The topic of America's most popular or desirable cities is often debated here.
Whether as a vacation destination or for possible relocation, the debate rages on as to how to rank cities by 'popularity'.

The current issue of Money magazine ranks US cities (over 300,000 population) based on two things: population growth since 1990, and 2) the 'premium' people are willing to pay to live in a city...an odd way of looking at things, but this is the amount of EXTRA money people are willing to pay in order to be able to live in a city--a lack of affordability, but a sacrfice people are willing to accept.
Of course looking at only these 2 factors is a narrow way of evaluating overall city quality, but interesting nonetheless.

The fastast growing cities:
1-Las Vegas--97% increase vs 1990
2-Phoenix/Mesa--40%
3-Austin--38%
4-Charlotte
5-Arlington VA
6-Colorado Spgs
7-Anaheim
8-Fresno
9-Fort Worth
10-Denver
11-Dallas
12-Tucson
13-Jacksonville
14-Houston
15-San Antonio

Housing Premium (disparity between cost of homes and local incomes--the extra amount of money people are willing to pay in order to live there)
1-Honolulu--$531,000 avg home price
2-San Francisco-$482
3-San Diego-$406K
4-Oakland-$370K
5-NYC-$341K
6-San Jose
7-Phila
8-Long Beach
9-Seattle
10-Santa Ana-$330K
11-Portland
12-Denver
13-LA
14-Miami
15-Boston


The overall winner of this popularity contest was Las Vegas because its population growth has been so dramatic that it overshadows all other stats when averages are used. Next was SF, SD, Honolulu, NYC, Oakland, SJ, Austin, Denver.


(I had read elsewhere at this forum that Dallas was the second fastest growing metro area, but it's not in the top 10 by these data).

Las Vegas population is shrinking from its high. Probably more now than 1990 but a lot less than its peak a couple of years ago.

Nora's comment is totally wrong.
Population data for the city of LV as of July of each year:
1998 441,000
1999 465,000
2000 483,000
2001 501,000

This study also assumes that only cities over 300,000 population are worth talking about. To many people, that high of a population is a turn-off to begin with.
Naples, Florida has been declared the second fastest growing area in the country -- but isn't included in the figures above because it is so much smaller. I suppose that very fact is one of the factors that make it so popular and why it is growing so rapidly. The same is true of many other smaller cities.

Fastest growing metro area and fastest growing cities are two different things. Populations can triple by adding in the metro area.

I'd rather be shot than have to live in Charlotte.

No question that growth and quality or desirability are not always tightly intertwined.
Look at Fresno!
What's it doing on a desirability list?

Patrick, you are correct.
Naples was the second fastest growing city by the 2000 census (1990-2000 growth) behind Las Vegas.

But if you look at the city that's third in growth rate, it simply points up the fact that sometimes numbers are just numbers.
Yuma AZ was third. One of the most desolate, ugly, uninteresting places I've ever been.

BTW, Naples barely missed the list above with a population of 251,000.

Dallas is not the second fastest growing city.

Metro Dallas/Ft Worth did, however, have the 3rd highest growth in population in the 1990s, about 1.2 million people. Only New York and Los Angeles had higher population increases. Other metros with high pop increases were Atlanta, Phoenix, Las Vegas, etc.

If a lot of people want to move to a metro area, and they stay there, its population inreases over a period of time.

This constitutes evidence that the metro is desirable to a lot of people, for whatever reason.

That does not mean that a particular person will like it. Taste varies.

Interesting post....

I am currently looking at relocating from Boston to Philly. Housing prices are almost cheap in comparison to prices in the Boston area.

We can buy a mansion in Philly for the same price as my small 1 bedroom apartment in a crappy area around Boston.

This is good food for thought. As is always pointed out in threads like this, no one survey or ranking is perfect.

One of the main flaws of this study is to assume that population growth is a sign of a vibrant, developing economy and region. You have to ask one key question: What kinds of workers (class) are fueling the growth? In the case of Las Vegas, it is the service class. This is low-wage, unskilled servers, cleaners, blackjack dealers, etc. In fact, LV has the highest % of service class personnel of any area in the country. Contrast that with Washington DC, which has the highest % of the "creative class" - engineers, architects, artists, high tech, etc. Tell me which area you think is developing a balanced, rich region and which is simply a low-middle class subdivision gone crazy?

And as for Dallas, they have had some real growth, but some statistics are skewed by the large number of Mexican immigrants. While immigration typically has positive long-term effects on an area, it is not exactly a predictor of near-term regional success.

Maybe the immigration in Dallas will help offset the lack of diversity. They ranked #60 overall on a recent study about how friendly an area is to gay/lesbian people.

Insightful comments all.
I'll bite on the hook at the end though.
Why would receptivity to gay and lesbian people correlate with quality of life in a city?

To Bos: Your statement that "We can buy a mansion in Philly for the same price as my small 1 bedroom apartment in a crappy area around Boston". If your small 1 bedroom apartment costs about 5M then that would be a correct statement. *L* If you are referring to Center City Philly, there are no mansions, but small 1 bedroom apartments aren't cheap. Don't underestimate the value of real estate in Philly.

Flaws, Las Vegas is historically a service industry town, i.e. hotels and casinos. The bulk of its existing population serves that industry, but you don't know that its recent immigrants are service employees. I would guess not.

I really wouldn't know if Dallas is friendly to gays/lesbians, but it does seem to have a lot of them... and there are no outward signs of a discontented Gay population.

Dallas does have a lot of international immigrants, but also a lot of migrants from other states, about a 45%-55% split. The census estimates that in 1990 alone, about 150 thousand people moved to Dallas from other US states.

The US migration to Dallas is remarkable since other cities its size are losing population to other states, i.e. more people moving out than moving in.

Foreign migration to Dallas is not just Mexicans. About 40% of the Hispanic migration is from Central and South America, and there are also large communities from India, East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, you name it.

Believe me, foreigners are just people, like anybody else. They are attracted to a city for the same reasons as Americans.

The number of migrants to Dallas is only half of the picture, however. The other half is: how many stay, instead of moving away when they get the chance. In this area, Dallas also did well, since its overall population increase was third highest in the USA.

It should go without saying that a city's ability to attract and keep migrants is a good indicator of its value to its people.

On the other hand, if fewer people move to a city, or the ones that do move there leave when they have the chance, the city will have slow or no growth. You might reasonably conclude that the city has some problems with livability.

Flaws, I mentioned the year of 1990 in my post. Correct that, it should read 2000 instead.

The 2000 Census developed that figure by asking a sample of people if they were living in the same address the year before. They then broke the answer into categories for a different address within the county, a different county within the state, or a different city.

Since Dallas is not near a state boundary, the figure represents people moving from an out of state metro area to Dallas Metro, rather than a move within a metro, but across a state line.

<Since Dallas is not near a state boundary, the figure represents people moving from an out of state metro area to Dallas Metro, rather than a move within a metro, but across a state line>

The last time I checked, Dallas was less than 200 miles from the Norman/Oklahoma City area. When I spent time in Tulsa, I knew a lot of people went to Dallas looking for work. I think it is safe to say that the regional draw of Dallas is significant. You are making some very broad leaps to say that they are getting people from other metropolitan areas.

As far as Texas goes, Austin is far and away the big winner in terms of growth of the "creative class" of people, those who will create economic advancement and help stimulate a rich community. I would argue that the growth in this creative class of people is the bar from which a region's health should be measured, not the absolute number of people who moved in from the sticks.

Dallas was 11th in growth rate according to the data cited at the beginning. Not 3rd.
Austin's growth rate was much higher.
So Dallas isn't even the fstaest growing city in its own state.

"Other cities the size of Dallas are losing population..."?
Well, that's obviously not true. According to the data cited Phoenix and las Vegas are obviously not losing population. They're #1 and #2 on the list.

Flaws, I'm trying to draw a distinction between migration within a metro area and people moving from one metro to another.

Some metro areas are located in more than one state, so this would bias the figures for interstate migration for those metros.

For example, Portland, Oregon/Vancouver Washington. Vancouver is basically a suburb of portland, and a move from Vancouver to Portland would not have the same demographic meaning as a move from, say, San Francisco to Portland.

There are other examples, Boston's metro is mostly in Mass, but also actually overlaps New Hampshire, so the move to a suburb looks like a move out of the Boston Metro.

In the case of Dallas, all out of state moves into the area would constitute migration from one metro to another.

The Dallas/Ft Worth metro does not overlap another state. So its numbers for intrastate moves count as Dallas pulling people from some other metro, not just a suburb-to-suburb move within Dallas.

Only a portion of the cross-state moves for other metros actually consist of a move from one metro to another.

This is an important distinction if you want to evaluate the relative desirability of one metro over another.

I'm not going to get hung up on the technicalities of the census methodology, because it doesn't change my point at all. If Dallas is acquiring population from places like Waco, Oklahoma City, and Witchita Falls, that is great. My point is that I don't see a city like Dallas attracting talent out of a Boston or a San Diego. Sure, there might be an anecdote here or there, but it just ain't happening on the large scale.

Why devote all of this thought to Dallas? My initial point was that those cities that attract and retain the CREATIVE people, the knowledge workers, are the ones that are really thriving. Those cities, according to a recent study by Carnegie Mellon, are:

San Francisco
Austin
Seattle
Boston
Wash. DC

and to lesser extents:
Chicago
Minneapolis
New York
Atlanta
San Diego

I'm signing out, I've made my point. Catch you all on a different thread. Later........

Some People Can't Count....

When I say "city", I'm talking about a metro area, not a municipality. Most metros are made up of dozens of municipalities, with arbitrarily drawn boundaries.

Other cities in Dallas' population class, metro-wise, would be Philadelphia, Detroit, Boston. There are 5 US cities (metros) that are significantly larger, i.e., San Francisco, Washington-Baltimore, Chicago, LA and NY.

Dallas metro currently has about 5 1/2 million, and should reach about 6 1/2 million by 2010.

Austin metro has about 1 1/4 million. Las Vegas was about 1 1/2 million, Phoenix was pushing 3 million... they're not in the same class.

A RATE of growth, increase per capita, is interesting in some ways, but is usually based on external factors (such as Las Vegas being close to LA, or Austin having some hi-tech industry in a hi tech boom period) and is not created by the city itself.

Thus, it does not measure anything about the city.

Typically, a high growth rate in a 10 year period is a fluke and is not repeated in the next 10 year census.

The actual NUMBER of people that a city attracts is much more important.

In Dallas' case, it has been sustaining its relatively high growth rate (25%) for the last 50 years. In the next 50 years, it could be comparable to LA in population.

I'm sorry if you don't think that Dallas people are "creative". I think they are. One of them, a man named Jack Kilby, won the Nobel Prize in Physics last year. Another one won a talent search as the best singer in America. Dallas has a high school that produces more grammies than ever came out of Austin.

But Austin is a fine city in many ways... no intent to disparage it...

Flaws, I think you're wrong about analyzing the census figures... a good demographer can mine them for gold.

Dallas, according to many surveys, has about twice the hi-tech workforce of Austin, and is surpassed in hi-tech workforce only by Boston and San Francisco.

Boston, unfortunately, has a very slow rate of growth, the influx of foreigners is almost matched by the outflow of its own people. San Francisco's economy is currently cratering, as is Seattle's. Hi-tech bubble burst, dot.come.and.gone.

I'm familiar with these subjects because I work in the Dallas hi-tech "creative" industry myself. And the city's hi-tech industries are not as affected as Austin's or San Francisco's. Different industries, like aerospace, hi definition video, nanotechnology, things like that.

And no, migration to Dallas is not just a local intrastate movement. It's primarily from out of state. I mentioned the figure before of 150,000 migrants from out of state in 2000.

And the hi tech campus where I work has plenty of broad, flat Northeastern accents, as well as India and China accents. And about 100 others. A big melting pot.

One thing in this thread is true, however. You can't measure the pull of a city, it's relative desirability, by just high numbers. You have to do some analysis.

And also... even though Dallas-Ft Worth has the numbers, and is a highly desirable region for migrants to settle in, it's not everything for everyone.

There will always be more tastes and preferences than any one place can satisfy.