[wwmiv]

I give up. The moment someone pops up with an equation that is applied to every city equally that can show me that San Antonio can hit 24th within five years, I'll return and congratulate them and concede. However, anecdotal evidence and things like "Las Vegas won't grow" and "Cincinnati will soon be passed by San Antonio" (despite the fact that even Cincinnati - think about that for a moment - had a higher growth rate than San Antonio this past year in the midst of the worst downturn in 80 years) and "Charlotte and Austin aren't growing anymore" (despite Austin being only one of two metropolitan areas over 1 million with growth > 3%) and "Portland will be passed by San Antonio soon as well" etc etc etc don't prove anything to me.

Trae is correct. San Antonio's numbers have dropping for awhile. The only reason people come here is because the economy is good. This place has nothing else to offer. Downtown is built and organized around the tourist industry, the inner city neighborhoods are typically downtrodden, city planning is skewed towards suburbia because the city is too expansive to handle itself, no truly great public universities, etc. Most of the growth here is because low income families don't have good access to family planning. Is that really the kind of growth that is going to lead to a prosperous society? I think that that is the real argument that we should be having. Good growth v. bad growth.