By Alex Macon – Published in Frontburner, D Magazine
Booming suburbs and a larger Latino population help tell the story of Dallas’ growth over the last decade.
The Dallas-Fort Worth region added more than 1.2 million residents over the last decade, growing its population by 20 percent since 2010, according to U.S. Census data released today. This was especially pronounced in the area’s northern suburbs. Collin and Denton counties, for example, each grew by more than 36 percent. Dallas grew by just under 9 percent in that same time period, although population growth in the city itself has comparatively stalled in the last couple years, with young professionals in particular migrating out to the burbs. The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan statistical area remains the fourth largest in the country behind New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
There’s a lot to sift through here, and a lot that’s relevant to policymakers. Redistricting is the most immediate and obvious way this data will be applied, although it affects everything from federal funding to infrastructure planning. Many of the national trends identified by the U.S. Census Bureau—growing cities and suburbs, shrinking rural counties, increasing diversity—are evident in North Texas. We’ll look into what it all might mean in greater detail later. But here are some quick highlights zooming in on the broader Dallas area.
North Texas Booming
While most of the region’s growth is happening in the suburbs (as we’ve written about before), the city of Dallas remains the ninth biggest in the country, and added about 100,000 residents over the last decade.
- City of Dallas Population: 1.3 million (+8.9 percent increase from 2010)
- Dallas County Population: 2.6 million (10.4 percent)
- Tarrant County: 2.1 million (16.7 percent)
- Collin County: 1.1 million (36.1 percent)
- Denton County: 906,000 (36.8 percent)
- Kaufman County: 145,000 (40.6 percent)
- Rockwall County: 108,000 (37.6 percent)
North Texas is also becoming more diverse, due largely to a growing number of Latino residents. Collin County, in particular, also added a lot of Asian residents. The Census has a metric it calls the Diversity Index, used “to measure the probability that two people chosen at random will be from different ethnic groups.” Dallas County’s Diversity Index of 70.7 percent is the second-highest in the state.
First reported by Frontburner, D Magazine. Read More…