I received an email yesterday from Nancy Sarnoff, who writes a real estate column for the Houston Chronicle. She told me that another reporter at the newspaper was working on an article regarding census numbers and would like to speak with one of my transferees who had relocated to Houston between July of last year and this year. Naturally I was happy to oblige and provided her with the name and contact details of one of our transferees so that she could pass the info on to her colleague. I didn’t really know anything else about the article until I opened the paper this morning. The headline read, “Texas Population Booms Amid Lean Times.” Not surprisingly, this was front page news!
According to the article, Texas added more residents than any other state in the year ending July 1st. Texas reportedly had an increase of 478,000 new residents. As I have noted throughout 2009, people have flocked to Houston in record numbers due to increased job opportunities and a stable housing market compared to other parts of the country.
The article quotes Karl Eschbach, state demographer at the University of Texas at San Antonio, who said, “In certain respects, Texas was the only state left standing during the last recession , so the competitors for migration kind of all went away.”
In November, the Texas unemployment rate was only 8%, which is 2% less than the national unemployment rate. As for the housing market in Texas, our state didn’t experience the bubble that other states did, thus it didn’t experience the bust that hit other states so dramatically.
Also quoted in the article was Stephen Klineberg, a sociology professor at Rice University, who said, “Growth has been the religion of Houston and Texas…That’s a measure of our virtue and success.” I couldn’t agree more with this statement.
Overall, the population growth of Texas is second only to California. Since the millenium, the Texas population has grown by 3.9 million people. Continued growth in Houston and in Texas will hopefully continue to fuel the rebound of the recent economic downturn.
