By Wire Services
Published: 18 July 2016 06:30 AM
Updated: 18 July 2016 06:43 AM
A divorce, the prohibitive cost of California housing and family living in Texas convinced Kathy Terry to say goodbye to the West Coast and head to the Lone Star State, where she settled in a new suburban neighborhood off Interstate 35 on what once was rolling farmland.
But Terry didn't gravitate to San Antonio or Austin, two of the country's fastest-growing large cities. Instead, she chose New Braunfels, a place she'd never laid eyes on but that's gaining residents like Terry at a faster clip than either the Alamo City or the state capital.
Terry made her decision based on the hunch of her younger son, who lives near Corpus Christi.
"'Mom, this is a cute little town, it's growing, and it's got the river, and you'll love it,"' she recalled him saying.
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While San Antonio officials have lately focused on how to deal with an expected 1.1 million more people in Bexar County by the year 2040, their neighbors along Interstate 35 -- New Braunfels, San Marcos, Schertz and Selma -- are booming as well. One day, they will form a tightly packed megalopolis from San Antonio to Austin, with no distinction from one city to the next.
"If you never leave the (New Braunfels) city limits here, you would think, 'Oh man, this growth is terrible,"' Greater New Braunfels Chamber of Commerce President Michael Meek said. "But it's happening everywhere. We're in one of the fastest-growing mega-regions in the nation."
This closely follows nationwide trends: more people drawn to suburban areas on the edges of big cities where there is ample land for single-family homes, a community-minded environment that families crave and lower housing prices. Plus there's proximity to a major interstate for easy access to the benefits of big cities.
The I-35 corridor -- starting in San Antonio at Loop 410 and extending up toward New Braunfels -- accounted for nearly a third of the new housing starts in the San Antonio region between the third quarters of 2014 and 2015, said Jack Inselmann, regional director of Metrostudy, a national home construction researcher.
Of the 15 fastest-growing cities in the U.S. from 2014 to 2015, four of them -- Georgetown, first, New Braunfels, second, Frisco, fourth, and Pflugerville, 11th -- were on or near I-35, and all were on the fringes of bigger cities. Together, those places are beginning to merge into an even larger megaregion that connects San Antonio and Dallas, and that's part of the still larger Texas Triangle that takes in Houston as well.
Despite all the rapid growth along the corridor, there is little in the way of planning for these superurban areas. San Antonio and Austin each has its own metropolitan planning organization that focuses on transportation, but on separate parts of the I-35 corridor.
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The infrastructure strains being felt all along I-35 affect New Braunfels residents every day. The city's population has almost doubled since 2000, ballooning from about 39,000 people to more than 70,000 last year, the U.S. Census reports. It ranked as the second-fastest-growing city in the U.S., with a population gain of 6.6 percent, from July 2014 to July 2015. By comparison, San Antonio inched up by 2.2 percent.
Comal County, which encompasses most of New Braunfels, has jumped from about 79,000 people to more than 129,000 from 2000 to 2015; from July 2014 to July 2015, it was the eighth-fastest-growing county in the U.S.
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http://www.dallasnews.com/business/headlines/20160718-collin-county-south-exploding-growth-affecting-towns-from-austin-to-san-antonio.ece
