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Being home to four of the nation's fastest-growing metropolitan areas brings Texas its share of bragging rights, but it also taxes the state's resources, says a research economist at Texas A&M University.
The Census Bureau's list of fastest-growing cities between 2000 and 2007 included four from Texas: Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio.
"When you look at such rapid growth, you've got to consider all the things that come with that," said James Gaines, of Texas A&M's Real Estate Center, which is part of the Mays Business School. The cost of growth can be daunting, from infrastructure to interstate lanes to a broad range of services, he said.
"We've got to employ, house, feed, re-create and provide retail space for those people. There needs to be lots of advance planning for all the services and all the facilities we'll need to accommodate them, as well as the people already here," Gaines said.
The expected addition of 13.6 million people over the next 25 years projected by the state demographer's office equates to the number of people in the 12-county Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, the nine-county Houston area, the seven-county San Antonio area and the population of Corpus Christi.
"And you've got to realize that adding practically 14 million people also means adding 13 million cars," Gaines said. "There is a lot of infrastructure that goes along with those numbers -- roads, parking and even gas stations."
Another factor to consider is the demographic profile of the population. Gaines said the racial and ethnic mix of Texas by the year 2030 will be 51 percent Hispanic and 32 percent Anglo. The black population is expected to decline slightly, and the "other" population group (primarily Asian) will double from 3.3 percent to 6.7 percent.
The age profile in Texas differs vastly from that of the United States, with higher percentages of the population settling at the younger end -- from birth to 8 years old -- and in the over-85 set, Gaines said. The first wave of the "baby echo" generation is now of college age, and there is a massive cohort of preschoolers right behind them, which Gaines predicts will have long-term effects on public and higher education.
"We'll see a lot more college-age students applying at regional campuses because, with tuition going up and the cost of housing going up, they won't be able to afford to go to the bigger colleges," he predicted.
"We'll also see more economic segregation, as financial assistance gets harder to find."
The most significant impact, he said, will be the strain on local property taxes to fund public schools as enrollments escalate.
Gaines elaborates on these and other issues in Tierra Grande magazine, which is published by the Real Estate Center. The link to the article, titled Looming Boom, Texas Through 2030, is http://recenter.tamu.edu/pdf/1841.pdf.
