Corner Column

By Phil Major
publisher@wood.cm
Posted 8/19/21

As a numbers nerd, reviewing the latest numbers from the U.S. Census puts me in hog heaven.

They’re almost as fun to dig into as voting trends.

Once I discovered a graphic that could take …

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Corner Column

Posted

As a numbers nerd, reviewing the latest numbers from the U.S. Census puts me in hog heaven.

They’re almost as fun to dig into as voting trends.

Once I discovered a graphic that could take me all around the state and look at figures and compare them to historical data, I could get lost for a long time.

Here’s one that stood out to me: Denton County has more than 900,000 residents and neighboring Collin County more than a million.

In the 1960 census Denton County had 47,000 residents, so by the time we moved there in 1962 it was probably around 52,000, given that the county added 28,000 residents in the 1960s, including our family of five.

The city limits sign read 26,844, just over half the population of the entire county. Today at over 200,000 that’s not even a quarter of the county residents.

And Collin County – which we passed through on the way to Denton – had 42,247 residents, with McKinney accounting for 13,763 of that. That city is also now in the 200,000 range, as is the city of Frisco (now home to high schools numbering in double digits).

When we considered trying to buy the paper there around 1990 it was not much larger than Mineola, with around 6,000 people. What was there then has pretty much been swallowed up.

As you move east from the Metroplex, the population increases start to slow down until you reach the northeast corner of the state where most counties show declines or very small gains since 2010. Only Bowie County (Texarkana) showed a modest increase.

Head south, though, and folks are still moving to places like Longview and Tyler.

The great stretches of West Texas continue to lose folks, except for the larger cities like Amarillo, Lubbock and Midland-Odessa where the latest oil boom still has an impact.

Even Wichita Falls is losing folks (it and Texarkana are the state’s only Metropolitan Statistical Areas to lose population from 2010 to 2020).

Wood County grew modestly in the 2010s, though the way home prices have been the last year-plus, the next population estimate may show much higher growth levels as the pandemic – just underway when the census was taken – has pushed people into more rural areas.

Our former home of Kaufman County, just two counties to the west, was ranked as one of the fastest growing counties in the state based on percentage increase.

And the entire state continues to grow at a rapid clip as folks abandon places from California to the northeast.

What does all that mean? We had better make plans to manage growth.

There’s not much way to stop it, but there are plenty of things that can be done to prepare for it and make sure it doesn’t run smooth over us.

Wood County will probably never have one million residents, but I’m guessing the leaders in Denton and Collin Counties probably would have told you the same thing in 1960, and probably didn’t make plans for the infrastructure needed to handle that many people.

It will be an interesting few years as schools and city and county governments figure out how to make the best of this. Stay tuned.

*  *  *  *

It was with great sadness that we learned of the passing of John DeFoore.

Though we met him only briefly while attending a few shows at the Piney Woods Pickin’ Parlor years ago, we knew of his incredible reputation as a guitar teacher extraordinaire. His legacy will continue for years to come as the music made by his students will no doubt entertain us for many decades.