Fort Worth is now the fastest-growing city in Texas and recently surpassed Austin as the fourth-largest city in the state.
Fort Worth, with nearly 990,000 residents as of January 2024, has grown faster than any other major Texas city since 2020 and has now moved past Austin to be the fourth biggest city in the state, the Austin American-Statesman reported.
“When you visit, it’s pretty clear that it’s a place that is booming, where people are very excited about the direction of things,” the director of the George W. Bush Institute’s Economic Growth Initiative at Southern Methodist University, Cullum Clark, told The Texas Tribune.
As the population has spiked, the amount of “affordable housing” has dwindled, with apartment rents regularly more expensive than in Austin.
“It’s more difficult to move around there, it’s more expensive to do things, it’s more expensive to buy housing there,” state demographer Lloyd Potter said.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex is expected to reach 8.5 million by 2028. Growth has been seen in the Sun Belt region.
“Most population growth is occurring across the Sun Belt. Specific to the large metro areas, eight of the top 10 growth markets are located within the Sun Belt (Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas),” the study’s author said. “Similarly, many of the high-growth metro areas with smaller and mid-sized populations are located within the Sun Belt.”
However, the City of Dallas saw a slight increase in population size in 2023, marking a turnaround from the population declines seen in previous years.