I've lived in the South (NC, SC) most of my life (born in MI). I've watched the migration of business and industry and people to the Carolinas for 60 years. For example, Charlotte grew from around 301,000 in 1973 when I first went to nearby Davidson College, to around 2,054,000 now. That's nearly a 7X growth in 47 years.

If you ask most business people why we have had such explosive growth in the Carolinas, they will list, in no particular order:help

Cheap electricityhelp
Good roads, railways, airports, trucking companies
Plentiful water
Variety of geography for vacations — mountains, piedmont, coastal plains, beaches
Mostly compliant, non-union labor
Good community colleges ahelpnd technical schools
Lots of colleges and universities
Mild climate combined with the advent of air conditioning
Low taxes
Relatively low real estate prices (and until recently, plenty of land)
Tax incentives to large businesses to move here
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Eight years back, a project management instructor of mine told me he had sold a 1600 square foot house on Long Island for about $550,000. He moved to the Lake Norman area just north of Charlotte and bought a 3300 square foot house for about $350,000. I just grinned and nodded my head. That is typical, although the numbers have moved upward in the last decade.
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The company my Dad worked for, from 1967 to 1986, moved from Saco, Maine, and Lowell, Massachusetts. They were able to combine helptwo plants into one Saco-Lowell, on far less expensive real estate in Easley, SC, and add a lot more manufacturing capacity. They had cheap Duke Power electricity, their own well water, 100% non-union labor, and a rail line that went right past the front of their plant. They could ship their textile machinery to mills throughohelput the South at much lower costs. Their executive staff could live in luxury for a fraction of the cost in New England. Of course, as textile companies moved offshore in the 1980s, the company died a slow death. A Super Walmart sits on that site, now. Textile machinery is made elsewhere in the world. (Nearby Greenville was once the "textile capital of the world"!)
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The sad, but entirely understandable fact of life is that businesses base their locations on costs. The Midwest and Northeast priced themselves out of many markets between 1920 and 2020. The migration of companies Southward and offshore is the inevitable result of less expensive labor, less expensive land, less expensive and more abundant energy,help plentiful clean water, milder climate, and less expensive raw materials in those locations. Would you logically pay an older high school drop-out union worker $28 to $38/hour to bolt on a fender, if a hungry auto worker in Mexico makes less than $5.00/hour? That's just one example of why auto companies moved out of Detroit (and to many Southern US states, too).
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As a trainer for a portrait photography company, I flew all over the States to train customers and employees. It amazed me to see the different regional cultures, attitudes, and economies, and to listen to the stories people told. It also made me extremely glad I have stayed in NC, because despite our checkered history, I know how far we have comhelpe, and how far we can go. The Hollywood stereotypes of NC are mostly untrue, or stuck 50 years in the past. The quality of life here seems far different — mostly in a good way — from some of the areas I traveled.

I willingly left Charlotte in help2014, partly because it was no longer fun to live there. The traffic is unbearable, as it is in any metro area of more than a million people. It is still a fast-growing area with lots of opportunity, but the Piedmont Triad is the next such.

There are many such storiehelps throughout the South...

My parents moved from a Chicago IL suburb to South Bend IN in 1960 because he changed employers. I was in South Bend when Studebaker left, then left for college. My parents stayed here for many years as we moved around the state. Eventually we moved back when my wife was offered a job in the area, just in time for my Dad, and later my Mom to die. Now we are both retired.

South Bend has transportation advantages, and land is available also, but the legacy of having been within the orbit of Detroit has left the entire state with an atmosphere that probably can be described as being "pro labor"; there are historical reasons for that, of course, but many employers avoid locating here for that reason.