The fastest growing city in America is in northeastern Texas, just 45 miles or so north of Dallas, and 280 miles south of the Oklahoma state border.
According to the latest figures compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, the city of Princeton has seen its population rapidly expand from just over 6,800 residents in 2010, to more than 37,000 today.
Looking at the statistics from just a year-to-year basis, Princeton has seen its population increase by 30.6%. Three other cities in Texas also made the top five for the fastest growing cities by percent change: Fulshear with a 26.9% increase; Celina, up by 18.2%; and Anna, enjoying a 14.6% jump.
The only non-Texas city on the top five percent change ranking is Leesburg, Florida, with a 18.5% increase.
Texas cities also figured on a list of the top five largest numeric increases. While New York City, after enduring an ongoing decline in the last decade, saw a healthy addition of 87,183 people, Houston recorded a jump of 43,217; followed by San Antonio with nearly 24,000 more people; and Fort Worth, up by 23,442 residents.
The only non-Texas city in this category is Los Angeles, also, like New York, seeing an increase after recent reversals, with 31,276 more people.
“Cities of all sizes, in all regions, showed faster growth and larger gains,” remarked Crystal Delbe, a statistician in the Population Division of the Bureau, in weighing the 2023 and 2024 figures.
In fact, for once, it was the South, where population increases have been almost epidemic, that saw a static population growth rate between those two years.
Overall, while smaller cities and towns in the West with fewer than 5,000 people saw modest increases of 0.5%, those in the category of 10,000 to more than 50,000 saw a steady growth rate of 1%.
In the county housing stock category, Maricopa County in Arizona showed the greatest growth in the nation with an increase of 38,000 units. Phoenix also placed high on a list of the top 15 cities with the largest population increases, adding nearly 17,000 people for a current population of 1,673,164.
Phoenix, meanwhile, is now the fifth largest city in the entire country.
Gains in the housing units by category list saw jumps of 2% or more in southern Arizona, north central New Mexico, and large swaths of eastern Colorado.
A location in Colorado showed up on the Census’s fifteen fastest-growing cities and towns: Erie in northern Colorado, with a 9.2% growth rate, contributing to its current total population of around 38,600 people.
May 30, 2025
By Garry Boulard
