The fastest-gentrifying places in America are small towns, not big cities

Triana, Alabama, a town outside Huntsville, had 499 residents in the 2010-2014 American Community Survey. In the 2020-2024 survey it had 3,964. Over the same decade, the share of its adults with a bachelor's degree rose from 24.9 percent to 48.7 percent, and its median household income went from $40,625 to $110,100.

That combination puts Triana first on the CensusEasy Gentrification Score, which ranks 6,646 cities, towns, and census-designated places with at least 5,000 residents. The score is a 0 to 100 percentile blend of a decade of growth in three things: inflation-adjusted median household income, inflation-adjusted median home value, and the share of adults with a bachelor's degree. A place scores high only when all three rise faster than almost everywhere else. The method is on our methodology page.

Our study of the fastest-gentrifying large cities ranks the 358 cities with at least 100,000 people, where Denver leads. When every place is included, the top of the list looks different. Of the 12 highest scores, 11 belong to towns or suburbs with fewer than 20,000 residents, and most are in the South.

Most of these places grew fast. Celina, on the northern edge of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, went from 6,558 residents to 34,268 between the two surveys, and the Census Bureau's estimate for July 2025 is 64,427. Hardeeville, just across the Savannah River from Georgia, nearly tripled. Wildwood, Florida, which sits next to The Villages retirement community, grew from 6,782 to 17,608.

Because the score measures the rate of change, a place that adds thousands of new, higher-income households to a small base posts very large gains on all three measures at once. A big city starts from a much larger and more mixed population, so even fast change moves its averages more slowly. The score is not weighted by population, and a high score does not mean a place has changed more in absolute terms than Brooklyn or Oakland.

Hapeville is the one that looks like classic gentrification

Hapeville, Georgia, a small city next to Atlanta's airport, is the exception on the list. Its population barely moved, from 6,611 to 6,630. But its median household income rose from $37,118 to $95,714 before adjusting for inflation, its median home value from $117,500 to $312,100, and the share of adults with a bachelor's degree from 18.9 percent to 43.2 percent. Roughly the same number of people live there, but the figures describe a very different population. That is the pattern most people mean by gentrification, and it is how neighborhoods like Harlem changed.

Twin Lakes, Colorado, a census-designated place north of Denver, shows the same shift in education. In the 2010-2014 survey, 8.6 percent of its adults had a bachelor's degree. In 2020-2024, 43.6 percent did, while its population grew by about a quarter.

Metro areas bring back the familiar names

At the metro level, the exurban surges are averaged into their regions, and some well-known names return. The score ranks 918 metropolitan and micropolitan areas.

Austin, Denver, and San Jose are the large metros on the list. In the Austin metro, median home value rose from $203,603 to $473,482 between the two surveys and the bachelor's share from 41.0 to 50.7 percent. The rest are mostly mountain and resort areas. In Jackson, Wyoming, the median home value passed $1.3 million in the 2020-2024 survey, up from $530,779. We looked at one of them in Bozeman is now wealthier than Boston.

Every place is scored in the full rankings of the fastest-gentrifying cities and fastest-gentrifying metros.

Sources

The Gentrification Score is a CensusEasy index built from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey 5-year estimates for 2010-2014 and 2020-2024, comparing inflation-adjusted median household income, inflation-adjusted median home value, and the share of adults 25 and older with a bachelor's degree. Dollar figures quoted in the text are not adjusted for inflation. The 2025 population for Celina is from the bureau's Vintage 2025 estimates. Places include incorporated cities and census-designated places with at least 5,000 residents.