Gulf of Mexico region (southern tip of Florida to Texas)

Gulf of Mexico region (southern tip of Florida to Texas)

Regional characteristics

Since 1990, the rate of development in the five-state Gulf of Mexico region has been a close second to that in the South Atlantic region. Its population has grown by one-third and its economy, measured in GDP, has nearly doubled. In 2007, the states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida⁵ were home to 54 million people, accounting for 1.4 million business establishments that employed 23 million workers.

The concentration of people and economic activity along the coast is nearly identical to that of the South Atlantic region, with one-fourth the population and almost one-third of the business establishments, employment, wages, and GDP located in the region’s shore-adjacent counties. However, the density of development in shore-adjacent counties is the much less than in the North and South Atlantic regions, and only slightly higher than the Great Lakes region. A selection of economic and demographic details from the region is displayed in Table 4.

The coastline contained within region’s boundaries is dominated in some parts by barrier islands and sand dunes (e.g., the Texas coast is dominated by extensive barrier islands and sand dunes, highlighted by Padre Island, the longest continuous barrier island in the world), coastal wetlands, (e.g., Louisiana has approximately 40 percent of the coastal wetlands of the lower 48 states) and mangroves and coral reefs (e.g., the Florida reef tract is the most extensive living coral reef system in North American waters and the third largest system in the world).

(http://www.oceaneconomics.org/Demographics/coastal_geographies.asp).