Austin Is America's Fastest-Growing City: Report

AUSTIN, TEXAS — You know Austin is growing fast. You see it in the number of cranes obstructing the downtown skyline, feel it as you're stuck in traffic on your way to work, experience it when you're trying to cross the street while waiting for a seemingly interminable line of cars whizzing by the roadway.

Well, it's official: Austin is the No. 1 fastest-growing large city in the country. So says the personal finance website WalletHub. In a recent study, WalletHub researchers took the average score from two distinct criteria groupings — jobs/economy and socio-demographics — in analyzing such key metrics as job and population growth, poverty rate, the number of business startups and more.

Given that reckoning, Austin came out on top in the large cities category. Rounding out the top five, in descending order, were Miami; Seattle; Charlotte, N.C.; and Denver. To make the rarefied list, municipalities in the "large cities" category had to have a population of at least 300,000.

Because everything is based in Texas, four Lone Star State entries topped the "midsize cities" list compiled by WalletHub: Midland, Pearland, McKinney and College Station in that order. Lehigh Acres, Fla., was the only non-Texas city making that list among mid-sized cities, and in the 5th position, no less.

View the full WalletHub list here.

WalletHub is hardly alone in ranking Austin among the city's fastest-growing. A similarly named personal finance website, NerdWallet, Austin ranked fifth in terms of population growth and housing affordability among the ten metro areas gaining the most residents from mid-2016 to mid-2017. NerdWallet researchers found the median home price in Austin to be $33,000 and median household income at $71,000. Moreover, the Austin area gained 55,269 residents, according to NerdWallet.

Besting Austin in the top four slots on the NerdWallet list were the Atlanta/Sandy Springs/Roswell portion of Atlanta; Houston/The Woodlands/Sugar Land in Texas; Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington, also in the Lone Star State; and Washington, D.C.

Nor is it a new thing for Austin to make such fastest-growing lists. In 2013, Forbes magazine ranked Austin as tops in its “America’s Fastest-Growing Cities” list for the second time in a row, with Dallas, Houston and San Antonio also cracking the top ten in the second, fourth and ninth places, respectively.

“The Lone Star State capitalized on low taxes and cheap real estate to draw in jobs from the rest of the country,” wrote Forbes scribe Daniel Fisher. “To construct this list, we pulled data from Moody’s Analytics on the 100 largest metropolitan areas, giving extra weight to projected economic growth and subtracting points for low median incomes and high unemployment rates. The result is a list of cities that aren’t just growing, but creating opportunities.”

At the time, Fisher lauded the state as perhaps the nation's only remaining competitive real estate market. In his study, he sang the praises of key Texas dynamics propelling it to the top of the list, including the absence of a state income tax; the presence of the University of Texas at Austin; the city's hosting of top employers such as Apple, Progressive Insurance and Whole Foods; and even the status of Austin as the state capital, cities that often perform better economically than their non-capital counterparts.

At the time of that list, Austin's projected economic growth rate from 2011 to 2016 was 6.1 percent

Austin’s projected economic growth rate from 2011-2016 is 6.1 percent — more than double the national as a whole, according to the report. Similarly, the projected growth rate of 2.8 percent was triple the national rate.

Graphic via WalletHub

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