The population of Comal County, which is just north of Bexar County in the Texas Hill Country, is the fourth-fastest growing of all counties in the nation, according to recent U.S. Census Bureau figures.
The five-year American Community Survey (ACS) released last month shows that Comal County’s population increased by 29% to about 174,500 over the past five years. Kaufman County in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area and other counties in Idaho and Georgia had faster growth.
But of U.S. counties with populations of 100,000 and more, the top three fastest-growing are all in Texas: Kaufman (35%), Comal (29%), and Hays (25%), according to census data.
Both Comal and Hays counties are located between San Antonio and Austin, further signaling the emerging metroplex between the two major cities. It’s a similar growth pattern the state has seen between Dallas and Fort Worth.
“It’s growing very quickly, and essentially, that’s consistent with what we see in development in almost any urbanized area where you kind of see these concentric patterns of growth,” said Lloyd Potter, director of the Texas Demographic Center and professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
That will have significant implications for the cost of housing in the region, Potter said.
“The demand is increasing probably faster than the supply of housing,” he said. The net result of that is going to be less housing per capita and more expensive housing.
“We actually saw it in Austin … the cost of housing has just skyrocketed there,” he added.
Meanwhile, the state’s capital has also experienced “domestic migration for some of the years since the pandemic, and that’s partly, we think, because it’s gotten to be really expensive to live there. It’s also combined with the fact that I think more people are able to work remotely or hybrid, so they’re they’re thinking: Well, I’ll move further out.”
While Bexar County’s population growth of nearly 6% to 2,037,000 is in line with Texas’ growth overall when comparing the most recent 2019–2023 data set to the previous five years (2014–2018), San Antonio was the fastest-growing large city last year, according to the bureau’s one-year estimates released in September.
The one-year ACS releases do not include smaller geographic areas with populations of less than 65,000 people, but the five-year estimates include data collected over a longer period of time to collect bigger sample sizes of the population, Potter explained.
That inherently dilutes the five-year survey’s ability to track fast-changing demographics, he said. “When you’re comparing data across time using the five-year, you’re essentially kind of blending data across those five years.”