Appalachia has been a byword for backwardness for more than a century. The region has repeatedly been the target of outside intervention to boost its fortunes, including through the creation of the Tennessee Valley Authority and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But today, market forces—including Sunbelt growth, sprawl, and remote work—are beginning to generate a dynamism in the southern portion of the Appalachian region that is not shared by the north.

The Appalachian mountain range is huge, and the federally designated Appalachian region is similarly large, encompassing 423 counties stretching from a portion of Mississippi not actually located in the mountain range all the way north to New York State. Such an enormous region is typically divided into subregions to help make sense of it. The federal Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) has designated five subregions, for example.

In a new report on the future of Appalachia for the Urban Reform Institute, I propose dividing Appalachia into two major subregions: North Appalachia and South Appalachia, with a dividing line along the northern boundary of Tennessee and North Carolina.

North Appalachia encompasses 235 counties in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia. South Appalachia includes 188 counties in Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.