Offering sober inspiration, each paragraph of this 172 page monster boasts bold new commentary on nine core categories: Population and Migration; Race & Ethnicity; Immigration; Age; Households & Families; Educational Attainment; Work; Income and Poverty; and Commuting. Without understanding these trends, we would continue to see the world from an outdated perspective, unable to address the new challenges ahead. This is basically the underlying philosophy of our census; while the results of the 2010 Census have yet to be analyzed, think of this report as the exit poll.

As we dream of a brighter tomorrow, let’s start by understanding where we are today:

New Reality #1: Growth and Outward Expansion. Bucking the trend in most other developed nations, the United States population grew significantly, around 10%, to 309 million. Despite economic gloominess, healthy fertility and immigration point to optimism about America’s prospects. The share of the metropolitan population living in lower-density counties – think Suffolk – swelled to 40%. For smart-growth advocates, the unintended silver lining of the real estate bubble-burst was a (temporary?) “retreat from the march toward outer suburbia.”

New Reality #2: Population Diversification. Much of our recent growth is owed to the flow of immigrants. Increasingly from Hispanic societies, one in six Americans is now a first-generation immigrant – in 1970, it was one in twenty.  The non-white share of the U.S. population is now 1/3; within the under-18 population that ratio is 1/2. “America’s largely successful history at integrating immigrants into its social fabric remains one of its greatest economic and societal strengths,” the report notes. Over half of Hampton Roads’ foreign-born population are naturalized citizens – the tenth highest share among all metros.

New Reality #3: Aging of the Population. The combined number of baby boomers and seniors exceeded 117 million (38%), and the “age tsunami” is causing waves of speculation about its effects on our current systems. Of special concern is where people are aging: large metros are aging faster than the rest of the country, and consequently, “their single-person households are growing … especially in suburban communities that were not designed with these populations in mind.” (Curious about the backfill? For the first time, a majority of immigrants now live in the suburbs.)

New Reality #4: Uneven Higher Educational Attainment. With 1 in 3 American adults holding a post-secondary degree – up from 1 in 4 in 1990 – our country remains one of the most-educated countries on earth.  But educational attainment is lower in young adults and most notably within African American and Hispanic groups: the gap in share of these groups with a bachelor’s degree – 15% –  to whites and Asians – 32% – is widening, and set to hit 20% this year.

New Reality #5: Income Polarization. Often cited by the Obama camp, the economic shockwaves of the 2000s were “not kind” to the average American household, whose inflation-adjusted income fell by more than $2,000. Moreover, it was low- and mid-wage workers whose incomes fell hardest; on average, high wage workers (90th percentile and above) actually saw incomes rise more than 3%. These “appear to be longer-run, structural changes,” the reports makes known, “calling into question the sufficiency of overall macroeconomic growth … for improving living standards for most Americans.” A bright spot here for our region, Hampton Roads was one of just five metros to see real income gains across all three categories.

Each of these five new realities probably deserves its own in-depth article, exploring national trends and the consequences for our region. For now, here are a few more numbers to contemplate over a beer:

“Industrial Cores are in some ways the most demographically disadvantaged of the metropolitan types. These 18 metro areas are largely older industrial centers of the Northeast, Midwest, and Southeast. Their populations are slower-growing, less diverse, and less educated than national averages, and significantly older than the large metropolitan average. These metro areas lost population in the aggregate in the 2000s.”