The fastest-growing metro area in the United States is The Villages, the sprawling Central Florida retirement community where the population has ballooned by nearly 38 percent since 2010, according to data by the U.S. Census Bureau released early Thursday.
Orlando clocked in at ninth-fastest nationally, at a clip of over 20 percent since 2010, putting the Orlando area at No. 22 in population among U.S. metros. The July 2018 population of nearly 2.6 million nudged past Charlotte, N.C., and was closing in on Baltimore.
The new Census population estimates, while not as precise as the decennial census that will take place in 2020, give a national snapshot of which areas are growing and which are contracting. The latest report shows that counties with the largest growth in sheer numbers are all in the nation’s South and West, with counties in Texas taking four out of the top 10 spots.
The Dallas/Fort Worth/Arlington area had the biggest boost — with a gain of nearly 132,000 people, most of it from current residents having babies.
But no other place in the nation even came close to the staggering pace of growth at The Villages between 2010 and 2018, when the once-rural community grew by more than 35,000 people. And each frigid, frozen blast of winter across the Northeast or Midwest only accelerates the trend.
“Yes, I hate to say it, but a bad winter up North helps us,” said Nancy Deichman, a RE/MAX Premier Realty broker who has witnessed the area mushroom over the past decade. “We actually have three offices in The Villages … and right now, there’s another 49,000 homes being planned.”
Centered on a master-planned, 55-and-over community in Sumter County, The Villages in recent years began growing most rapidly into Lake and Marion counties.
“The Villages has completely transformed that area,” said Rich Doty, a research demographer at the University of Florida’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. “In 1970, the median age of that area was about 30. By 2020, it’s projected to be about 67.”
While growth in The Villages has been fueled exclusively by domestic migration, elsewhere in Central Florida the catalyst has been “international” migration — a category that by the Census definition includes people from Puerto Rico. The new figures show Orange and Osceola, particularly, were impacted more by “international” growth than domestic, and Orange actually had a net loss of domestic migration — meaning more residents moved out than moved in from elsewhere in Florida or the other 49 states.
The latest population estimates show Orange had a net increase in international migration of nearly 20,000, and Osceola gained 9,000. Though the data doesn’t show where the new international residents came from, it does shows a loss of about 130,000 from Puerto Rico between July 2017 and July 2018 — a period that included Hurricane Maria, the worst natural disaster on record for the U.S. territory. As of March 2018, Orange County Public Schools had nearly 3,500 Puerto Rican students enroll in classes, and Osceola had over 1,650.
Voter registration data reveals more than 47,000 Orange County voters who were registered in July 2017 were no longer registered a year later. An Orlando Sentinel analysis found about half moved to six nearby counties. The most popular was Seminole, which has a highly touted public school district. The most popular cities on the Seminole County side were Altamonte Springs, Oviedo, Casselberry and Longwood, in that order.
Orange families and retirees also disproportionately moved out, but often not very far out, according to Doty.
“If you look at the Orange County data by age … it appears as though families with children have been moving out, as have retirees, but working-age folks and international migrants are coming in,” Doty said. “We can guess that it’s families moving for a better school district — which is something we’ve seen elsewhere in the state, but we don’t know that. It could also be people working in Orange but living in Osceola or Lake,” where housing tends to be more affordable.
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