Posted on 06/24/2004 8:01:53 AM PDT by ladtx
Star-Telegram Staff Writer
Fort Worth is on the move on the population charts. So is Dallas. They're just going in opposite directions.
Jumping past five cities -- including Boston, Seattle and Washington, D.C. -- Fort Worth is now the 20th largest city in the country, with 585,122 residents, according to 2003 Census figures released today.
Dallas, meanwhile, was supplanted by San Antonio as the eighth largest city in the country. Dallas, which gained fewer than 2,500 people between July 2002 and July 2003, dropped to No. 9.
Fort Worth has been enjoying a robust growth rate for several years. But Rocky Gardiner, with the North Central Texas Council of Governments, said Cowtown is growing even faster than expected.
Two years ago, the council said Fort Worth would have 624,000 people by 2010, Gardiner said.
"With the growth we're seeing lately, they could surpass that by 2006," he said.
Most of the growth is in north Fort Worth.
Fort Worth was also the fastest-growing city of more than 500,000 from July 2002 to July 2003, increasing by about 2.8 percent, or 16,000 people.
And from April 2000 to July 2003, Fort Worth grew 8.1 percent, making it the fasting-growing city of more than 500,000 during that time, according to the census figures.
"We have found that delicate balance between economic development opportunities in our city and the quality of life in our neighborhoods," Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief said.
The city's booming population will undoubtedly affect public policy, he said.
"We're no longer 25. We're now 20. Certainly as we go into this next budget cycle, it's something we're going to have to be mindful of," Moncrief said.
While municipal services must continue to be expanded to sustain the growth, Fort Worth is big enough to handle the newcomers, Fort Worth city planner Fernando Costa said.
About one-third of the city's land is vacant and suitable for development, Costa said.
"We can accommodate a great deal of growth within our city limits, which in a sense makes Fort Worth different from many other large cities," Costa said.
State demographer Steve Murdock said Fort Worth's and San Antonio's growth is partly because of the availability of land surrounding the cities. Dallas, on the other hand, has little space left for new development.
"Dallas is a very contained area. Growth like this simply isn't possible there," Murdock said.
Dallas Mayor Laura Miller, who had just given her state-of-the-city address Wednesday, said she was disappointed to learn of Dallas' drop in the standings.
But she said it would not be long before Dallas surpasses San Antonio again, especially after the completion of the Trinity River Corridor project, which will consist of lakes, trails, an equestrian center and the Great Trinity Forest, which will be seven times the size of New York's Central Park.
San Antonio has "that little, teeny, tiny River Walk and when we get our big, huge Trinity River lakes project with our nice bridges, I think that's going to turn around real fast," she said.
Arlington gained 4,806 new residents in 2002-03, more than moved to Dallas during that time. The city's population of 355,007 makes it the 49th largest U.S. city, but its growth rate was only 1.4 percent.
Some smaller communities in North Texas enjoyed substantial growth.
Little Elm, on the north shore of Lewisville Lake in Denton County, grew more than 31 percent to about 12,000 people from 2000 to 2003, making it the country's seventh fastest-growing city of any size during that time.
Town Manager J.C. Hughes called the figures "mind-boggling" but not unexpected.
"Frisco is right next to us, so I think it was a natural progression for people to look down the road to us," Hughes said.
He said population growth will probably be even greater in 2008, when a corridor connecting Little Elm to Interstate 35 is completed.
In Crowley, south of Fort Worth, City Manager Truitt Gilbreath downplayed his city's 8.1 percent growth rate.
"Being a smaller city, naturally our percentage would be greater than larger cities where the numbers are growing faster," he said.
Gilbreath said the quality of life in a smaller town combined with its proximity to Fort Worth attracts people to Crowley.
"You have a little more opportunity to be involved in a small community," he said.
Burleson spokeswoman Sherry Campbell-Husband attributes the city's growth of 6.8 percent to the semi-rural environment, good schools and proximity to shopping and other amenities in Fort Worth.
While dealing with growth can be painful, it's worth the hassle, Campbell-Husband said.
"Our mayor is fond of saying, 'A community that doesn't grow dies,' " she said.
Staff writers Jeff Claassen, Mike Lee, Martha Deller and Eva-Marie Ayala contributed to this report.
40,000 new people since 2000, I miss it the way it was.
I live on the Dallas side because of work location (moving to Rockwall next week) but have always preferred Fort Worth and environs.
People need a place to live I reckon.
As kids we hunted all these fields where the new houses are, and caught 3 lb bass and catfish in the small creeks that are now shallow trash filled depressions.
although traffic is nothing like Dallas, its getting there.
Dallas itself may have gained only 2500 in population but I'll guarantee that the suburbs are growing a a greater rate than that. We're moving to Rockwall from Plano mainly to get away from the sprawl but looks like it won't be long and we'll be in the middle of it again. Lake Ray Hubbard will always keep us a little separated though.
ping
Fort Worth's got the best downtown area in North Texas. Lots of entertainment, up-scale apartments, great restaurants.
I agree. The stockyards area is great for taking relatives when they come for a visit. Plus always take them to Pendery's downtown so they can get their spices particularly the chili powder.
Newsflash: Most Americans consider Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington one big city.
It makes little sense to compare cities that have room to grow to cities that are surrounded by growing suburbs.
Chicago is a great example. Although the population of Chicago has changed little over the last ten years, the burbs just keep expanding into the farmland.
Sooo... instead of comparing city populations, it would make more sense to compare the populations of urban areas instead.
You have a point. Dallas proper really has no room to grow other than up. That's why the outlying suburbs have such a high growth rate. The total population of the DFW Metroplex is about 5.1 million as of 2000 census.
Columbus, for example, was the 16th-largest city in the U.S. in 1990, with a population that exceeded the population of Cleveland by more than 100,000 and had about 300,000 more people than Cincinnati. And yet it never had a major sports franchise until the NHL's expansion Blue Jackets started playing there a couple of years ago.
I never would have guessed that Oklahoma City would be larger than such cities as Kansas City, St. Louis, Atlanta, Oakland, Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, etc.
These sorts of assessments actually belie the reality that formal city limits only contain a small fraction of the population of each metro especially in places like DFW. This method of assessments has always made it seem like eastern cities are bigger than western and southern ones which at the metro level exceed eastern ones which are bigger by this method. If the entire metro area was considered and with no artificial breaking up of some of the largest western and southern ones into smaller ones where there is in fact no physical separation of any kind, the results would be very interesting. In the case I am most familiar with, where I live, the SF Bay Area, they break us up into 3 individual "SMA" units, when in fact its continuous concrete across 9 counties with a combined 7 or so million people, with another 2 counties with arguable "exurb" satellites. Oh, and also, the Rats love the current, urban core biased, gerrymandered way of reporting this, as if I even needed to mention it.
Yes indeed.
But the East Coast liberal intelligencia hate that fact and want to portray places like Philly, Boston, and Baltimore as being bigger than they really are, while downplaying just how big in population southern and western metro areas really are.
Kansas City is Cowtown; who are these imposters?
The liberals would hate if we counted that way. It would highlight the reality that the future belongs to people living outside the limits of the "urban core" cities in the west and south. They don't want to face the facts.
I'd bet Fort Worth alone has over 75,000 illegal aliens.
That's ok; I already did it for you! (From a safe distance, I might add.)
The discrepancy you've noted goes both ways, and for the same reasons. New York City has a population of about 8 million people. The New York metropolitan area has a population of about 25 million people, which means it is almost half the size of the entire state of California.
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