Texas Cities Encourage and Cope With Massive Growth

Editor's Note: This article appears in Governing's Summer 2025 magazine. You can subscribe here.

Cedar Park, a small city in Texas, has a stunning new library. The $31 million edifice includes rentable community rooms, a maker’s space with machines to handle digital fabrication, an indoor play space for kids and two screened reading porches on the second floor. Plus, not to be overlooked, thousands of books. Since it opened last November, the library has welcomed more than 330,000 visitors. That’s like every single resident of the city coming through its doors, four times each.

As successful as the new library has been, it’s only the start of something much grander. It’s built among a group of towering pecan trees and surrounded by walking trails and a new playground — a public stake in the ground for the new Bell District, a 54-acre master-planned complex with restaurants, shops, office space and hundreds of housing units. The project responds to a community demand that came up again and again during a recent comprehensive planning process, says Brenda Eivens, Cedar Park’s city manager: “This desire to have a place to go, an identity, something that feels like the heart of your city.”

It’s not every city that gets a chance to build a downtown half a century after its incorporation and 140 years after its founding. But so explosive is the growth of Central Texas that cities of all sizes from Austin to San Antonio are getting a chance to recast their identities and remake their infrastructure.

Cedar Park grew from around 5,000 people in 1990 to 48,000 in 2010 and more than 77,000 today, a multiplication of the tax base that’s made it possible to bond for state-of-the-art amenities like the new library. Other small cities within the two metro areas, including Georgetown, Kyle, San Marcos and New Braunfels, have at various times topped the lists of fastest-growing American communities in the last decade. Austin, which has grown faster than most other big U.S. cities in recent years, is transforming from a “keep it weird” college town and cultural capital into a tech hub to rival Silicon Valley. San Antonio, the 7th-biggest city in the country, managed to gain more residents than any other American city in 2023.
Seventy-five miles separate San Antonio and Austin, but the area is increasingly talked about as a single metropolitan unit. Today there are around 5 million people residing in the two metro areas — double the count in 1990. By 2050, the area is expected to hold 8.3 million, which would be bigger than the Dallas-Fort Worth or Houston areas. “At some point it’s going to be one straight line all the way to Waco,” says Chris Miller, executive director of the Capital Area Council of Governments in Austin. “It’s all going to be one big cluster.”

Growth at this scale is causing some real headaches, notably in areas such as traffic and water. Texas already has too much of one and not enough of the other. But rapid and sustained growth has showered benefits on local governments. Many of them can invest at a scale they’ve never experienced before. New housing is going up in planned developments all around the urban edges, along with new roads, new public buildings, new data centers and new water storage and transmission infrastructure.

At Texas State University in San Marcos, college grads for years have posed for pictures in front of an iconic archway that framed a seemingly limitless view of the future. In the last few years, however, the view has been crowded in by a new apartment building. “We’re catching all of the overflow from Austin and Travis County, and it’s easier for me to manage a county with growth versus a county that’s in decline,” says Hays County Judge Ruben Becerra. “When I have more people contributing to law enforcement, to emergency services, to supporting our roads — when I have more people pitching in for those infrastructure pieces, it benefits us all.”

As the country’s population growth has blossomed primarily in Sun Belt metro areas, Texas in particular has boomed. Texas was the only state to gain two congressional seats out of the last census and is on track to pick up four more after 2030. Between July 2023 and July 2024 alone, the Texas population grew by nearly 563,000. Its economy is now larger than Canada’s, and second among U.S. states only to California. Long fueled by oil and gas, the economy has diversified, with recent job growth in transportation and utilities, leisure and hospitality, construction and education and health services. The growth has been accelerated in large part by the state’s low taxes, light regulation on development and abundance of land.
Within Texas, it’s the metros that have grown, the central cities and their surrounding counties. Close to 84 percent of Texans now live in metro areas. On every map of Texas depicting any kind of economic activity, the four counties in the San Antonio-Austin corridor — Bexar, Hays, Comal and Travis — glow like a string of festoon lights.

South-Central Texas cities are now juggling more opportunities than they ever have before, but it’s not quite right to say they’re charting their own individual destinies. Many of the challenges they face are regional in nature. At the top of everyone’s list is traffic congestion on Interstate 35, which has slowed to a crawl as the region has boomed. Drivers making the trip between Austin and San Antonio inch past towering billboards for Buc-ee’s and Whataburger but are left to guess at what goes on behind the blank facades of newly built data centers, barely stealing a glimpse of the Texas hills beyond. A trip that took about an hour a generation ago now routinely takes two hours — sometimes much longer. For every percentage point in regional population growth, traffic on I-35 increases 3 to 4 percent, according to the Greater Austin-San Antonio Corridor Council, a regional advocacy group founded in the 1980s.

The Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT), awash in funding after years of economic growth and state budget surpluses, is carrying out construction and maintenance up and down the corridor. Parts of I-35 outside San Antonio are lined in freestanding columns that will eventually support an elevated expansion of the road with both new carpool lanes and general-purpose lanes.

The department is about to embark on a $4.5 billion project to expand I-35 through downtown Austin, adding lanes, sinking a portion of the road and capping it to create new urban land. It may be necessary work given all the population growth and increases in freight shipping on the corridor, but it’s not clear it will improve mobility over the long term. “We’re going to spend $11 billion over the next 10 years on I-35, and every credible study we’ve seen shows the congestion will be just as bad after we spend that money as it is today,” says Ross Milloy, the Corridor Council president.

The Corridor Council has been among a group of regional voices calling for decades for passenger rail service linking Austin and San Antonio. An existing Amtrak service between the cities runs once a day in each direction, but the trip takes even longer than the traffic-choked drive on I-35. An effort in the early 2010s to start more frequent and faster service eventually failed because Union Pacific, the railroad that owns the tracks, wouldn’t agree to host more passenger trains along an already busy freight route.
Some local leaders are trying again. The infrastructure bill passed by Congress during the Biden administration created new funding and enthusiasm for passenger rail. Travis County Judge Andy Brown, an Austin native, launched a rail advocacy group with other city and county officials up and down the corridor last year. The group also includes TxDOT rail officials and Amtrak representatives. Brown says the goal is to create a sustainable plan for funding the service — whether it’s with Amtrak or Brightline or another operator — and then apply for federal funding to build the infrastructure. “I can’t think of another two cities in Europe or anywhere in the world that are this big and growing this fast that don’t have great passenger rail infrastructure between them,” Brown says. “I think we’re going to be left behind if we don’t accomplish that.”

Passenger rail has the support of elected officials, transportation planners, business groups and lots of everyday people. But it faces huge obstacles as well. Not only is building new rail infrastructure wildly expensive under the best scenarios, but the political winds have shifted against federal investment in transit during the Trump administration. In April, the Department of Transportation canceled a planning grant for a long-sought high-speed rail link between Dallas and Houston. And the state government in Texas has been less than supportive of many urban transportation projects. Austin residents voted for a major expansion of public transit called Project Connect in 2020, but the Texas Legislature continues to debate bills that would block its local funding mechanism.

The state GOP has taken a strong stance against any plans that reduce vehicular lanes. In 2022, TxDOT canceled plans to cede control of a state road to the city of San Antonio where new bike lanes were planned — even after voters backed millions in funding for the plan. “It’s a pipe dream,” Travis Mitchell, the mayor of Kyle, a few miles south of Austin, says of an expanded passenger rail link between the cities.

When Melissa Cabello Havrda was growing up there, the far west side of San Antonio was “like living in the country, green and grass. Now a lot of it is paved over.” Cabello Havrda, a San Antonio City Council member, also chairs the Alamo Area Metropolitan Planning Organization, which oversees regional transportation projects. That perch allows her to see firsthand how different kinds of communities are responding to the increase in populations and commerce.
Urban communities such as San Antonio want parks, bike lanes, pedestrian improvements and trails, while some of the rural areas are clamoring for more vehicle lanes to manage congestion. “I don’t think either side is wrong,” Cabello Havrda says. “It’s just a matter of priorities.”

But cooperation is key. Henry Cisneros, San Antonio’s mayor during the 1980s and a former Housing and Urban Development secretary under President Bill Clinton, rattles off pairs of cities — Baltimore and Washington, San Francisco and Oakland, Los Angeles and San Diego, Orlando and Tampa — where “the true economy is the interplay of that region, not what’s within the limits of a single city.”

Passenger rail is an obvious opportunity, says Cisneros, who’s working on a book about the Austin-San Antonio megaregion. It’s too late to think about a shared airport, he says, but as the region grows, it could pursue other big-city amenities, like an NFL team. Being able to seize on those opportunities requires laying the groundwork for cross-jurisdictional collaboration, he says.

“We are going to grow. That’s a given,” Cisneros says. “But are we going to grow in a planned way with proper support, with some kind of rational transportation system, quality of life, opportunities for training and a coherent approach? Or is this just going to be eclectic growth that creates traffic congestion, air pollution, and communities at each other’s throats? That’s the choice.”

Some projects are less contentious than transportation and transit. Economic development agencies in San Antonio and Austin have begun collaborating more formally, recently hosting a summit to promote the idea of the two cities as an economic megaregion. The biggest real estate associations in Austin and San Antonio began sharing listings data with each other last year. Sections of the Great Springs Project, a planned 100-mile trail linking springs in San Antonio and Austin and points in between, have opened up this year.

The growth of the area is substantial enough that virtually every community gets a piece of the development action. The population of rural Gillespie County, west of Austin, doubles on the weekends as people come to visit the Texas wine country, says Daniel Jones, the county judge. But individual communities still cling to their own cultural identities and harbor different visions about how to manage the growth.

The role of local officials in shaping development is different in Texas than it is in many other states. Many planned developments, where much of the new housing and commercial space is being built, are essentially negotiated between builders and officials, rather than being designed to meet a specific zoning regulation.

Kyle, a city of 60,000 that grew from just 5,000 at the turn of the century, was long considered a dumping ground for the cheapest development in the region, says Mayor Mitchell, who moved there from Austin in 2013. He has gradually tried to build better public and commercial amenities. He’s championed a project called the Vybe, an undulating bike and pedestrian path that will eventually connect various parts of the town without altering the design of the streets. The city passed a road bond in 2022 and is now starting construction on a slew of new transportation projects, including replacing traffic lights with roundabouts at a number of intersections.
With all the development happening in the region, cities are scrambling to find enough water to meet growing demand. Kyle recently made a deal with San Marcos to buy some of its supply after maxing out its allowable draw from the Edwards Aquifer, one of the largest sources of groundwater in the state. San Antonio, long reliant almost solely on the Edwards Aquifer, built a 142-mile pipeline to get water from a neighboring aquifer several years ago.

New Braunfels has tripled from around 35,000 people in 2000 to around 110,000 today. In his downtown office, Ryan Kelso, the CEO of the local utility, is eager to share a chart illustrating the diversification of the city’s water supply over the last decade. New Braunfels drew all of its water from the Edwards Aquifer in 1985. Now the aquifer supplies just 18 percent. The utility estimates it has enough supply to meet growing demand through 2070.

The water question has become more urgent in recent years as much of Central Texas has entered a drought. The Edwards Aquifer is at its lowest levels since 1990, with beloved swimming holes gradually drying up. The Edwards Aquifer Authority has recently built an education center in northern San Antonio along the banks of Cibolo Creek, where the creekbed has been dry for the last three years, with patches of limestone bedrock baking away in the Texas sun.

Sarah Valdez, an educator with the authority, leads gaggles of schoolchildren through a series of exhibits that highlight the endangered species that live in the aquifer and emphasize its centrality in the growth of the region. “The first thing we do is we try to make the connection: This matters to your life,” Valdez says. “Do you like being alive?”

Texas voters in 2023 approved a $1 billion allocation to the Texas Water Fund, sponsored by Republican state Sen. Charles Perry. The Legislature considered a bill this year to make annual allocations of $1 billion to the fund. Some estimates suggest the state will need about $150 billion for water infrastructure over the next 50 years. “The Legislature wants to have this Texas economic miracle continue for decades to come,” says Jeremy Mazur, an infrastructure director with the policy advocacy group Texas 2036. “They want to make these investments in reliable water infrastructure so Texas can still be a competitive place.”
For now, Texas has just about all the growth it can handle. In Cedar Park, Eivens drove from the library across town to the site of a new Nebraska Furniture Mart, a massive furniture retailer that started in Omaha in the 1930s. The store, which has only four other locations in the U.S., has such a massive draw that it’s expected to generate tourism from around the state. Still under development this spring, dozens of pickup trucks were lined up in the dirt lot and cranes stretched into the sky. The site seemed big enough to hold an airport.

Cities compete for economic development projects like those. But the growth of the region has surprisingly generated a new collegiality between officials in different communities, who trade tips and lobby for their shared interests.

The region may not be a single entity, but it’s beginning to act a bit more like one. “You always want what’s best for your city,” Eivens says. But, she adds, “you’re not going to get an economy of scale if you don’t figure out how to work together.”