The story of Texas in recent decades has been shaped by rapid growth — booming cities and a steady influx of new residents. But new U.S. Census data suggests that is starting to change.
Texas is still growing faster than any other state, from what we can tell, but that growth is no longer concentrated in its biggest cities. Instead, some of the state’s largest urban centers like Dallas, Plano, Arlington and Austin actually lost residents last year.
So what seems to be driving this reshuffling?
Texas State Demographer Lloyd Potter said a big part of it is a slow down in international migration into Texas.
“A lot of that has to do with what’s happened with the current administration, that the border has been pretty well locked down,” he said. “We have very few refugees crossing the border and very few unauthorized immigrants. The U.S. Policy on immigration also has slowed legal immigration as well.”
Another factor is slowing birthrates.
“Actually, the number of children being born is going up, but it’s going up slower than it has,” he said. “So we’re still adding more babies year after year, but not a whole lot more… That’s resulted in slowing of the growth in Texas.”
» GET MORE NEWS FROM AROUND THE STATE: Sign up for Texas Standard’s weekly newsletters
The areas in Texas still experiencing high levels of growth can be found in the suburbs of big metro areas.
“Texas had five of the fastest-growing cities in the country and four of those were in the Dallas-Fort Worth area,” he said. “They’re all kind of out in these suburban ring counties — so, like Collin County, Rockwell… The urban cores are slowing their growth.”
Contrast that with Dallas County, which is starting to lose population.
“Dallas County has had net-out domestic migration for some time,” Potter said. “But now that’s actually gotten to the point where with declining immigration, that’s not offsetting the net outflow of domestic migrants.”
Austin’s growth has also slowed down, but the city still reached a new milestone: A million residents.
“Austin is playing with the big boys, I guess you could say,” Potter said. “There’s something like 12 cities that have more than a million. So, Austin is now part of that small group.”
Potter said Texas is in line with bigger trends that have seen people move from rural areas to urban cores over time, and then into “suburban rings” outside of the city center.
“You kind of have this concentric pattern of population development where you have the suburban rings growing further and further out. Sometimes, the urban quarters, we’ve seen them be able to turn around and attract people back,” he said.
“And we certainly have seen that. I think about San Antonio when I first moved there, I think in 2008, the downtown was like there was nobody there. I mean, at nighttime the only people that you’d see would be tourists. And now there’s apartments and condos and so on downtown. And that’s kind of really changed what downtown looks like.”
If you found the reporting above valuable, please consider making a donation to support it here. Your gift helps pay for everything you find on texasstandard.org and KUT.org. Thanks for donating today.