If you live and work in what Amtrak calls the Northeast Corridor of the United States, you have to work hard not recognize that we live in an increasingly diverse nation.

Nowhere is that more evident than the lunch trucks around the office. Right outside my front door is a cart selling Mexican food; next to it is a Pakistani man cooking cheeseburgers and hot dogs; around the corner is a Greek couple making cheese steaks; across the street, a Cambodian woman sells Chinese food.

Diversity sometimes doesn't create better understanding, as anyone familiar with the highly publicized news report of the Philadelphia restaurateur who refuses to serve anyone who doesn't order in English.

Generally, however, there is an effort to get along and learn and to do business.

Unless you get out of the Northeast or off the East or West Coasts once in awhile, you may begin to think that those regions have a monopoly on diversity.

I spent 15 days in June tent-camping 4,000 miles across country to Southern California -- the other diverse place in the nation -- and was surprised to say the least about how multicultural even the nation's heartland has become.

No better example of this is Dodge City, KS, followed closely by Pueblo, CO. You grow up watching Gunsmoke, and you think of Dodge City as a town full of hard-fighting, hard-drinking cowpokes, surrounded by dirt farmers scraping a living out of the prairie.

That was, of course, between 1872 and 1876 -- and was highly exaggerated by Hollywood writers.

Today's Dodge City, outside of the Boot Hill Museum by the railroad tracks, is home to a large Hispanic population, employed in the meat-packing industry and fertilizer plants and on cattle ranches.

It was too hot to spend much time out of the air-conditioned van, so we drove the streets above downtown, lined with neat bungalows and trim front lawns, as well as Mexican restaurants, businesses, and the massive Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which was the nation's first Roman Catholic cathedral built in the new millennium.

The Dodge City Globe's website has a Spanish-language edition.

Although I didn't get to see much of Pueblo, we did pick up a few things at the Super Wal-Mart, where lots of shoppers and many employees were speaking Spanish.

The story was the same in Arizona and in California.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been concerns that fears of terrorism will stem the flow of legal immigrants into the country. So far, that hasn't happened to any great extent.

The real estate industry has long recognized the existence of diversity, and the opportunities that a growing pool of potential homebuyers will present now and well into the future.

A lot of companies have taken giant steps to recruit Hispanic or bilingual agents and brokers, and Latinos, too, have been getting into the real estate business, and organizing associations to obtain a greater voice in how business is transacted.

Still, there's plenty of work to be done, as a survey by Demos.org, a nonpartisan public policy research and advocacy organization, shows.

Between 2000 and 2050, the white population will grow 7 percent. In contrast, the African-American population will grow 71 percent and the Latino population will increase 188 percent.

By 2050, African Americans and Latinos will comprise 40 percent of the population. Demos says that projections suggest, however, that in 15 years, the gaps in opportunity experienced by African Americans and Latinos today will result in declining education and income levels which will affect the overall productivity and economy of the country.

For every dollar in median income earned by a white non-Latino household in 2004, an African-American household earned 62 cents, and a Latino household earned 69 cents.

In 2002, the median net worth of Latino households was $7,932. For African-American households it was $5,988, and for white households it was $88,651. This translates to 9 and 7 cents of net worth for Latinos and African Americans, respectively, for every dollar of net worth held by white households.

In 2004, 76 percent of whites owned their homes. At the same time, African-American homeownership stood at 49 percent and Latino homeownership stood at 48 percent.

For immigrants of every generation, homeownership has been both a major goal and a means to end. Just being able to buy a home signifies that you have a stake in the United States, while possessing a tangible asset might help finance a business or pay for children's college education.

For real estate agents, being able to assist in achieving this goal is very good business.