Rising from another green pasture is the 2-week-old Wal-Mart Supercenter, where twentysomething Alex Morales has his first-ever job as a cashier. “If we can keep pouring enough concrete to build the freeways, we’ll keep the people coming out there.” “It’s just unbelievable,” Garvin said of the growth. Billboards advertise new housing developments with names like “First Colony” and “New Territory.” Others tout the future site of “the cool, new Sugar Land Town Square,” the city’s new downtown, to be built completely from scratch on what is now pasture. Sugar Land, once the center of vast cane plantations, now draws thousands of baby boomers each year to a cookie-cutter landscape of wide residential streets and faux ranch homes built around artificial rivers and lakes. “We’re building the elementary schools, the middle schools and the high schools just as fast as we can.”įort Bend County also has a satellite campus of the University of Houston in the works. “And it’s not going to stop any time soon,” said Louis Garvin of the Fort Bend Chamber of Commerce. The population of the Austin suburb of Cedar Park, for example, increased by more than 400%.Īnd Sugar Land, a teeming suburb built on former horse pastures and sugar cane fields outside Houston, helped drive a 57% leap in the population of surrounding Fort Bend County. The suburban version of the new Texas can be found in the outskirts of Houston, Dallas and Austin, where many cities have doubled or tripled in population over the last decade, growth fueled in part by the success of computer companies such as Dell, Compaq and Texas Instruments. The others are California, New Mexico and Hawaii. “Just like there’s two nations.”ĭemographers predict that as early as 2005, whites will no longer be a majority in Texas and that the state will become the fourth with no ethnic or racial majority. “There are, in a sense, two Texases now,” said Steve Murdock, director of the Texas State Data Center.
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