild West with names like Calico and Tombstone. The grim implosion of the once thriving ‘Motor City’ during the latter half of the 20th Century offers a modern warning that no city is too big to fail. As 2026 gets underway, cities and regions across the United States are again experiencing explosive growth in unexpected places that is altering landscapes and lifestyles, with Big Data driving much of the development. Will the harsh lessons of the late-19th and mid-20th Centuries come to pass again? Have the civic leaders learned from the historic boom-to-bust cycles? Or is it in America’s sociocultural genetics to keep building and consuming in a freewheeling dynamic that’s consistent with a casino table—keep rolling the dice until our luck runs out?
“Boomtowns? Hell, we’re no different than Tombstone, Dodge City or San Francisco. First comes the dreamers, then the bankers, then the salesmen. Then the sharks, then the desperate and then the thieves… and nobody is immune. Kids have to quit college. Trucks get sold or repo’ed. Houses too. People quit going to the doctor because they lost their insurance. Yeah, a bust affects everything in a town like this, even the lifespan of the population.”
—Billy Bob Thornton, Landman
The above monologue, as uttered in the syrupy Southern drawl of actor Billy Bob Thornton, packs a particularly powerful punch at the opening of 2026.
The world’s powers continue to prosecute their tussles over oil reserves known and unknown in places like Venezuela and chase each other over rare earth mineral rights across the globe to the frozen terrain of Greenland. Meanwhile, the American national backdrop appears increasingly stuck at full boil and adorned with ugly flourishes of violent political discontent and deep polarization of the type that inflicts unhealing wounds across the body of Americana that now stretches from The Twin Cities to Los Angeles.
And through all of this global competition and domestic upheaval, the American national landscape is once more being transformed by boomtowns, rapidly expanding population centers that are fueled by dazzling technological advances of the sort that herald great promise in the future but carry with them the echoes of the greed-fueled speculative impulses of the past.
The formative dynamic of the boomtown can be seen in that cycle of habit…
To continue reading and for footnotes please refer to the PDF of the Forum paper by clicking here.
Mark Cromer is a professional writer and researcher with more than three decades as a working journalist and an investigator in the field of business intelligence. His work on mass immigration and population growth issues has been published in major newspapers across the nation and internationally. Cromer was a senior staff investigator at Sapient Investigations, Inc., for more than a decade and he worked as a contract investigator for Kroll Associates, the global blue chip risk consulting and investigations firm.
