The Suburban Tale of Texas Growth

According to an article by Jill Cowan, "while Texas’ largest cities continued to add tens of thousands of residents last year, it’s the suburbs that are seeing the most marked transformation."

The article quotes Steve Murdock, former head of the U.S. census and current director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University, who describes the story of Texas' population growth as a story of the I-35 corridor: "You start at the Oklahoma border, then there’s a few miles in between before you hit the suburbs of Dallas … through Waco to the Austin suburbs that now run really with no gaps between Austin and San Antonio."

The article digs into the demographic details of the state's growth, as well as a hidden fact among the typical Texas narratives: more than a quarter of the state's cities decline din population in the first five years of this decade. Most "are in rural areas hit hard by consolidation in the agriculture industry," according to Cowan.