TDC in the News
Renter mobility across the U.S. came to a major halt during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, but multifamily experts say that as people have adapted to the new normal, people are moving again.
Texas migration data for the bulk of 2020 is not available yet, but Texas Demographic Center senior demographer Lila Valencia said that over the last decade, the state’s population has rapidly grown from both international and domestic migration, as well as a natural increase in births.
“For about five of the last 10 years, births have made up about a little bit over 50%. And then the other five, net migration has made up a little bit over 50%,” Valencia said. “Now, both of those things have been impacted greatly by the pandemic.”
The numbers indicate the economy was getting better prior to the coronavirus pandemic, State Demographer Lloyd Potter said. But he’s concerned the progress may have been halted by the pandemic sweeping across the nation.
“Certainly it’s a sign that the economy has been continuing to recover since the recession that we had in 2008,” said Potter, who is also a University of Texas at San Antonio professor of demography. “And that was continuing to have positive impacts on those people who are at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. But I can’t help but worry about what’s happened in this last year. We won’t know (the effects) … for another year.”
Neighbors were pleading with neighbors in the final hours of the 2020 census, which was brought to an abrupt end last Thursday, when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with President Donald Trump and refused to allow counting to continue through Oct. 31.
“It is a moment of desperation … We just want your household to be counted,” said Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Houston).
As of the end of the count, 62 percent of Texans had responded, which is lower than the national self-response rate of 67% and lower than Texas’ 74.4% response rate of 2010.
Experts are worried about data.
“The earlier finish date concerns us in that anything short of Oct. 31, which the bureau stated they needed to conduct an accurate count, has the potential to produce lower quality data,” wrote Lila Valencia, a senior demographer in the Texas Demographic Center on Monday.
The census came to an abrupt halt Thursday after a pandemic and a legal tug-of-war threw the massive survey into chaos. Officials around the country now fear they’ll lose their fair share of federal funding and political representation due to an incomplete count.
A George Washington University study indicates that a mere 1 percent undercount for Texas by the U.S. Census Bureau would amount to $290 million less per year in federal revenue. A lower-than-anticipated count in urban areas could also mean one or two less congressional seats and fewer electoral votes for the state, as well as a smaller share of free lunches, Medicaid and HUD dollars.
“It’s such a huge logistical problem counting every person in the country and to have all these problems thrown in the spokes, it’s been very difficult,” said Potter, who also runs the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconoic Research at University of Texas San Antonio. “This particular year there is a perfect storm of challenges for an undercount.”
The deadline to be counted in the 2020 census is 5 a.m. Texas time, Friday morning. The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed a shutdown of the census count two weeks earlier than originally scheduled.
Though the Census Bureau said that as of Wednesday, 99.9% of housing units in the United States have been accounted for, some demographers and advocates for a fuller count question those numbers.
Lila Valencia is a senior demographer for the State Data Center at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She told Texas Standard that the Census Bureau previously said it needed until the end of October to complete an accurate count, due in part to COVID-19.
“Anything shorter than that really concerns us,” Valencia said. “That data quality might not be what it should be for the U.S. and for Texas.”
As the race for the White House tightens between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, voting rights activists in Texas, Georgia and Arizona are combating what they say are tactics by Republicans to suppress Black and Latino voters.
From 2010 to 2018, nearly 54% of Texas's population growth came from the Latino population, compared to just 13.6% from non-Hispanic whites, according to the Texas state demographer's office.
In Texas, state Democrats also point to shifting demographics – mainly burgeoning growth in and around urban centers like Houston and Dallas that tend to vote Democratic – for the push to turn Texas blue.
Harris, Tarrant and Bexar counties – where Houston, Fort Worth and San Antonio are located, respectively – accounted for the biggest population growth in Texas over the past decade, adding a combined 1.2 million new residents, according to the state’s demographer office.
Census advocates are concerned that confusion resulting from schedule changes the Trump administration made to the 2020 census could lead to a significant undercount in states like Texas.
With the pandemic forcing census workers to count residents at a heightened pace, there has been less time in recent months for workers to return to households that did not respond.
The additional month for counting could allow census workers to return to those households, which might help produce a more accurate count, said Lloyd Potter, the state demographer.
“It gives me hope that we’ll do a better job than we would have,” Potter said. “Though there could be some problem with the qualities of the data.”
The urgency remains for Texans to fill out 2020 census forms as soon as possible. This is the advice of Lila Valencia, a senior demographer in the Texas Demographic Center. “In order to get above the confusion around the actual deadline for the census, we continue to encourage everyone to self-respond as soon as possible by going online, calling the Census Bureau, or mailing their form,” said Valencia. “Further, we are encouraging folks to not wait for an enumerator to come to their door.”
The Census Bureau reported that 98.2 percent of Texas households had been contacted by enumerators by Saturday.
“This seems pretty high, but the Census Bureau is targeting a response rate of over 99 percent. It is possible that they will get there by September 30, 2020,” wrote Lloyd B. Potter, director of the Texas Demographic Center, in an email on Monday.
Time is running out to complete the 2020 census. A federal judge ruled last week that census counters could have more time to finish their work – until October 31. But the Trump administration appealed and Monday, an official announced the census will now end on October 5, despite the court ruling.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and other disasters, millions across the country are out of a job, unable to pay rent, and relocating for concerns over safety and personal finances. In the midst of this, the 2020 census is still underway.
The constitutionally mandated count occurs every 10 years as an attempt to tally every person living in the country "once, only once, and in the right place." The survey helps to determine the reapportionment of Congressional seats and the redrawing of electoral districts, as well as the distribution of state and federal funding and the deployment of essential services.
Dr. Lila Valencia, a senior demographer at the Texas Demographic Center and Texas' lead liaison to the U.S. Census Bureau's State Data Center Program, largely echoes this sentiment. The stakes are high, so for those with mistrust, or fear of contact with Bureau workers due to the pandemic, the most effective path forward is self-responding, she said: "What we tried to impress is that the fear will be greatly outweighed by the benefit to their communities.
The poverty rate for San Antonio residents fell to its lowest level in at least a decade in 2019, while the statewide rate dropped to a more than 15-year low, according to new census numbers.
Although the numbers are positive, they provide a snapshot of life a year ago — before the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything.
“Things were economically going along pretty well until 2020. And we don’t really have data on that,” said Texas State Demographer Lloyd Potter.
“We’re likely to see an increase in poverty, a decline in household income and probably a further decline in the population that has health insurance,” said Potter, a demography professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
About 5% of the Texas population is Asian. While that number is small, some 1.5 million people, they are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the state.
“Our projections out of the Texas Demographics Center indicate that there could be close to 6 million Asians in Texas by 2050,” said Lila Valencia, a senior demographer with the Texas Demographic Center.
Why is Texas’ Asian American population growing now? According to Valencia, for the same reasons most people come to Texas: the economy.
“Even during the Great Recession, the recession was not as severe in the state of Texas, and we were able to come out of it a lot faster,” she said. “And a lot of migration, whether it’s migration from other countries or migration from other states, is largely driven by economic forces.”
Homecity.com, a part of Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate, released its list of Best Places to Live in Texas, and Round Rock checks in at No. 5.
"One global trend is clear above all the rest, Texas, the Lone Star State is the place where everyone wants to be. Texas is growing exponentially at about 1,000 people per day as reported by State Demographer Lloyd Potter."
Since the last census in 2010, Texas has added about 4 million people — more than any other state — to its population.
An overwhelming percentage of those additions — as much as 87% — are Black, Hispanic and other communities of color, according to the Texas Demographic Center.
These populations are historically considered among the hardest to count.
And that was before a global pandemic and, most recently, an abrupt change in the filing deadline.
Now, demographers and other experts say the Census Bureau’s ability to get a “true and accurate count” for the 2020 census is in doubt — and they fear what an undercount could mean for Texas.
The coronavirus pandemic has made a already challenging proposition all the more difficult.
With about seven weeks left to go and thousands of census staff still to be hired, it’s a race against time and the pandemic.
“The census count really affects us in a very direct way on almost a daily basis,” said Lila Valencia, a demographer at the Texas Demographic Center.
Valencia studies population, helping the state plan for the future. She said if undercounted, Texas could lose billions over the next decade.
Texas’ growing Latino population is poised to be significantly undercounted in this year’s census, following a slew of recent Trump administration moves.
Advocates say that means Latinos could face a decade of diminished political power and underfunding for essential government services as they try to recover from a pandemic that is disproportionately affecting them.
The census is a national head count that happens every 10 years. It determines how much federal funding states and communities get, as well as how much political representation they get.
Lila Valencia, a senior demographer at the Texas Demographic Center at UT San Antonio, said Latinos made up half the total population growth in Texas between 2010 and 2019.
An abrupt change to the census deadline is increasing fears of an undercount in Texas. Last week, the Trump administration lopped a month off the time people have to respond to the 2020 count. It’s now the end of September instead of October.
But months into the count, the state's at about a 58 percent response rate – meaning about 5 million households have yet to respond. The Texas Demographic Center also told us response rates were lower in areas with more people living in poverty or with larger shares of Hispanic residents.
“We always knew counting Texas would be difficult, but this shorter timeline leaves the most challenging part of the count to be conducted in even less time and during unprecedented challenges,” said Lila Valencia, a senior demographer at the Texas Demographic Center.
Un 85% de los hispanos texanos viven en regiones que están por debajo del 20% de respuesta, de acuerdo con un estudio de 2018 citado por el Texas Tribune. Y la pandemia no ha hecho sino dificultar aún más una labor de por sí complicada.
Lila Valencia, demógrafa de la Universidad de Texas en San Antonio, señaló que son los condados latinos los más afectados. “Algunas de las áreas que tienen el menor índice de respuesta en el censo de 2020 son también regiones con un porcentaje importante de población hispana”, aseguró.
The U.S. Census Bureau has moved up the deadline to respond to the 2020 Census from Oct. 31 to Sept. 30, raising fears of an undercount in Texas.
“While I’m disappointed the Census is ending early, I am hopeful that Terrell residents who have yet to respond will be counted in the closing days,” said Ray Dunlap, president of the Terrell Economic Development Corp. and a member of a Kaufman County Census taskforce. “It is important to our community that we get an accurate count.”
The announcement comes as the Census count is moving into a new phase whereby Census workers have started door-to-door visits with households that have not filled out the Census online, by phone or by mail.
“It seems like not only are they cutting back the time they’re giving themselves to do this nonresponse follow up, but they’re also allocating the least amount of time in the hardest-to-count places in the state,” Lila Valencia, a senior demographer at the Texas Demographic Center, told the Texas Tribune.
“We’re in the middle of this pandemic where people are concerned about their health and safety, but also concerned about their future and food insecurity and things of that nature,” Valencia told the Texas Tribune. “That is a phenomena that many of us are experiencing at different levels, but some in our state are experiencing all of it. It’s a cumulative effect, and for them to even think of the Census, it’s just not at their top of mind and understandably so.”
For the past few years, Texas has seen rapid growth in population with an influx of people moving into the state. At the end of 2019, that growth was expected to continue, but the pandemic has likely slowed down the rate of growth – though it’s still too early to tell what impact it has had.
At the start of this year, demographers had no reason to suspect that there would be any interruption in the steady population growth. Demographers predicted that the state would continue to see an increase in net migration and that by the end of 2020, the state would become a majority Hispanic population.
Instead, COVID-19 happened and turned everything upside down.
Valencia said it’s still too early to tell what the pandemic’s effect has been on population growth, but there has been a slowdown in net migration.
El Pasoans have one less month to complete the census, and so far roughly 40% of the population has yet to respond.
The U.S. Census Bureau announced Aug. 3 that the 2020 census will wrap up at the end of September, a month earlier than anticipated.
"El Paso has actually done really well, relative to much of the rest of the state," said Texas State Demographer Lloyd Potter, noting that there are still areas in the region not up to par.
Potter said it's "very unlikely (the memorandum) is something that could actually play out and actually result in a change in apportionment," but added that if it did play out, "Texas would suffer pretty dramatically."
Millions of Americans may not be counted in this year’s Census.
The U.S. Census Bureau announced it is ending all counting efforts for 2020 on Sept. 30, a month earlier than previously scheduled.
Officials in states like Texas fear that would lead to severe undercounting — possibly resulting in states losing a congressional seat and some cities not getting enough federal funding.
“We are very concerned this could be a failed Census,” Dr. Mark Fossett said.
Fossett is with the Texas Census Research Data Center, and he fears not every American will be counted.
The Census Bureau has reduced the data collection time for the 2020 census by a month. The previous deadline was Oct. 31, but now counting efforts will stop on Sept. 30. That includes all counting efforts — door-to-door, by phone, website and mail.
The shorter deadline, announced Monday, came as a surprise to Dr. Lila Valencia and her team. Valencia is a senior demographer with the Texas Demographic Center.
“I think we would have been less surprised if response rates had been surging. However, response rates have been pretty stagnant. Texas has been seeing an average daily increase of 0.2 percentage points since Census Day on April 1,” she wrote Thursday in an email to Reform Austin. “As of August 4, 58%, or 7 million Texas households, have responded to the 2020 census.”
The U.S. Census Bureau announced this week that it plans to conclude its count on Sept. 30 – a month earlier than originally planned. The bureau is required by law to report the final results to the president and Congress by year’s end.
Critics say it’s an attempt to undercount people of color, immigrants and other people often undercounted in the census.
In Texas, an undercount could affect everyone. The census determines how much federal funding a community receives, as well as the number of Texas’ congressional seats.
Lila Valencia is senior demographer at the Texas Demographic Center. She told Texas Standard that the bureau now has less time to work amid the unprecedented challenges of the pandemic.
The Census Bureau on Monday lopped a month off the time people have to respond to the 2020 count. Texas is already lagging behind the country in response rates, with low-income and Hispanic Texans at high risk of being missed.
The schedule change comes at a key point in the count. The bureau has started its door-to-door campaign to follow up with households that have not yet filled out the census online, by phone or by mail, but census workers won’t reach some communities in Texas, like the Rio Grande Valley, that are at the highest risk of being missed until next week.
“It seems like not only are they cutting back the time they’re giving themselves to do this nonresponse follow up, but they’re also allocating the least amount of time in the hardest-to-count places in the state,” said Lila Valencia, a senior demographer at the Texas Demographic Center.
Data from the 2020 U.S. Census will impact legislative representation, federal funding, and economic growth for the next decade. But amid the global Covid-19 pandemic, responding to the census is not foremost on the minds of many Americans. That’s why the Texas Demographic Center is working to ensure residents in the state understand the importance of providing this critical information. The organization participated in a virtual road trip in early July that brought Texas communities together to share their enthusiasm and ideas for encouraging others to respond to the census. The 2020 census also has an extended deadline and more convenient ways to respond, including online, to ensure everyone is counted.
Texas ranks low when it comes to participation rates in the 2020 census – 40th in the nation. So far, only 57% of Texans have returned their census forms.
Demographer Lila Valencia from the Texas Demographic Center told Texas Standard on Thursday that could lead to an undercount of the population, which could mean a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding over the next 10 years.
Texas ranks low when it comes to participation rates in the 2020 census – 40th in the nation. So far, only 57% of Texans have returned their census forms.
Demographer Lila Valencia from the Texas Demographic Center told Texas Standard on Thursday that could lead to an undercount of the population, which could mean a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding over the next 10 years.
Despite an extended deadline, local government cash infusions and grassroots campaigns to improve Houston’s 2020 census response rate, almost half of Houston households are still missing from the official count.
As of July 5, 52.5% of Houston’s estimated 2.32 million residents have completed the decennial survey, according to the most recent census data. In Harris County, the response has been about 56 percent.
“There were all these plans to have outdoor fairs as we went into the spring, to set up and advertise,” Potter said. He explained that the pandemic “took some of the wind out of our sails,” but local organizations are continuing to reach out to communities and census workers are starting to knock on doors, leaving the surveys at homes that have failed to respond.
While it’s true that anyone could contract COVID-19, growing data shows the virus is infecting and killing people in Latino and Black communities across the country at a disturbing rate.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Latinos have been hospitalized nationwide at a rate of more than four times that of white people. For Black Americans, the hospitalization rate is about five times that of White Americans.
“In Bexar County, there definitely is this divide. So in terms of infection and exposure, that’s very closely associated with socioeconomic status and that happens to also be associated with whether or not you’re Latino,” said Lloyd Potter, Texas State demographer.
Angelina County is one of three counties in the region expected to experience population growth through 2030 and is leading the region in the 2020 Census with a 53% self-response rate.
“Right now, when we look at the DETCOG counties, what we see is that Angelina, Polk and San Jacinto counties are the only counties that we are projecting to experience population growth through 2030,” Lila Valencia, a senior demographer for the Texas Demographic Center, told the Deep East Texas Council of Governments board of directors last week.
“All of the other counties in DETCOG are projected to experience population decline. If you know that to be different from your experience, then you want to make sure that those areas are fully counted.”
The Deep East Texas Council of Governments confirmed its officers for the coming year during an online meeting held Thursday June 25. The new officer terms begin July 1.
Sabine County Judge Daryl Melton will serve as President. Nacogdoches City Councilman Roy Boldon will be President-Elect.
Shelby County Judge Allison Harbison will serve as Vice President. San Augustine County Judge Jeff Boyd was elected to serve as Secretary. Bill Holder of the Trinity River Authority is completing his year as President and will remain on the Executive Committee as Immediate Past President.
Also during the meeting, Dr. Lila Valencia, Senior Demographer for the Texas Demographic Center, gave an update on the progress of the 2020 Census and its response rates in Texas and the Deep East Texas region.
Bexar County’s population is becoming more racially and ethnically diverse, with the numbers of Hispanic, black and Asian residents each growing at faster rates than non-Hispanic whites, new census data released late Wednesday shows.
“It really highlights the fact that Bexar County is continuing to become more and more diverse,” said State Demographer Lloyd Potter, a University of Texas at San Antonio demography professor. “Certainly, the Latino population is driving that from a numeric perspective.”
Texas’ Hispanic population has grown by more than 2 million since 2010, according to new population estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau, and the state's demographer now predicts that Hispanics will be the state's largest population group by mid-2021.
The year 2020 will be one to remember given the pandemic, the economic downturn, and protests for justice and police reform. It’s also a big year for the U.S. census.
Being counted may not be on people’s minds during these times, even though being counted affects their lives and community.Responses in Texas continue to run behind the national average, said Dr. Lila Valencia, a senior demographer in the Texas Demographic Center.
“The response to the census has definitely slowed down quite a bit in Texas. We started about 2 percentage points behind the U.S. Now we are over 5 percentage points behind the national response rate, with 55.5% of Texas households and 60.8% of U.S. households responding.”
“We are hopeful that response rates will go up now that the Census Bureau has resumed its field operations in Texas. Some households have just now received their census packet information as part of the Update/Leave program,” Valencia wrote in an email Thursday.
A decade has passed since former Texas Gov. Rick Perry named UTSA demography professor Lloyd Potter the state demographer, an action that also made the university home to the Texas Demographic Center.
He has spent much of the past decade providing valuable data and guidance to city and state officials while informing communities about important demographic trends. Last fall, for instance, he explained the need of drawing larger political districts in areas experiencing population loss to the Texas State Senate’s Select Committee on Redistricting. Weeks later he spoke to the Waco Chamber of Commerce about the state’s population trends and how Texas could lose $300 million in federal funding with just a 1% undercount in the 2020 U.S. Census.
“Not getting a complete count hurts the state, not only for representation in congress but also in the amount of federal dollars we receive,” Potter said. “It’s about $1,000 for every person you miss, so if we miss 100 people, that’s $100,000 right there.”
A delay in the census because of the COVID-19 pandemic could push Texas redistricting into legislative overtime. Next year’s redistricting round will be the first time in nearly half a century that the Texas legislature can redraw maps without any federal supervision to ensure they don’t discriminate against communities of color.
Ethnic media services had organized for a teleconference on Texas 2020 Census count and redistricting on May 20, 2020. If the hard to count communities aren’t reached, the implications are vast. The census shapes political representation and the allocation of public funding over the next decade, determining state Electoral College votes, as well as how local, state, and federal legislative district lines are drawn.
San Antonio continues to record impressive population growth, ranking second nationally in increase in population in a single year, new census numbers show.
The city added 17,237 people between July 2018 and July 2019, pushing its estimated population to 1,547,253, according to census data released late Wednesday.
The city is showing strong growth in both its suburban ring and urban core, Potter said. “And that probably is an indication of the kinds of jobs that are being created here — and that young professionals are finding San Antonio to be an attractive place to live, to work in,” he said.
Mike Villarreal believes we should all stop saying the phrase “getting back to normal,” especially when it comes to thinking about students’ return to in-person classes this fall.
“If I have one recommendation to my fellow parents, it is be adaptive – adapt to the new circumstances, be flexible,” said Villarreal, the director of the University of Texas at San Antonio’s Institute for Urban Education. “It’s going to take awhile to ramp up a vaccine when it eventually gets created, but in the meantime, we all need to figure out how to move forward together.”
During the UTSA panel discussion, State Demographer Lloyd Potter underscored that there will be a “whole range of issues to manage” if students return to a classroom setting.
The Texas Demographic Center provides valuable data to policymakers and various entities in the Lone Star State. The center does this by working closely with the U.S. Census Bureau and using census data as a jumping-off point to provide its own population estimates and projections about Texas. The center has observed, for example, that while the Texas population, in the aggregate, is growing, the population in certain counties is actually decreasing. This type of information can be valuable for government agencies in helping them understand how or why population changes occur. The center’s data is used by more than 500 entities in the state of Texas for a wide range of purposes.
Slammed by a pandemic, the Census Bureau postponed crucial portions of the count for the third time in a month, further raising the bar for an accurate count.
That has some experts concerned. In Texas, a fifth of the state’s 254 counties — heavily Latino areas along the border with Mexico, sparsely populated poor areas in the state’s interior — are responding to the census at rates half that of the state average, which is itself among the lowest in the country. In part, that is because a Census Bureau effort to deliver forms to about five million households without postal addresses, most of them poor, was barely begun before being halted by the virus.
“The response rates have really dropped since census day” on April 1, said Lila Valencia, senior demographer and the point person on census issues at the Texas Demographic Center in Austin. “We need to get self-response kick-started, right now.”
City demographer Ryan Robinson is worried about the outcome of the 2020 U.S. Census. “This is going to be a horrible census,” he told the Austin Monitor.
Because of the need for social distancing to slow the spread of Covid-19, the U.S. Census Bureau has stopped collecting census data in person and plans to restart the process in June.
As a result, Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross is proposing to delay information necessary for states to do redistricting for Congress as well as state legislatures. It remains to be seen whether Congress will go along with a proposal from Ross, who announced this week that he wants to extend the time for people to respond and for the bureau to collect field data to Oct. 31.
Before the coronavirus outbreak, before social distancing, the population in Texas was growing. In fact, for the past 10 years, Texas has grown tremendously.
Texas was in demand before COVID-19, but what will it look like after it?
When we return to normal, what will cities look like? Will a desire for urbanization still be there? Will new restaurants want to open? Will museums and arts venues sprout new schedules and programs? Will people want to live close to work? Will city life be the same?
Interstate 35 is a vital transportation artery cutting across Texas, south to north. It stretches from Mexico, through Dallas and eventually ends up in Canada. The highway is essential for keeping goods flowing between the three largest countries in North America – everything from produce to medical equipment is trucked along it. And it’s especially important during the pandemic as people are more aware of the vulnerability of the supply chain.
But the highway is also a divider. It splits the population of Texas into two very uneven sectors. A large majority of Texans live east of I-35, says Texas State Demographer Lloyd Potter.
“It’s 87% of our population,” he says.
McBride said they are hosting online events to keep businesses informed.
“We’re doing an event for our members where we’re having a presentation by the Texas State demographer,” McBride said. “We’re doing a presentation on what he expects to see demographic trends changing in Texas over the next few years.”
Bexar County’s population has crossed the 2 million mark for the first time, new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau indicate.
The county’s population surged by almost 289,000 people since 2010, the latest numbers show. As of July 1, its total number of inhabitants stood at 2,003,554, the census information released late Wednesday shows.
Bexar County ranked sixth nationally among U.S. counties recording the largest raw numeric growth since 2010. Local experts cited a healthy economy and affordable housing as reasons why people want to move here.
Bexar County landed among the top 10 counties with the most population growth between 2010 and 2019, according to estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday.
In that period, Bexar County added nearly 289,000 people, its population reaching the 2 million threshold for the first time. In 2010, Bexar County had 1,714,781 residents living within its boundaries. In 2019, there were 2,003,554 residents, a 16.8 percent increase. That growth made Bexar County sixth in the nation with the most numeric growth between 2010 and 2019.
Texas has changed a lot during the past decade. State Demographer Lloyd Potter says its population isn’t just booming; it leads the country.
“We are growing more than any other state. We’ve added more population than any other state, and we’re growing faster than any other state,” Potter says.
Potter says Texas’ population grows by about 1,000 people every day, half of these new Texans are babies born here. The other half are people moving to Texas: that’s a mix of people coming from within the U.S. and those coming from another country.
People are not just flocking to Texas for the warmer weather or a plate of juicy brisket. In 2018, the Austin American-Statesman shared “people are moving to the state” for the appeals of economic growth in the culturally diverse” area, in addition to affordable housing, and well-paying jobs within energy, health and technology Texas has long been known for. Although migration may not be politically-driven, here’s a glance at how a growing relocation population can affect voting in 2020.
State Demographer Dr. Lloyd Potter estimated that between 2010 and 2017, there were 1,019,434 new residents to the state.