Suburbs take center stage as US growth slows

In 1990, fewer than 10,000 people lived in Meridian, Idaho, a sleepy community surrounded by farmland.

Today, with a population of 117,600, its main thoroughfare, Eagle Road, is so congested during rush hour that motorists might forget they’re in one of the country’s least populated states.

The 2020 census ranked Meridian among the 10 fastest growing major cities in the country. All the cities on the list experienced growth of over 44%. They are all in the South and the West. And these are all suburbs.

Southern Jordan, Utah, for example, is outside of Salt Lake City. Frisco, Texas, is just north of Dallas. Buckeye, Arizona, is west of Phoenix. And Meridian is outside of Boise.

Meridian and the other nine cities represent a trend, according to US Census Bureau officials. As the country’s largest cities expand and become increasingly unaffordable for many, their suburbs have exploded, taking on their own identity.

Marc Perry, senior demographer at the US Census Bureau, said in an email that “in recent decades, the general trend has been for the fastest growing cities of 50,000 and more to be located on the outskirts of areas. rapidly growing metropolitan areas. to the South and to the West.

Metro Phoenix and Dallas-Fort Worth have suburbs on this list every decade, he said. “Significant amounts of empty land for housing construction” encourages this population growth, and this land is more commonly available in the West and South. Today, people are moving further and further away from city centers to seek vacant lots, especially in cities that have been developing for half a century, Perry said.

Irvine, the only slower-growing city on the list in California, is about 40 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Conroe, Texas, another top 10 city, is about 40 miles north of Houston.

Meridian, fourth on the list, is growing along with the rest of Idaho.

Idaho was the second fastest growing state in the past 10 years, at 17.3%, with much of the growth concentrated in and around Boise, according to the Census Bureau. Meridian has grown from around 75,000 people in 2010 to 117,635 at the 2020 census. The change was big enough to bring down the state’s second-largest city, Nampa, though it has also grown significantly, to more than 100,000 inhabitants. (The state’s largest city is still Boise, the capital, with a population of nearly 236,000.)

“Back then, in the ’60s,’ 70s, ’80s and’ 90s, Meridian was more of a dormitory for Boise,” said Jan Roeser, labor economist at the Idaho Department of Labor. “There was a lot of farmland. … It had a very small town feel to it.

Now people are building bigger houses and wanting bigger yards, prices go up every year, the city has a different vibe and it is developing an urban core, she said. It has a subdivision the size of an entire square mile.

The city’s slogan, “Built for Business, Designed to Live,” positions it not as a suburban town in Boise, but as its own entity. Meridian now has a pedestrian mall and numerous retail stores, breweries and cafes. It’s gotten to a point where people are overpriced.

The city’s population growth is so rapid that the infrastructure cannot keep pace. Meridian just built a high school that will serve over a thousand students, but the school was finished and ready to open this fall before the completion of road extensions required by the county road district to handle the influx of cars. .

“The traffic is going to be bad,” Meridian planning director Caleb Hood told Boisedev.com. “You have a bunch of teenagers driving, or mothers driving their kids to school, or fathers driving their kids to school, and there’s a lot of traffic there. The roads really can’t handle that kind of traffic in 20 minutes. Hood said the roads were not finished because no contractor would bid on the project; there was a labor shortage.

These growing pains are being felt in the city and in Idaho in general, Roeser said. And as new library branches, apartment buildings and bus lines appear in Meridian as it develops an urban core, many rural counties are losing residents.

The Meridian and suburbs like it, Perry said, “serve as a reminder that there are still pockets of rapid population growth in some parts of the country,” although the past 10 years have been the second decade of slowest growth. for the American population. What the census data clearly shows is that many suburbs are taking their own lives.

“Who can say that the people of Meridian won’t overtake Boise at some point?” Roeser said.