US oil prices tumbled from more than US$100 a barrel in the summer of 2014 to less than US$50 a year later, but that didn’t stop workers from flocking to Texas, America’s biggest energy-producing state.
Eight of the top 20 US counties that gained the most population last year were in Texas. Four Lone Star metros – Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin – collectively added more than 412,000 people from July 2014 to July 2015, according to Census data published Thursday. Of those new residents, 63 per cent had migrated from either elsewhere in the US or from other countries.
If energy prices tanked, why did the population keep growing?
A diverse labour market, fueled in part by Texas’s corporate-friendly tax structure, combined with relatively affordable housing and proximity to the Mexican border, has been drawing people to Texas for years.
Houston’s Harris County, a global hub for the energy industry, has added more than 440,000 people since 2010 with annual increases averaging 2 per cent over the past five years, according to historical data from the census. The Dallas-Fort Worth area, with such large corporate employers as AT&T and American Airlines, has grown too, with Dallas County adding 186,000 people over the same period.
All those new workers searching for homes have made housing more expensive, with the state’s median home price reaching US$189,000 in January 2016, up 37 per cent from five years earlier, according to data compiled by the Texas A&M University Real Estate Centre.