Houston Strategies

Half of all population growth coming to CA, TX, and FL

An few interesting facts from a random article on the Drudge Report:

The U.S. Census Bureau expects Florida to become the third-biggest state within 25 years. Florida is expected to pass New York in size by adding 11 million residents by 2030. That total is on top of the 17 million already in the state. About 40 percent of the growth is expected among seniors.

California and Texas will stay larger than Florida, according to the report. All three combined will account for nearly half of the nation's growth in the coming decades.

Nearly two-thirds of the country will live in the South and West by 2030.

I think Texas is around 22 million now, but this says we will be ahead of Florida with 29 million in 2030, so we're looking at some pretty serious growth. It also bodes well for some explosive growth for Continental and IAH. Houston has traditionally been considered too far south to be a good transcontinental domestic airline hub, but as the population keeps shifting south and west we are becoming more and more central to much of the US population.

(After I wrote this, I came across the Chronicle article with more details for Texas. Here's a relatively easy, roughly accurate way to remember the numbers and impress your friends: start in 2000 with Texas at ~20m and Houston metro at ~5m. Each decade, Texas will add ~4m new people, roughly equally split between Houston, DFW, the San Antonio-Austin corridor, and the border area. That means the Houston metro is adding ~1m/decade, or 100k/year, which equals 6m ~2010, 7m ~2020, and 8m ~2030. Generally population has about a 2 to 1 ratio to jobs, so 100,000 people/year should equate to about 50,000 jobs/year - which is roughly what Houston added in 2004.)

posted by Tory Gattis @ 8:37 PM