Most credible projections point to the same answer: Texas will surpass California as the most populous state in the United States around 2045 to 2050. The gap between the two states is large today, roughly 9 million people, but it has been closing steadily for two decades, and...
The Black middle class in America is growing, and it is growing in specific places. The story of where traces a clear pattern: a sustained migration toward Southern metros, a movement from cities into suburbs, and the emergence of a handful of regions that have become national centers of Black...
The United States has been growing since before it was a country. The first official Census in 1790 counted 3,929,214 people, a number smaller than the current population of Los Angeles. Today the country has 340 million. The story of how that happened is not a straight line...
The Dallas-Fort Worth metro is on track to pass Chicago as the third-largest metropolitan area in the United States, and most projections put the crossover in...
The short answer is everyone. The US Census is designed to count every single person living in the United States - regardless of age, citizenship status, immigration status, race, or income. But the full answer involves some important distinctions about who counts where, which groups are historically undercounted, and a current political debate about whether that "everyone" rule should change for the 2030 Census...
Population projections are educated guesses, and the Census Bureau is the first to say so. Every projection comes with a range of scenarios built around different assumptions about birth rates, death rates, and immigration levels, and the gap between the high and low scenarios in 2050 runs to...
The US Census exists because the Constitution requires it. Article I, Section 2 mandates an "actual Enumeration" of the population every ten years, and the original reason was simple: to divide political power fairly among the states. But the census has grown into something...
Filling out the census is not optional, at least on paper. Federal law requires every US resident to participate in the decennial Census, and there are penalties on the books for refusal. But the practical reality of what actually happens if you don't respond is a lot more nuanced than the legal language suggests...
The United States has been getting more racially and ethnically diverse with every Census count for decades. But not all groups are growing at the same pace, and the answer to which group is growing fastest depends on whether you measure by percentage growth rate or by raw numbers added. Both ways of looking at it tell an interesting story...
A census is an official count of an entire population. The word comes from Latin - specifically from censere, meaning "to assess" or "to estimate." According to...
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...
Nashville has been one of the most talked-about relocation destinations in America for the past decade. The no-income-tax pitch, the music culture, the relative affordability compared to coastal cities - it all adds up to a compelling story. But the Census data tells a more complicated version of that story, one that includes a poverty rate that stays stubbornly above...
California is still the most populous state in the country by a wide margin, home to 39.3 million people and roughly 11.7% of the entire US population. But the demographic story of the past 35 years is not one of unchecked growth. It is a story of a state that grew explosively through the 1990s, hit a plateau in the 2000s, absorbed an...
Three Texas cities rank in the top five wealthiest cities in the entire country by median household income. That is not a typo. Southlake, University Park, and West University Place all hit the ACS ceiling of $250,001 and land at positions three, four, and five on the national list, trailing only two small California communities. For a state whose identity is...
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...
The federal poverty rate for the United States sits at around 12%. The cities on this list are running at two to three times that figure, and most of them have been for decades. These are not cities that hit a rough patch. They are places where concentrated poverty has been the structural reality for a generation or more, driven by deindustrialization, population loss, disinvestment, and the compounding effects of each of those forces on the next...
Most tracts are unremarkable in the statistical sense - middle of the distribution on income, density, poverty, home values. But the ones at the extremes tell stories that city-level or county-level data can never surface. A tract with 44,000 residents. A neighborhood where the median home value exceeds $2 million. A block where 0% of residents live in poverty. These places exist...
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...
Harlem has been called the cultural capital of Black America for more than a century. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s produced writers, musicians, and artists whose influence still runs through American culture...
In 1990, the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area had just under 4 million residents. Today it has 8.5 million. That's not a typo, and it's not a story about one fast decade followed by a plateau. The Dallas metro has added people in every single decade since 1990, at a pace that has no real parallel among large American metros...
