While North Texas as a whole has grown to 7.8 million people during the pandemic, Dallas County has lost almost a full percentage point of its population.
The U.S Census Bureau says Dallas County’s population in July 2021 dropped to 2,556,050 – about 25,000 residents down from the previous year.
North Texas’ three other most populous counties, Tarrant, Collin and Denton, all saw growth of 0.5 percent, 3.4 percent, and 3 percent respectively. Lloyd Potter, director of the Texas Demographic Center, told The Dallas Morning News he isn’t surprised.
“A range of people seem to be in a process of moving out of Dallas County into suburban ring counties,” he said.
Cullum Clark, the director of the Bush Institute-Southern Methodist University Economic Growth Initiative, said population declines like the one seen in Dallas County are common right now among large U.S cities.
Over the last few years, he said, there have been two driving national demographic trends: a movement from coastal cities to the Sunbelt region and a migration from heavily populated urban areas to suburbs.
Those moving out of urban areas are opting for “fully-formed city” suburbs with jobs, retail and restaurants.
“And in Texas, we’ve been really good at that, more even than in most other places,” Clark said. “We’ve seen the really explosive growth of several such urbanizing suburbs in North Texas like Plano, Frisco, Allen, McKinney and Denton, but then there’s others kind of coming up behind them still further out, like Prosper and Celina.”
Even if Dallas County doesn’t see the same growth as it has historically, the area is booming. In 2022, local population estimates say, North Central Texas has surpassed 8 million people.
The North Central Texas Council of Governments includes the less populous counties of Wise, Hunt, Rockwall, Kaufman, Ellis, Johnson, Hood and Parker, all surrounding the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, in the Metroplex Planning Area where that growth is tracked. These counties saw a one-year growth increases ranging from Hunt County’s 3.2 percent to Kaufman County’s 7.3 percent.
Rogers Healy, owner of the real estate firm Rogers Healy Companies, sees the D-FW metroplex as one of the most affordable metropolitan areas in the country, despite record home prices spiking 31 percent in April. He believes the region holds even more growth potential.
“I think it has potential to be the largest metro in the entire country,” Healy said. “We literally can build all four directions.”
For about a decade, Potter said, Dallas County’s population growth has hinged on international immigrant growth and birth rates. Minority population birth rates have carried Dallas County in the net positive for much of the last decade, Potter said. From 2020 to 2021, according to U.S. Census data released in June, those factors did not balance out with the number of people leaving the county.
The global coronavirus pandemic also sped up the migration away from Dallas County for some, Clark said.
The pandemic brought economic uncertainty, which likely stunted birth rates, and more people working from home, which could have more searching for homes further away from downtown Dallas.
“We’re seeing people that don’t have to be living right next to or within a short commuting distance of their workplace,” Potter said. “People are wanting to move out of urban core areas and are interested in moving into suburban ring counties.”
Dallas County lost residents in its non-Hispanic white (-3.1 percent), African American (-0.9 percent) and Hispanic (-0.1 percent) categories, according to census data.
The two populations that increased within Dallas County lines between 2020 and 2021 were the Asian population and the Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander populations. The U.S. Census reported that the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington area saw the largest increases of these populations nationwide.
The Asian population increased by more than 24,000 totaling 686,834 people for the metropolitan area, and the Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander population reached 22,286 last year – a 3.9 percent increase.
People and jobs are following each other out of Dallas as employers prioritize choosing their location on potential employees rather than dense, urban cities. Job growth in other D-FW counties has surpassed Dallas’, Clark said.
“Collin County, for example, employers would say, is among the best places they could possibly go in the United States to find a big, deep, well-trained, well-educated pool of potential workers that they can select from, that they can compete for,” Clark said.
Higher-end service jobs, such as at Wall Street investment banks and in top law firms, will continue to keep downtown offices. But those who work and live outside of Interstate 635 don’t see that much of a draw to Dallas.
“People who live in northern suburban places also work in northern suburban places, and in many cases, very rarely ever even come into the city of Dallas or Dallas County,” Clark said.
Healy’s company sells property across the D-FW metroplex. He chalks up the migration out of Dallas County to affordable housing.
“Four hundred thousand [dollars] two years ago didn’t get too much in the city. It gets you nothing now. So the migration to Collin County, Denton County and Tarrant County, and even Rockwall County is happening in droves.”
The housing supply within Dallas County is also much lower than that in surrounding counties. Dallas County is barely building more housing units than it is demolishing, Clark said. Millennials are driving the market, Healy said, and they want their money to go further.
“All the cities that we hadn’t even heard of 10 years ago are the new boom towns because frankly, there’s places to build,” Healy said.
Outside of North Texas, most of the urban corridors across the state netted positive population growth. Statewide, Texas grew by 300,000 to 29,527,941 from 2020 to 2021.
The state demography office reported last week that more African Americans live in Texas than in any other state, and Texas has the second-largest non-Hispanic white population after California.
All urban counties apart from Austin’s Travis County saw a drop in non-Hispanic white population.
Dallas County also saw the largest population drop across large, urban Texas counties. Harris County was the only other urban county with a population decrease, dropping .09 percent to 4,728,030 residents.
Economist and demographer Clark said the Houston-area county is seeing the same trends as Dallas County, but Harris County has more room within county lines to develop. Harris County’s 1,778 square miles is almost twice Dallas County’s 909 square miles.
Healy and Clark expect the D-FW sprawl to continue outside of Dallas County as more look for affordable housing and job growth continues outside the county.
“I think that the question mark is, to what degree does the City of Dallas stay in the game of competition?” Clark said.
