Why Sioux Falls Is Booming
South Dakota’s biggest city isn’t a college town or a state capital or in the Sun Belt. So how does it keep growing and growing?
Downtown Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Photographer: AlexiusHoratius/Wikimedia Commons
There are 63 metropolitan areas in the U.S. (out of 382 total) that saw their populations grow by 10 percent or more from 2010 through mid-2017, according to estimates compiled by the Census Bureau. That compares with an increase of 5.5 percent for the nation as a whole, and 6.5 percent for its metropolitan areas — which, just to be clear on what we’re talking about, are defined as “one or more counties that contain a city of 50,000 or more inhabitants, or contain a Census Bureau-defined urbanized area and have a total population of at least 100,000 (75,000 in New England).”
Thirty-nine of these fast-growing metros are in the South and 19 in the West. This should come as no big surprise, given that these two regions are estimated to have accounted for 86 percent of the country’s almost-17-million-person increase in population since 2010. None of the fast-growth areas is in the Northeast, but there are five in the slowest-growing of the four regions delineated by the Census Bureau: the Midwest.