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Originally Posted by DCReid
From the data that I think you are looking it, the 100K increase in that county is for a three year period, not one year. Other counties in TX also have that amount of increase. I presume they are increasing rapidly because they have the land for SFH and the prices are below average. I think a lot of the increase in many of the fast growing metros, but not all of it, is due to the price of housing being more reasonable compared with the Northeast and West coasts. Of course they are also drawing a lot of new businesses, but housing prices are a big factor. I would say one good example would be Phoenix - I believe in 2000 and 2001, it grew much faster by 80K-90K (I believe), and I suspect that was partially because its housing had barely recovered from the 2008 bust and was very cheap, but now it is no longer cheap and it grew by only 50K. Atlanta is not cheap anymore, and its growth as slowed, and Miami is expensive and it has slow growth. Texas, is becoming more expensive, with Austin being expensive and Dallas becoming expensive, but it has the advantage of being attractive to California and of course those metros can sprawl further out. But it is interesting that San Antonio gained nearly as many people as Austin, and I suspect because it is cheaper. I read somewhere that Houston is now the cheapest metro of the big ones, which is probably bumping up its population increases.
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San Antonio has always gained between 40k to 50k people in an average year for the last 15 years. So no, it isn’t gaining as many people as Austin because of its affordability. San Antonio has always been fueled by natural increase, far more births than deaths. And Houston and Atlanta are nearly identical prices for homes in the metro areas BTW. So why did one add 2x the number of people than the other? Because one gets significantly more immigrants every year and is much younger demographically and adds more people by natural increase than the other. Thats the difference. Both are more affordable than DFW and significantly more affordable than Austin, which added 50k people, the usual amount it’s been adding on any average year for the last 15 years.
If affordability was the end all be all then Houston and Atlanta would be growing and adding more people than DFW but they’re not because things like domestic migration, natural increase, immigration, job growth, housing to accommodate new population, etc all go into it and not just one factor by itself.
If affordability was the end all and be all then every major city in the Midwest would outdo major cities in every other region for population growth. But that’s not the case because things like immigration, job growth, housing construction, domestic migration each play a pivotal role in the growth of a place.