Arizona's growth driven by southern counties

By Ronald J. Hansen, The Arizona Republic
Posted 3m ago |

Soaring numbers of Hispanics and overall growth in Phoenix and the West Valley helped make Arizona the second-fastest growing state in the nation, newly released census data show.

Arizona had nearly 1.9 million Hispanic residents as of April 1, 2010, and their share of the overall population rose to 29.6%. It was 25.3% in 2000. The total count of Hispanics rose by nearly 600,000 over the decade.

By 2010, Phoenix had added nearly 125,000 residents and had grown to 1.4 million, a 9.4-percent increase from 2000. The growth was smaller than previously estimated and Phoenix remained behind Philadelphia, which held its status as the nation's fifth-largest city.

Solid growth in Maricopa and neighboring Pinal county means they could be central to a new, ninth congressional district to be created before the 2012 elections. Maricopa County, which surrounds Phoenix, had 3.8 million residents, making it the fourth largest in the nation, slightly behind Harris County, Texas, which surrounds Houston.

While the state's 10-year growth figures are impressive, they fell short of estimates made in the final years of the past decade. The new numbers suggest demographers overestimated the state's growth at the height of the housing boom, in part because of tumult in housing data and lags in recognizing a shift in birth and death patterns, experts say. It's unclear how much the Great Recession and the state's militant immigration-enforcement policies may have altered the final figures.

The new data will help guide the five-member Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission as it redraws the political boundaries to be used over the next decade. But it also serves as the most precise snapshot of how and where Arizona has changed since 2000.

The state's largest city, Phoenix, was 148,000 smaller than what the Census Bureau estimated for it in 2009.

The census count of Arizona's population, released in December, was 4 percentage points below previous census estimates. It was the widest such margin in the country.

Arizona State University economist Tom Rex, who analyzes census data, said that's largely due to the movements of illegal immigrants and faulty assumptions from the housing boom.

Illegal immigrants "come here to work," Rex said. "If they've lost their work, they've lost total motivation to be here.

"That, in conjunction with the (2008) employer-sanctions law, made it harder for them to find another job. It seems quite reasonable to expect that a lot of them up and left the state in pretty good numbers."

William Schooling, Arizona's demographer for the past two years, said the state's own estimates were skewed by overreliance on misleading housing information, a method he is now changing. The Census Bureau similarly leans heavily on births and deaths, which are often reported too slowly to reflect the type of sudden shift that apparently happened at the end of the decade, said Schooling, who once headed the bureau's population estimates division.

Rex suspects the state population actually shrank on an annual basis for the first time since the 1930s. If so, that would match a pattern in Florida and Nevada, two historically high-growth states where population gains skidded to a halt at the end of the past decade. Last month, Robert Groves, director of the Census Bureau, could not explain why Arizona proved so challenging, but promised such surprises would be studied.

The census figures serve as more than a population scorecard. In addition to its impact on congressional apportionment, the data is used to help allocate more than $400 billion in annual federal funding for a range of programs, from aid to public schools to transportation projects.

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