New Census Data Show People Go Where the Money Is

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Town Hall:

What parts of America have been growing during these years of sluggish economic growth?

Answers come from comparing the Census Bureau's just-released estimates of metropolitan area populations in July 2012 with the results of the Census conducted in 2010.

The focus here is on the 51 metro areas with populations of more than 1 million where 55 percent of Americans live, most of them of course not in central cities but in suburbs and exurbs.

Two growth champs stick out -- Austin and Raleigh. A half-century ago, neither of them amounted to much.

The counties now in metro Austin had 300,000 people in 1960. Those in metro Raleigh had 260,000. Now metro Austin is 1,834,000, and metro Raleigh is 1,188,000.

Austin's population grew by 6.9 percent and Raleigh's by 5.1 in 2010-12. That's huge growth in just two years.

Both are high-tech centers with major universities. They had the biggest rate of domestic in-migration of any million-plus metro areas in 2010-2012.