We're No. 10??

After years of commenting that the Austin skyline seemed to be changing daily, you’d think I’d have been prepared for this. Nope. Not at all. The news that Austin is now the 10th largest city in the country really blew my mind.

A stats junkie, I just wasn’t paying attention to the stats. I knew Austin was somewhere in the mid-teens. But I somehow missed that we’d been parked at No. 11 for at least the past three years. So when the Census Bureau reported last week that we’d blown past San Jose into 10th place, it caught me so off guard I had to dig into the numbers, some. 

Here we go. Let’s take it census by census, starting in 1970. 

Fifty years ago, Austin was a city of a quarter-million people; it ranked 56th in the country. It was about the size of modern-day Irving or Laredo. But it was on a growth spurt, having swollen by about a third since the 1960 count. 

By 1980, the year before Linda and I moved here, the decennial growth rate had surged to 37%. Austin was now home to 345,000 or so and was 42nd in the country. The city was about as big as Anaheim is today. 

Growth “slowed” to less than 3% per year in the 80s thanks to our oil-price roller coaster ride. All over Texas it slowed but certainly didn’t stop – and certainly not in Austin. We reached the end of the decade living in a city a little smaller than Omaha is now. At 465,000, Austin had become the country’s 27th largest city. We’d leapfrogged places like Miami, Atlanta, Portland, and St. Louis. And Austin had passed Fort Worth and was now the fifth largest city in the state. 

In the roaring 90s, we roared past Denver, Boston, Seattle, and New Orleans into 16th place – and passed El Paso into the No. 4 slot among Texas cities. With 650,000 people, Austin at the turn of the millennium was about the size of modern-day Las Vegas. 

And for the next decade, the pace really did decline to about 2% a year. But Austin had already become so big, even at that pace we added about 130,000 residents, passed Detroit and Columbus, and become the 14th biggest city in the U.S. With almost 800,000 living here in 2010, we were as big as San Francisco is today. 

Despite all the cranes that loomed over downtown over the ensuing 12 years, despite all the jokes about newly arrived Californians, despite all the tied-up traffic, the 2010-size Austin stuck in my mind. I somehow missed that we were passing Jacksonville, Frisco, and Indianapolis on our way to 11th place in the 2020 census. That decade-plus-long brain fart is to blame, then, for my surprise at the bureau’s 2022 numbers estimating the Austin population at 974,447 – big enough to jump over the declining San Jose and into the Top 10. 

So now, four of the country’s 10 biggest cities are Texas cities. No other state but California has more than one. It looks like we’re here to stay. Houston (4th), San Antonio (7th), and Dallas (9th) are more likely to climb over the crumbling old cities ahead of them than to lose rank any time soon. 

That all adds a little bit of polish on the ever-humble Texas ego until you realize that every new Texans gives incrementally more national influence to the right-wing crackpots that run our state – and to draw ridiculous political maps that sap the power of our growing – and much more progressive – big cities. 

So that explains it. I wasn’t blind to my city’s standing. It was just a case of hopeful ignorance.

Photo by Carlos Alfonso on Unsplash