URBANIZATION IN TEXAS
Nearly eighty-five percent of Texans now live within an area that is classified as urban. These urban areas range in size from 84,008 in Victoria to 4.1 million in Houston.(3) These 27 urban areas accounted for ninety-one percent of all growth in Texas from 1990-2000. To get a visual understanding of the area classified as urban figure 2 shows the metropolitan areas by county in the state. The areas that are seeing the most growth are along the Mexican Border, the Central Texas areas, the Dallas-Ft.Worth Metroplex, and the Houston area. As these areas expand outward, more counties will be added to the already large amount of land within each metropolitan area. This growth, commonly called urban sprawl, presents a unique set of problems. Environmentalists see this urban sprawl as a blight on the landscape, and not as modern progress as a business person would see it. Texas has seen large increases in population since the 1950s. Figure 1 shows population growth from 1950-2000, in which Texas has nearly tripled in population.
Figure 1(1)
Metropolitan Areas in 2000
Figure 2(4) Map Composed by Chad Troxell.
Figure 2 shows the current areas that are classified by the U.S. Census Bureau as being metropolitan areas. Many of these urban areas are clustered together forming conglomerations of metropolitan statistical areas. The Census Bureau recognizes two of these clusters and classifies them as Consolidated Metropolitan Statistical Areas (CMSA), and those would be the Houston CMSA, and the Dallas CMSA. Within each of these CMSAs, each individual metropolitan is classified as a Primary Metropolitan Statistical Area (PMSA). Other individual metropolitan areas outside the CMSAs are classified as a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA).