America's fastest-growing suburbs cities

Of the 100 suburbs most speedily spreading, California has the fastest, Arizona has the biggest and Texas has the most. ( By Matt Woolsey, Forbes.com )


Los Angeles is sometimes called the "Sultan of Sprawl." But you wouldn't know it by looking at the country's fastest-growing suburbs. Not a single one falls in the L.A. metropolitan area.

Instead, Angelenos are packing their bags and heading 60 miles east to San Bernardino, where 12 of the country's 100 fastest-growing suburbs are located. Leading the pack? Beaumont, which has grown 130% since 2000.

It's easy to understand why. Home prices in the Riverside-San Bernardino metropolitan area are 30% less expensive than in L.A., and household incomes are comparable.

The move from basin to valley makes enough sense that San Bernardino's rate of net domestic migration has near quadrupled since 1990, while the Los Angeles metro area posted negative net migration figures over that same period. Last year, it lost 72,000 more residents than it gained.

Our list was compiled using U.S. census growth data from 2000 to 2006 and provided by Demographia, a St. Louis research firm. Demographia excluded outlying towns that were in suburban counties but didn't have significant economic and social ties to the big city. Suburbs included cities, townships and villages that had more than 10,000 people in 2000.

Behind the numbers

The fastest-growing suburb in the nation is Lincoln, Calif., just outside Sacramento. Its population jumped from 11,746 to 39,566, an increase of 236%. The Sacramento area isn't cheap by national standards, but it's growing because it's a less-expensive alternative to Los Angeles, San Francisco or San Diego.

The fastest-growing big suburb (with a population of 100,000 or more) is Gilbert, Ariz., outside Phoenix, which grew from 112,766 people to 191,517. The Phoenix area saw the greatest positive domestic migration of any American metro area last year, with 115,000 more people moving into town than leaving. Affordable housing and a growing economy are draws for the city.

Texas has the lion's share of the country's 100 top-growth suburbs, with 20. (Twelve of these are in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area.) That's partly because geographic growth is almost completely unregulated in the Lone Star state. Sprawl has its pros and cons. These areas have some of the most affordable homes in the nation, because there is plenty of supply to meet demand. But transportation expenses are often high. In Houston, transportation costs are the No. 1 household expense, according to the Brookings Institution.

Cities that engage in restrictive growth policies find themselves with different trade-offs. In Boston's inner suburbs, including Chelsea and Cambridge, zoning and growth restrictions designed to prevent sprawl instead force people to look farther outside the city for affordable housing. According to the same Brookings Institution study, metro areas with growth-exclusion plans have the most expensive housing in the country, because there is a limited supply of homes close to the city.

Last year, about 16,000 more people left the Boston metro area than moved in, and the suburbs continued to expand geographically. The result is a thinning of the area. If sprawl is defined as the density of population over a geographic space, that makes Boston more of a sprawl than places such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, which are spreading out faster but with a more concentrated population.

Rounding out the top 10 fastest-growing suburbs after Lincoln were four Phoenix suburbs: Buckeye, Surprise, Goodyear and Avondale; Plainfield, outside of Chicago; Beaumont, outside of San Bernardino, Calif.; Frisco and Wylie outside of Dallas; and Woodstock, outside of Atlanta.