The Midweek #67: Rapid Growth Along I-35 Corridor Outpaces Infrastructure Growth

San Antonio is sometimes blessed, sometimes cursed, by the latest national survey ranking U.S. cities and their people, economies, and quality of life. After 37 years here, I tell people that I live in a great city to raise a family. It’s also a very comfortable, livable city if you are gainfully employed and occupy a secure space in the middle class.

Living here without secure employment at a livable wage is a prescription for struggling, just as it is in any U.S. city.

San Antonio fares well in surveys that measure affordability and cultural attributes, but less well when the topic is education attainment, job growth, or the percentage of working families living below the poverty line.

The America’s New Boomtowns survey by SmartAssets, a fintech company that connects individuals with financial advisors, confirms what many already know: the I-35 corridor is home to some of the fastest-growing cities in the country, and the top two cities in the national survey, Georgetown and New Braunfels, are located right in the booming Austin-San Antonio corridor.

I’ve spent the last two years thinking and writing a lot about this unprecedented growth after being invited by former San Antonio Mayor and Housing & Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros to join with him and former San Antonio Express-News journalist David Hendricks to report and write a book on regional growth and the enormous infrastructure needs that come with such rapid population and economic expansion.

The Austin-San Antonio Megaregion: Opportunity and Challenge in the Lone Star State was published by Texas A&M University Press in October 2025, and is attracting more sustained attention than I expected for a public policy book. We continue to be invited to share our findings and recommendations at book festivals, with economic development entities, chambers of commerce, universities, and civic groups.

Texas Public Radio, in collaboration with Centro San Antonio and the San Antonio Report, is hosting a Tuesday Luminaries breakfast event at its downtown headquarters on San Pedro Creek next Tuesday at 8 am in the Irma and Emilio Nicolas Media Center. TPR President and CEO Ashley Alvarado will moderate a conversation with Cisneros, Hendricks, and myself. Click here for tickets.

Alvarado recently appeared with San Antonio Report CEO and Publisher Angie Mock on the bigcitysmalltown podcast to discuss their scheduled July 1 merger. It’s worth your time if you depend on local media to keep you informed on regional issues of importance and interest.

What we learned reporting the Megaregion story is that it’s wrong to place all the focus on Austin and San Antonio. While the two major metros that anchor the region dwarf other area cities in terms of population, jobs, and GDP, the mid-sized cities are growing at the same pace and thus face the same challenging infrastructure deficits as the big cities.

Simply put, people are moving to Texas in droves, and within the Austin-San Antonio corridor, at a rate that greatly exceeds the ability of developers to build single-family homes or multifamily apartment projects. Texas cities already face affordable housing shortages. The current demand-supply imbalance has driven up prices and reduced inventory, and only the post-pandemic economic slowdown has served to keep rent prices in check after years of costs rising far faster than wages.

Of course, housing is only one major issue. Anyone who has been following the looming water crisis in Corpus Christi knows that this drought-stricken state will struggle to maintain a healthy water supply in the face of such growth. Extreme weather events, as the planet continues to warm and local droughts arrive with cyclical repetition, are challenging state leaders to protect the overtaxed energy grid at the same time they are opposing expansion of renewable energy sources.

Investment in Pre-K-12 and higher education continues to lag behind other major states, raising serious concerns about workforce readiness as the state’s minority population grows and education attainment rates remain low. 

How fast are we growing? When our work on the book began, Texas had a population of 29 million-plus people. By the end of this year, we will approach 32 million, with 500,000 more people coming every year. Big states and cities on both coasts, meanwhile, are losing population or no longer growing.

Back to the SmartAssets survey. It measured 400 U.S. cities with populations of 65,000 or more in three categories: economic output, housing units, and labor force size. The top 75 of those cities, the survey reports, are all booming.

Georgetown finished first among the 400 cities surveyed. It lies 30 miles north of Austin. The city claims to be home to the “Most Beautiful Town Square in Texas.” It certainly has a large and well-preserved stock of historic architecture, and it is home to Southwestern University, the state’s oldest, dating to 1840. The city offers a high quality of life and proximity to major employers. 

The massive $40 billion Samsung chip-manufacturing plant in Taylor is less than 20 miles away from Georgetown. There are only a few hundred workers at the partially built plant today, but the 1,200-acre site is expected to begin chip production this year and eventually employ 2,000 workers, creating many more indirect jobs. 

Dell Corp. in Round Rock is even closer, a 15-mile drive south on I-35, where more than 13,000 people are employed on the company’s massive campus. Dell surpassed Tesla on the latest Fortune 500 list of major corporations, moving up three spots to No. 41 with annual revenues now of $113.5 billion.

Tesla, ranked 43rd on the list, has built a 2,400-acre Gigafactory in southeastern Travis County near the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. The 16,500 employees there build the Model Y, the Cybertruck, and battery cells. The company, now officially headquartered in Austin after Elon Musk’s move from California, is also working on autonomous vehicle technology there.

New Braunfels came in second among the 400 cities surveyed. It, too, has a robust visitor economy with the Comal River and its own historic town center, but anyone who has driven east or west on TX. 46 lately knows how traffic-choked the city is with new residents and workers. Like many other central Texas cities that once served surrounding ranches and settlements, the city today is a bedroom community with workers heading north and south to jobs while enjoying the quality of life in the German heritage city.

Leander, a city that surged from its 7,000 population in 200 to nearly 100,000 today, finished fourth on the SmartAssets list, even if many readers might not be able to locate the city northwest of Georgetown without Google Maps. It offers great schools and affordable living within commuting distance of Austin’s tech corridor.

The growth in this country is centered in two Sunbelt states: Florida and Texas. And the fast-growing Dallas-Fort Worth megaregion often outpaces Austin-San Antonio’s rate of growth. Lewisville (5), McKinney (8), Frisco (10), Denton (11), and Allen (19) rank in the Top 20.

Other Austin-San Antonio corridors and nearby cities show up high on the list, no surprise. Cedar Park (28), Austin (37), Round Rock (43), and Pflugerville (60) all make the Top 75. San Antonio and other fast-growing cities do not, even though their population growth qualifies them as on any list of fastest-growing cities in the U.S. This city’s economic growth, apparently, is not enough to qualify San Antonio as “booming.” 

The real work that lies ahead must be done through more advanced regional planning and coordination with the Texas Legislature in the 2027 session. Growth and how to meet it should be at the top of the legislative agenda. Let’s hope the state’s top elected leaders agree.