Where Texans Live, 2018

The 2018 census estimates are out and I thought it might be a good time to review them, crunch a few numbers and try to get a handle on this big ole – sometimes misunderstood – place we call Texas.

The bottom line is pretty simple; Texas is a really big place (about 269,000-square miles) and it’s got lots of people (28.7 million). The details, however, are considerably more nuanced.

While the size hasn’t changed much (give or take a few square miles involving border disputes with neighbors) since the Compromise of 1850, the population has changed, a lot.

Texas has easily outpaced all other states in population growth since the 2010 census, adding 3,459,166 souls. Texas also had the largest population increase from 2017 to 2018, 379,128. (Percentage wise, Texas ranked third and seventh, respectively).

To put those numbers in perspective, if, during the last eight years, every person in the states of Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont had packed up and moved to Texas another 138,000 would be needed to equal the actual population growth in Texas during that time. The population growth in the last year alone is roughly equivalent to gaining the entire population of Wichita, Kansas.

Florida is the only state that comes anywhere close to matching Texas in raw numbers and Texas has added a million more residents than Florida since 2010.

It is also important to understand that Texas is now a majority-minority state with Blacks and Hispanics comprising 52 percent of the population. The percentage of White and Hispanic Texans is about equal, in the low 40s, with 13 percent Black, five percent Asian and 17 percent foreign born.

Two counties in one state, far apart

To get started trying to describe where these millions of diverse Texans live - and don’t live – across this vast state I’ll contrast the least-populous (and driest) county with the most-populous (and 11^th-wettest).

Bone-dry Loving County on the New Mexico border in far West Texas gets slightly more than nine inches of rain, on average, per year. There are no incorporated cities in its nearly 1,000 square miles, giving its 141 residents plenty of elbow room. However, Loving County also happens to be in the center of one of the largest oil and gas plays in American history and the population there has doubled since 2012, making Texas’ least populous county its fastest-growing county over the last six years.

On the other side of the state, both literally and figuratively, is Harris County, home to Houston, arguably one of the most diverse, dynamic and resilient cities in the country and the home of one America’s busiest seaports. Unrelentingly humid, Harris County averages nearly 54 inches of rain per year and parts of it got more 30 inches in a single day during Hurricane Harvey.

The county’s population numbers are staggering. Home to nearly 4.7 million people Harris County, if it were a state, would rank as the 25th most populous, a shade more than Louisiana and a smidgen less than Alabama. There are nearly as many foreign-born residents in Harris County as there are Whites, 26 percent to 29.7 percent. You read that right, more than one in four residents of Texas’s largest county were born in a foreign country. Nearly 20 percent of Harris County residents are Black, more than seven percent are Asian and 43 percent are Hispanic. More than 16 percent of all Texans live in Harris County where the population increased by nearly 600,000 in the last eight years, slightly more than the current population of Wyoming.

The vast majority of Texans live in or close to large cities. Twenty-five percent live in just two counties, Harris and Dallas and more than half live in seven counties, Harris, Dallas, Tarrant (Ft. Worth), Bexar (San Antonio), Travis (Austin), Collin (suburban Dallas) and Hidalgo (Rio Grande Valley). If those seven Texas counties alone were a state only California, New York and Florida would be larger.

There are lots of ways to look at Texas

There are many ways to slice and dice Texas but, demographically speaking I find it useful to divide the state into three parts along the I-35 corridor.

Forty-three percent of Texans live in the 22 counties that touch Interstate 35 (I included Collin County in the Dallas Metroplex on this list even though it does not touch I-35 because it is part of the DFW Metroplex, which is effectively bound together by I-35).

I-35 runs from the Oklahoma border at Gainesville south to the nation’s largest inland port at Laredo. Long before white settlement, statehood, paved roads and interstates this route was an important corridor for commerce and travel in and through what we now call Texas. It has also been a common and convenient dividing line between East and West Texas; culturally, geographically and demographically. For instance, nearly every county east of I-35 gets more than 25 inches of rain per year while the vast majority of the counties west of I-35 get less than 25 inches.

I-35 splits into east and west versions to cut through the heart of both Dallas and Ft. Worth and in so doing it helps bind together the four counties of the Dallas Metroplex, home to 6.5 million Texans.

Further south the cities of Austin and San Antonio are becoming increasingly fused into a six-county metroplex along the I-35 corridor that is now home to 4.3 million Texans.

Only one county in the I-35 corridor lost population in the last eight years and, collectively, the population in these 22 counties has increased a whopping 17.55 percent since 2010.

Another 43 percent of Texans live in the 98 counties east of I-35, more than half of them in the greater Houston area. Although 22 of these 98 counties lost population since 2010 the population in the area as a whole increased 12.4 percent.

To put the raw numbers in perspective, it’s like having the entire population of Illinois stuffed into the 22 counties along I-35 and the entire population of Pennsylvania contained in the 98 counties east of I-35.

But that leaves just 3.8 million Texans to spread out over the 134 counties west of I-35, an area larger than the state of Montana. Even though the population in these western counties has increased 6.4 percent since 2010, more than half (74) of them lost population. In fact, more than one in three counties in Texas lost population during the last eight years.

To further emphasize the vast (and increasing) emptiness of this part of Texas I’ll also tell you that 45 percent of its people live in just four urban areas, the oil-patch cities of Midland-Odessa, El Paso, Lubbock and Amarillo. The remaining 128 counties, collectively, have barely two million residents.

As the charts below attest, there are lots of different ways to think about where Texans live.

In summary

I think it is important to understand that, even though Texas is a very big place with lots of very different people, 60 percent of all Texans live in three well-defined metropolitan areas, Greater Houston, the DFW Metroplex and the Austin-San Antonio Corridor.

It is important to remember that, even though the Texas population increased 13.8 percent from 2010 to 2018, 38 percent of the counties in the state lost population during that same time.

And it’s interesting to know that 4.8 percent live in the Rio Grande Valley, nine percent live in counties that touch the Mexican border and 24 percent live in counties that touch the Gulf of Mexico.

The Texas 3	Population	Percent
I-35 - 22/1	12,382,919	43.14%
East - 98/22	12,501,376	43.56%
West - 134/74	3,817,550	13.30%
Total	28,701,845

Greater Houston	Population
Harris	4,698,619
Fort Bend	787,858
Montgomery	590,925
Galveston	337,890
22.35%	6,415,292
DFW Metroplex	Population
Dallas	2,637,772
Tarrant	2,084,931
Collin	1,005,146
Denton	859,064
22.95%	6,586,913
Austin-San Antonio Corridor	Population
Williamson	566,719
Travis	1,248,743
Hays	222,631
Comal	148,373
Guadalupe	163,694
Bexar	1,986,049
15.11%	4,336,209
Rio Grande Valley	Population
Cameron	423,908
Hidalgo	865,939
Willacy	21,515
Starr	64,525
4.79%	1,375,887

I-35	Population
Cooke	40,574
Denton	859,064
Collin	1,005,146
Dallas	2,637,772
Tarrant	2,084,931
Johnson	171,361
Ellis	179,436
Hill	36,354
McLennan	254,607
Falls	17,335
Bell	355,642
Williamson	566,719
Travis	1,248,743
Hays	222,631
Comal	148,373
Guadalupe	163,694
Bexar	1,986,049
Medina	50,921
Atascosa	50,310
Frio	19,816
LaSalle	7,531
Webb	275,910
43.14%	12,382,919
Mexican Border	Population
Cameron	423,908
Hidalgo	865,939
Starr	64,525
Zapata	14,190
Webb	275,910
Maverick	58,485
Kinney	3,767
Val Verde	49,208
Terrell	823
Brewster	9,267
Presidio	6,948
Jeff Davis	2,252
Hudspeth	4,795
El Paso	840,758
9.13%	2,620,775

Gulf Coast	Population
Cameron	423,908
Willacy	21,515
Kenedy	442
Kleberg	31,129
Nueces	362,265
San Patricio	66,893
Aransas	23,792
Refugio	7,032
Calhoun	21,561
Victoria	92,035
Jackson	14,874
Matagorda	36,552
Brazoria	370,200
Galveston	337,890
Harris	4,698,619
Chambers	42,454
Jefferson	255,001
Orange	83,572
24.00%	6,889,734