"April 5, 2007, 12:58AM
Houston metro area now 6th largest in U.S.
The Houston metropolitan area is now the nation's sixth largest, surpassing Miami, the Census Bureau said in a report released today.
The Houston-Baytown-Sugar Land statistical area grew by 824,547, or 17.5 percent, to 5,539,949 people between April 1, 2000, and July 1, 2006, the bureau said. It was the nation's third-highest growth in raw numbers and 30th-highest in percentage terms.
Growth in the Houston area helped to cement Texas' position as the fastest-growing state between 2000 and 2006, said Steve Murdock, director of the Institute for Demographic and Socioeconomic Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
The state population grew by 2.7 million in the six-year period, Murdock said, about 120,000 of that because of Hurricane Katrina evacuees.
Four of the nation's fastest-growing metro areas in raw numbers are in Texas: Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, the San Antonio-to-Austin corridor and the Texas-Mexico border area.
"Those four regions have been the fastest-growing in the state for 20 years, and we're seeing an affirmation of those as the growth centers of Texas," Murdock said."
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