The inhabitants of Comal County, which is simply north of Bexar County within the Texas Hill Nation, is the fourth-fastest rising of all counties within the nation, in response to latest U.S. Census Bureau figures.
The five-year American Neighborhood Survey (ACS) launched final month exhibits that Comal County’s inhabitants elevated by 29% to about 174,500 over the previous 5 years. Kaufman County within the Dallas-Fort Value metro space and different counties in Idaho and Georgia had sooner progress.
However of U.S. counties with populations of 100,000 and extra, the highest three fastest-growing are all in Texas: Kaufman (35%), Comal (29%), and Hays (25%), in response to census knowledge.
Each Comal and Hays counties are positioned between San Antonio and Austin, additional signaling the rising metroplex between the 2 main cities. It’s the same progress sample the state has seen between Dallas and Fort Value.
“It’s rising in a short time, and basically, that’s in step with what we see in improvement in virtually any urbanized space the place you form of see these concentric patterns of progress,” mentioned Lloyd Potter, director of the Texas Demographic Heart and professor on the College of Texas at San Antonio.
That can have vital implications for the price of housing within the area, Potter mentioned.
“The demand is growing most likely sooner than the provision of housing,” he mentioned. The online results of that’s going to be much less housing per capita and dearer housing.
“We truly noticed it in Austin … the price of housing has simply skyrocketed there,” he added.
In the meantime, the state’s capital has additionally skilled “home migration for a few of the years for the reason that pandemic, and that’s partly, we expect, as a result of it’s gotten to be actually costly to reside there. It’s additionally mixed with the truth that I feel extra persons are capable of work remotely or hybrid, so that they’re they’re considering: Properly, I’ll transfer additional out.”
Whereas Bexar County’s inhabitants progress of practically 6% to 2,037,000 is in keeping with Texas’ progress general when evaluating the newest 2019–2023 knowledge set to the earlier 5 years (2014–2018), San Antonio was the fastest-growing giant metropolis final yr, in response to the bureau’s one-year estimates launched in September.
The one-year ACS releases don’t embrace smaller geographic areas with populations of lower than 65,000 folks, however the five-year estimates embrace knowledge collected over an extended time frame to gather larger pattern sizes of the inhabitants, Potter defined.
That inherently dilutes the five-year survey’s skill to trace fast-changing demographics, he mentioned. “If you’re evaluating knowledge throughout time utilizing the five-year, you’re basically form of mixing knowledge throughout these 5 years.”
