The Houston metro added 126,720 people from 2024 to 2025, the most of any U.S. metro area and just ahead of Dallas-Fort Worth, according to new Census Bureau estimates.
Atlanta and Charlotte are the two cities that defined the Southeast's rise as an economic region over the past 35 years. Both started the 1990s as mid-sized Southern cities with regional profiles and have grown into nationally significant metros with Fortune 500 headquarters, major financial sectors, and...
Texas added more residents in 2024 than any other state in the country. It has done so in most years since 1990. The current Texas...
Atlanta has a reputation for sprawl, and most of the metro earns it. The region covers more than 8,300 square miles, with a metro density of just 630 residents per square mile, which puts it among the most spread-out large metros in the country. But Midtown Atlanta, the two-mile stretch of high-rises, walkable streets, and dense residential towers running along Peachtree Street between North Avenue and 17th Street, operates by completely different rules...
Between July 2020 and July 2024, the South gained 2,685,000 net domestic migrants, according to Hamilton Zanze's analysis of Census Bureau data. That is not a rounding error. It is the largest sustained regional population shift in modern American history, and...
Retirement location decisions come down to three things for most people: how far their money goes, what the weather feels like day to day, and whether the place actually works for someone who isn't commuting to an office anymore. The Census data makes it possible to look...
Every year researchers and city planners study the same question: which American cities are actually growing, and what is driving them? The answer keeps pointing to the same regions. The Sun Belt, the Mountain West, and a handful of mid-sized metros with strong job markets and enough land to build on. The cities...
Bozeman, Montana has a population of around 60,000 people. It sits at 4,800 feet in the Gallatin Valley, surrounded by mountains, about an hour from the nearest major airport. For most of its history it was a college town with cheap rents and modest wages, the kind of place people left for bigger opportunities...
In 1990, Frisco was a small farming town north of Dallas with about 6,500 people. Thirty years later it had 200,000. By 2024 it was closing in on 235,000, and the city is still building. No city in modern American history has sustained that kind of growth for that long...
