Since Recession, DFW Has Gained Thousands Of New Residents, 1 Million Jobs
Texas rebounded from the 2008 economic recession with a decade-long recovery, and the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex in particular was a massive beneficiary, with seven-figure job growth and a massive population surge.
The Lone Star state attracted 563,945 new residents from other U.S. states in 2018 alone, with more than 200,000 of those residents heading to Dallas-Fort Worth, a new 2018 relocation report from the Texas REALTORS organization says.
This growth spurt is certainly not an isolated incident, but rather a decade-long trend in North Texas.
The state as a whole attracted more than a half a million people annually for six years in a row leading up to the most recent 2018 report, according to the REALTORS' report.
DFW remains atop new residents' destination lists.
The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington MSA attracted the most of Texas' transplants from other states in 2018, with 200,966 people arriving in DFW, followed by the Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land submarket, which attracted 176,110 transplants.
Houston's Harris County came in No. 1 with a net gain of 80,572 out-of-state residents. Four North Texas counties — Dallas, Tarrant, Collin and Denton — also ranked in the top 10 for population gains attributed to incoming residents.
The DFW area's population growth coincided with a decade-long surge in job creation, which began after the metro lost 140,000 jobs in 2008 and 2009, according to a new study from JLL, citing data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Since the steep recession, DFW has gained back an average of 95,000 jobs per year, with some years bringing in as many as 100,000 new jobs annually, JLL said.
In totality, the DFW metro has created one million jobs since 2010, topping the recovery off with 121,000 new positions in just the last 12 months, according to BLS data.
Of the new residents coming to DFW and Texas, a strong majority still come from the West Coast, particularly California. California saw 86,164 residents flock to Texas in 2018, up 36.4% from 2017.
Florida and Louisiana transplants ranked second and third for Texas-bound relocations in 2018, with 37,262 and 29,108 state residents, respectively, moving to the Lone Star State that year.
