Exurb boom: America's fastest-growing cities
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Atlanta, Fort Worth and Raleigh are America's fastest-growing cities with more than 250,000 residents as of 2023, according to new U.S. Census Bureau data out today.
Why it matters: Late-pandemic shifts in where Americans live are still shaking out — with big implications for cities seeing massive growth or rapid decline.
By the numbers: Atlanta grew by 2.42% between 2022 and 2023, and now has 510,823 residents.
- Fort Worth grew by 2.23% with 978,468 residents in 2023, and Raleigh grew by 1.87%, with 482,295 residents.
Losers: New Orleans (shrank -1.56%, to 364,136 residents), St. Louis (-1.55%, to 281,754 residents) and Philadelphia (-1.04%, to 1,550,542 residents).
The big picture: Southern cities dominate the list of the fastest-growing big metros, with Florida and Texas alone accounting for eight of the top 20.
- That reflects a continued trend of Americans flocking to areas of the country that face some of the greatest climate risks.
Between the lines: Some of America's fastest-growing places are not cities themselves, but their outer suburbs, or "exurbs."
- "Fewer of the fastest-growing places between 2022 and 2023 were inner suburbs than in 2019 ... and more were on the far outskirts of metro areas — 30, 40 and even more than 60 miles away from the largest city's downtown," according to a Census Bureau analysis.
- That's a particularly pronounced phenomenon in the Phoenix metro area, where four exurbs made up a third of the broader area's population growth in 2023, the Bureau says.
