High Point’s growth exceeds big neighbors

By contrast, both Greensboro and Winston-Salem grew by 0.7% during the same period.

Both Guilford County and Forsyth County saw their greatest growth outside of their large cities, though. Guilford’s overall growth rate during the period was 0.9%, and Forsyth’s was 1.7%.

Small towns in the High Point area similarly had higher growth rates than the Triad’s two biggest cities:

Thomasville grew 0.8% to 27,399 people; Archdale grew just under 1% to 12,0003 people; Trinity grew 1.2% to 7,103; and Wallburg grew 2.7% to 3,142.

North Carolina’s fastest-growing cities mostly are still in the Raleigh and Charlotte areas. The only two among the 10 fastest-growing that are not are Wilmington at the southeast coast, which grew 4.3%, and Burlington, which grew 3.5% and benefits from being halfway between the Triangle and the Triad.

Nationally, the new estimates show that large metro areas that saw growth stall early in the pandemic because of fears about how the coronavirus spread in densely populated areas saw it rebound strongly in 2022.

The Dallas-Fort Worth area grew the most in 2022 among U.S. metros, jumping by six-digit figures for a second consecutive year, as it gained another 170,000 residents last year. Metro Dallas-Fort Worth’s 7.9 million residents made it the nation’s fourth-largest metropolitan area, behind only New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, all of which lost population last year but with much smaller losses compared to the first year of the pandemic.

Other metropolitan areas which saw the largest growth in number were Houston, adding more than 124,000 residents; Atlanta, with almost 79,000 new residents; Phoenix, with an additional nearly 73,000 people; and Orlando, Florida, adding almost 65,000 new residents.

Metro Phoenix also surpassed the 5 million-person threshold for the first time last year.