Tulsa metro population growth.

[swake]

Being from a Rust Belt City, it's wild to see people label 7% growth as "barely growing."

We are next to Texas and always compare ourselves to Dallas and Austin where 7% growth is called "a decent year".

[dbacksfan 2.0]

I don't know what counties should or should not be in Tulsa's or OKC's MSA, but one thing that is clear is that OKC is and has been growing at a much higher rate than Tulsa for the past decade.  Tulsa's leader can celebrate topping 1 million all they want, but our slower growth should be the trend keeping them up nights.

Before I moved to AZ in 1998 I always said that the reason OKC was growing faster than Tulsa even back then was that you had to pay to get into or out of Tulsa in almost every direction on the highways to get anywhere, and OKC only had to pay to get to Tulsa or Lawton.

Speaking of the commuting issue, I knew people in the 70's and 80's that lived in Muskogee and worked at Telex, and people that lived in Owasso/Collinsville/Skiatook that commuted back and forth to Bartlesville and Barnsdall. My dad knew people at McDonnell/Douglas, Rockwell and AA that lived in Claremore and areas around it.

[dbacksfan 2.0]

Being from a Rust Belt City, it's wild to see people label 7% growth as "barely growing."

I spent 11 years working in Gilbert AZ and watched their population go from 115,000 in 2000 to almost 210,000 in ten years, and they have now grown to 263,000.

[TheArtist]

One thing I am really curious about is how the city of Tulsa's population is doing.  For a while it was stagnant and then even went into decline.  Wonder what it has been like the last few years?  Will hopefully find out after the new census numbers come out.

But as for OKC growing so much faster, every time I visit there, for the love of God I am SO thankful I live in Tulsa lol. OKC just feels so sprawly, ugly and miserable. Why the heck would anyone chose OKC over Tulsa? Course as an artist/business person I know I have a bit of a "problem" tending to prefer "looks and feelings" first over cold profits.

[LandArchPoke]

I get that OKC has certain built in advantages, but I disagree it is to be expected that OKC will grow faster than Tulsa.  We think Tulsa is a wonderful place to work and live and we think companies should move here, but we are in second place and fading within our own state.  Population growth is a vote of confidence by people of where they think is a great place to live and have opportunity to succeed.  To copy a phrase, "if you ain't growing, you're dying."   Right now, we are barely growing and that is not encouraging.

I've always found it concerning that we are growing slower than just about every adjacent MSA beside Ft Smith and Joplin. I haven't had time to dig through the 2020 numbers and I'm sure someone could pull it up but I think Springfield Mo MSA was on pace to hit 8 or 9% growth since 2010 and I believe even Wichita MSA had similar percentage wise growth to Tulsa's from 2000-10 but has since further slowed. NWA grew by 20%+ adding over 100,000 people. I believe that's more total people than our MSA added, not just a % higher growth rate.

I know we see the growth rates in Texas, but I can assure everyone that we do not want that pace of growth. It creates so many problems that I'm not sure it's much better than stagnant growth either. There's a good middle ground. Tulsa is kind of on the low end of that good middle ground of growth. I'd like to see it go up to at least the OKC level and maybe a bit above ideally but not to the level you see in the Texas Triangle. Just to put some #'s into perspective too, Austin added nearly 600,000 people to it's MSA (about the size of the entire NWA MSA). When you're growing at that pace it's impossible to keep up with.  

OKC has the big advantage of so many state jobs and the lack of sharing anything with anywhere else in the state. Once Devon, SandRidge, Chesapeake got going there was little chance of ever keeping pace with OKC. The reason why Tulsa and OKC were on a relatively same trajectory for a while was because Tulsa has a big private sector and OKC a big public sector. Once OKC finally started growing the private sector like that I'm not surprised they are outpacing us anymore. Many of Tulsa's big private sector firms are in the 'mature' phase where they aren't in a boom cycle like those three were - Williams and all those did that decades ago and have for the most part right sized in comparison. OKC's public sector has also been key with Tinker, they've been able to leverage that into bringing in Boeing and others. It's just hard to compare the areas apples to apples when there's so much concentration of public sector money in OKC. Now that those big three have mostly imploded outside of Devon (which still shrank dramatically) it will be interesting to see if OKC keeps up pace with the growth they've seen in the last decade or not. I have a feeling they will, just seems they have more momentum than Tulsa and their economic development teams are doing a lot better job than we are and it really baffles me.

One thing I am really curious about is how the city of Tulsa's population is doing.  For a while it was stagnant and then even went into decline.  Wonder what it has been like the last few years?  Will hopefully find out after the new census numbers come out.

But as for OKC growing so much faster, every time I visit there, for the love of God I am SO thankful I live in Tulsa lol. OKC just feels so sprawly, ugly and miserable. Why the heck would anyone chose OKC over Tulsa? Course as an artist/business person I know I have a bit of a "problem" tending to prefer "looks and feelings" first over cold profits.

If you look at just the central city, something to keep in mind is Tulsa is mostly land locked by suburbs. OKC isn't. The majority of growth to the city of OKC is because the NW area near Edmond has been growing so much. If it wasn't for that, the city of OKC would probably be in worse shape statistically wise than the city of Tulsa. Population growth in Midtown and even Downtown for example is as fast as most of the suburbs in Tulsa.

Something else to keep in mind, and a lot of bigger cities have the same problems, but as immigrant populations grow there is always a big under count of those household. Especially with this last census, there is a big fear amongst those communities to accurately report the size of the household or even report period. There's large parts of East Tulsa for example that are vastly under counted in population totals and other areas in town as well. Parts of East Tulsa has some of the biggest declines in population and if you ever drive around those neighborhoods there isn't a growing number of vacant homes, most of the apartment complexes stay very well occupied too. There are just some fundamental problems with the Census, especially as it has increasingly became more political. The income levels of those areas just don't support retail growth and other stuff that we typically correlate with 'growth' and that's not a bad thing - there should be spaces for everyone in town not just the middle class and rich. I think if the city did more outreach and some strategic investments in things like better transit and stuff, some of those neighborhoods would feel less like and have less of a perception that they are in decline.

Outside of pockets around like Red Fork, parts of North Tulsa, and the area just west of Downtown between the river and 412 I don't see many areas of the city with large inventory of vacant housing or for that matter growing inventory of vacant housing. Even in most of those areas I just mentioned I wouldn't say the vacancy of housing is going up - it's at least stable to starting to decline.    

[Oil Capital]

Tulsa MSA
2010:   937,521
2019:   999,348
2020: 1,006,411
One-year growth rate:  0.71%
Ten-year growth rate:   7.35%

Oklahoma City
2010: 1,252,989
2019: 1,409,988
2020: 1,425,375
One-year growth rate:  1.09%
Ten-year growth rate:  13.76%

Springfield MO
2010:  436,756
2019:  471,268
2020:  475,220
One-year growth rate:  0.84%
Ten-year growth rate:   8.81%

Wichita
2010:  623,061
2019:  640,763
2020:  643,768
One-year growth rate:  0.47%
Ten-year growth rate:   3.32%

Fayetteville/Springdale/Rogers AR
2010:  440,118
2019:  535,746
2020:  548,634
One-year growth rate:  2.41%
Ten-year growth rate: 24.66%

Joplin
2010:  175,509
2019:  179,557
2020:  180,099
One-year growth rate:  0.30%
Ten-year growth rate:  2.62%

Fort Smith
2010:  248,264
2019:  250,430
2020:  250,434
One-year growth rate:  0.0016%
Ten-year growth rate:   0.87%

Little Rock
2010:  699,781
2019:  743,048
2020:  746,564
One-year growth rate:  0.47%
Ten-year growth rate:   6.69%

These 8 metros ranked by one-year and ten-year growth rates:

One-Year
1. Fayetteville/Springdale/Rogers
2. Oklahoma City
3. Springfield
4. Tulsa
5. Wichita (tied)
5. Little Rock (tied)
7. Joplin
8. Fort Smith

Ten-Year
1. Fayetteville/Springdale/Rogers
2. Oklahoma City
3. Springfield
4. Tulsa
5. Little Rock
6. Wichita
7. Joplin
8. Fort Smith

[Oil Capital]

From the Census Bureau's Metro Area-to-Metro Area Migration Flows: 2014-2018 American Community Survey data:

The top metro areas  from which people moved to Tulsa  metro area were:
1.   Oklahoma City (3,905)
2.   DFW    (1,836)
3.   Houston   (833)
4.   Los Angeles   (808)
5.   Fort Smith   (734)
6.   Kansas City   (575)
7.   Fayetteville/Springdale/Rogers   (553)
8.  South America   (536)
9.  Chicago   (476)
10. Wichita   (458)
11. Phoenix  (414)
12. Lawton   (389)
13. NYC       (372)
14. San Antonio (321)
15. Denver   (319)
16. Washington DC (306)
17. Little Rock  (299)
18. Indianapolis  (298)
19. Springfield, MO  (280)
20. Joplin   (232)

The top metro areas to which people moved from Tulsa metro area were:
1.  Oklahoma City (5,633)
2.  DFW   (1,902)
3.  Houston  (1,603)
4.  Fayetteville/Springdale/Rogers  (1,091)
5.  Kansas City  (892)
6.  Fort Smith (853)
7.  Phoenix  (739)
8.  Wichita (737)
9.  Denver (614)
10. Los Angeles  (412)
11. Lawton (390)
12. Nashville (388)
13. Seattle (368)
14. San Antonio  (317)
15. Lubbock  (308)
16. Miami (306)
17. Washington DC  (297)
18. San Diego (282)
19. St Louis  (271)
20. Riverside/San Bernadino (246)

Top metro areas for net migration inflow to Tulsa metro
1.  Los Angeles  (396)
2.  Chicago  (309)
3.  New York City  (276)
4.  Orlando  (191)
5.  Little Rock  (184)
6.  Indianapolis  (163)
7.  Memphis  (160)
8.  El Paso  (159)
9.  Hot Springs, AR  (157)
10. Detroit  (141)
11. San Francisco  (127)   (tied)
11. Jacksonville  (127)   (tied)
13. San Juan, Puerto Rico  (122)
14. Tampa  (118)
15. Bakersfield  (113)
16. Manhattan, KS  (108)
17. Topeka, KS  (100)
18. Pensacola, FL  (99)
19. Anchorage, AK  (98)
20. Springfield, MO  (94)

Top metro areas for net migration outflow from Tulsa metro
1.  Oklahoma City  (1,728)
2.  Houston  (770)
3.  Fayetteville/Springdale/Rogers  (538)
4.  Phoenix  (325)
5.  Kansas City  (317)
6.  Nashville  (299)
7.  Denver  (295)
8.  Wichita  (279)
9.  Seattle  (235)
10. Lubbock  (228)
11. St Joseph, MO  (227)
12. Miami  (220)
13. Blacksburg, VA  (194)
14. Albuquerque  (156)
15. Birmingham  (143)
16. Charlotte  (133)   (tied)
16. Waco  (133)   (tied)
18. San Diego  (121)
19. Fort Smith  (119)   (tied)
19. Portland  (119)   (tied)

[Oil Capital]

More fun population info.  I've been working with the Census's Urbanized Area data and thought I'd share some of the info.

There are 497 "Urbanized Areas" (An Urban Area is a continuously built-up area with a population of 50,000 or more. It comprises one or more places—central place(s)—and the adjacent densely settled surrounding area—urban fringe—consisting of other places and nonplace territory.)

Based on 2019 numbers:

The Tulsa Urbanized Area has a population of 698,349 and is the 63rd largest urbanized area in the country.

Numbers 56-62 are Omaha, Albuquerque, Birmingham, Sarasota/Bradenton, Dayton, Rochester NY, and Fresno.
Numbers 64-70 are Allentown PA, Concord CA, Cape Coral FL, Charleston SC, Colorado Springs, and Springfield MA.

Among the 155 Urbanized Areas larger than 250,000, Tulsa's density comes in at #97  (2078.9 per square mile)

Other Urbanized Areas in the region:

Oklahoma City: 947,247.  #49 in population.   #74 in density (2306.3/square mile)
Springfield, MO:  295,230.  #132 in population.   #99 in density (2073.1/square mile)
Fayetteville/Springdale/Rogers:  350,995.  #113 in population.   #118 in density (1,868.3/square mile)
Wichita:  484,715.   #86 in population.   #75 in density  (2257.7/square mile)
Little Rock:  446,814    #88  in population.    #130 in density  (1,733.2/square mile)
Kansas City:  1,602,005    #34 in population.    #70 in density  (2363.2/square mile)
Houston:  5,724,418    #6 in population.    #29 in density  (3,444.6/square mile)
DFW:   5,910,669   #5 in population.   #33 in density  (3,320.7/square mile)
Austin:   1,685,522    #31 in population.    #37 in density   (3,220.1/square mile)
Denver:  2,709,398    #18 in popultion.    #14 in density  (4064.6/square mile)

[heironymouspasparagus]

One thing I am really curious about is how the city of Tulsa's population is doing.  For a while it was stagnant and then even went into decline.  Wonder what it has been like the last few years?  Will hopefully find out after the new census numbers come out.

But as for OKC growing so much faster, every time I visit there, for the love of God I am SO thankful I live in Tulsa lol. OKC just feels so sprawly, ugly and miserable. Why the heck would anyone chose OKC over Tulsa? Course as an artist/business person I know I have a bit of a "problem" tending to prefer "looks and feelings" first over cold profits.

I spent a LOT of time in OKC over the last 14 years.  Still don't like it.   "Sprawly, ugly, and miserable" are the words.

[Hoss]

I spent a LOT of time in OKC over the last 14 years.  Still don't like it.   "Sprawly, ugly, and miserable" are the words.

Agreed.  I spend more time there than I would like to admit and have never liked it.  Have always liked this part of the state better as the terrain is much better for things I like to do.

[dbacksfan 2.0]

I had relatives that lived in Edmond from 1971 until 1987 so we spent a lot of time in the area. I have always joked that once you get west of Chandler on the Turnpike the scenery doesn't change until you hit the Texas New Mexico border on I-40.

[tulsabug]

Agreed.  I spend more time there than I would like to admit and have never liked it.  Have always liked this part of the state better as the terrain is much better for things I like to do.

I tend to think of Tulsa and Oklahoma as two separate places.

[Jeff P]

OKC has the big advantage of so many state jobs and the lack of sharing anything with anywhere else in the state. Once Devon, SandRidge, Chesapeake got going there was little chance of ever keeping pace with OKC. The reason why Tulsa and OKC were on a relatively same trajectory for a while was because Tulsa has a big private sector and OKC a big public sector. Once OKC finally started growing the private sector like that I'm not surprised they are outpacing us anymore. Many of Tulsa's big private sector firms are in the 'mature' phase where they aren't in a boom cycle like those three were - Williams and all those did that decades ago and have for the most part right sized in comparison.

In some ways, yes, but also Tulsa's major players in the energy space have tended to be pipeline/infrastructure/utility companies vs. E&P companies...Williams, ONEOK, OneGas, Magellan, etc. Those companies just tend to be more stable and aren't as susceptible to the boom/bust cycle associated with oil prices.  And you see the result of that with SandRidge and CHK going through bankruptcy and Devon struggling to fill their massive building that they built (and having to acquire WPX to generate some growth).

So yeah, OKC certainly reaped the benefit of the shale oil/gas boom becoming a place where many of these E&P companies decided to set up shop, but the flip side of that is what has happened in the past few years when that flips to a bust cycle. There have been multiple bankruptcies and they have lost thousands of jobs.

OKC's public sector has also been key with Tinker, they've been able to leverage that into bringing in Boeing and others. It's just hard to compare the areas apples to apples when there's so much concentration of public sector money in OKC. Now that those big three have mostly imploded outside of Devon (which still shrank dramatically) it will be interesting to see if OKC keeps up pace with the growth they've seen in the last decade or not. I have a feeling they will, just seems they have more momentum than Tulsa and their economic development teams are doing a lot better job than we are and it really baffles me.

You hit the nail on the head with the government/public sector jobs. That provides a massive employment cushion that Tulsa doesn't have, especially Tinker. The military industrial complex is a nice thing to have in your back yard, lol.

In terms of those E&P companies they likely will come back but at a much more measured pace. CHK was always a house of cards waiting to implode. Piling $25 billion in debt on an E&P company was just plain stupid and a testament to Aubrey McLendon's ego more than anything. Doing something like that is basically betting that oil/gas prices never go down. Just dumb. Devon was always much more disciplined (building a giant skyscraper aside).

If you look at just the central city, something to keep in mind is Tulsa is mostly land locked by suburbs. OKC isn't. The majority of growth to the city of OKC is because the NW area near Edmond has been growing so much. If it wasn't for that, the city of OKC would probably be in worse shape statistically wise than the city of Tulsa. Population growth in Midtown and even Downtown for example is as fast as most of the suburbs in Tulsa.

Yep. There's definitely something to this. Think of all the significant growth in south/east Tulsa County. If Tulsa was more similar to OKC in terms of city limits, an enormous amount of the growth in Jenks and Broken Arrow would be city of Tulsa and not those cities.

[Oil Capital]

Earlier in the thread there seemed to have been some confusion about the meaning of Metropolitan Statistical Areas and Combined Statistical Areas and what each is intended to include. Some seemed to wish they were about retail trading areas. (Hint: it's not about where Bartlesvillian teenagers go to find an H&M).  That is covered by different analyses and is interesting in itself.

For this analyses, one needs to look at the Major Trading Areas defined by Rand McNally.  Here's a map:  https://transition.fcc.gov/oet/info/maps/overlays/mtacolor.pdf.

The population of Tulsa's Major Trading Area:
Tulsa CSA:    1,126,243  (yes, if Bartlesville teenagers want to shop at H&M, Tulsa it is!) plus
Haskell Co:        12,652  plus
McIntosh Co:     19,635  plus
Adair Co:           21,955  plus
Cherokee Co:     49,019  plus
Delaware Co:     43,136  plus
Mayes Co:         41,152  plus
Craig Co:           14,194  plus
Nowata Co:        10,076  plus
Wilson KS:           8,362  plus
Chautauqua KS:  3,230  plus
Montgomery KS:31,502  plus

Total population of the Tulsa Major Trading Area (and the region of which Tulsa is the hub):  1,381,156

[Oil Capital]

Yep. There's definitely something to this. Think of all the significant growth in south/east Tulsa County. If Tulsa was more similar to OKC in terms of city limits, an enormous amount of the growth in Jenks and Broken Arrow would be city of Tulsa and not those cities.

But that doesn't explain Tulsa's metro population growth rate being just over 1/2 that of OKC's.