Are you looking to make a move or relocate for a new job? Well, you can find out which part of the U.S. is attracting the most buyers and help decide where you should make your new home. Get up to date on the fastest-growing cities, and moving trends from this recent Livability article by Matt Carmicheal.
Here’s what I found:
Any way you slice it, Texas is the big population winner for 2015. At the state level, it added more residents (490,000) than any other. Four of its metros added more than 412,000 people (that’s more than any other state-level total) between July 2014 and July 2015, according to data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau. The Houston area added about 159,000, while the Dallas-Fort Worth area added another 145,000. Adding 412,000 people is about the same as adding a city the size of Miami or Oakland. That’s a lot of people.
Overall, the nation’s 381 metro areas house about 275 million people. About 285 of them saw growth during that period.
Growth at the county level
Net growth is all well and good, but the pieces that make up that pie are interesting in themselves. Population change comes from a variety of sources. People are born, people die, people move in and people move out. Let’s spend a little time looking at the winners and losers at the county level, based on two of those that relate a lot to livability: people moving, and children being born.
The fastest-growing counties (in terms of people moving in) are in the fastest-growing metros primarily in the South and the West (and Florida). These areas (Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas and Houston) have been gaining people left and right for years now. However, not all of Texas is winning people over. El Paso cracks the top 10 for counties losing residents.
Despite all that is written about the explosion of population and interest in our largest cities, four of the counties losing the most people are boroughs of New York City. Most cities reside in counties (some overlap county lines), but New York City is unique in that it’s so large that the city itself is made up of five counties, and four of them are bleeding people. The fifth, Richmond County (aka Staten Island), saw its population remain more or less unchanged.
Cook County Il., home of Chicago and its collar suburbs, had more than 50,000 people move out, and saw its first overall population decline since 2007. That’s like losing the population of Chicago neighbor Oak Park, Il. in one year. Los Angeles County lost even more to people moving out.
[Read the full article at Livability.com]
