A few thoughts on population.
Growing by 10,000 a year may not seem like very rapid growth, but in the last decade, Chicago was shrinking at 20,000 per year. This is a net improvement in growth by 30,000 per year. I doubt that any other city has had that magnitude improvement in the last decade. Houston is growing at 30,000 per year, but they've been doing that for a while. Unambiguous good news for Chicago.
And it's already been mentioned, but this 10,000 net is distributed unevenly demographically. Chicago is losing the disadvantaged and gaining "creative class" types in a way that's good for the tax base and employment, overlooking the obvious social costs to the disadvantaged themselves. Purely from a development and bottom line point of view, losing no one and gaining 10,000 people is not nearly as attractive as losing 20,000 low-skilled, low-payed citizens and gaining 30,000 highly-educated, highly paid workers. Maybe this news isn't worth
cheering, but there's more than a silver lining.
Regarding the weather and population, this is an issue, but it's over-emphasized. The high in NYC is 3-degrees warmer on average in January and it's still growing fast. Toronto is attracting tons of immigrants. Meanwhile, Southern "rust belt" towns like Birmingham and Memphis have the same demographic issues as their peers in the North despite having the same weather as Houston. Population in some ways conforms to laws of fluid dynamics. When an area is empty (the Southwest until 1980) it can accept migrants from populated areas, but can not send them in return. Chicago probably won't grow rapidly again until an equilibrium has been reached with our arid peer cities. It's likely that most America cities will never grow rapidily again at all. World population is going to level off in the 2040-2050 time frame and after that, cities will only grow as fast insofar as there is rural-to-urban or suburban-to-urban densification. (or an unexpected open-door immigration policy. It's estimated that 600-million people would move to the U.S. if it were permitted.)
Regarding Texas cities, folks in Texas always talk about how people from the North are moving there and their growth is due to winning an aspritational demographic battle with cities like Chicago and Philly. This contributes approximately zero to Texas' population growth in the last few decades. See
Texas Population Chart here:
In reality, the doubling of Texas population between 1980 and now is explained almost entirely by mexican immigration and their high birth rates after establishing residency. White migration from other states to Texas is measurable, but essentially a rounding error.
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