Nevada stays atop nation in growth

Paul Kane

Wednesday, Dec. 31, 1997 | 10:15 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Nevada witnessed the nation's fastest growing population for the 12th straight year, up another 4.8 percent in 1997, according to new U.S. Census Bureau reports.

And it comes as no surprise that it is the booming Las Vegas region that continues to attract most of the newcomers.

The state's population grew from 1.6 million to 1.68 million from July 1996 to July 1997, the latest date for which statewide data is available, the Census Bureau reported Wednesday.

That's 475,000 more people living in Nevada than there were at the start of the decade, a near 40 percent increase since 1990. And demographers attribute almost all of that growth to Las Vegas.

"It's the Las Vegas metro area that's witnessing the vast majority of growth," said Marc Perry, a Census Bureau demographer.

According to another Census report issued Wednesday, Las Vegas added 58,369 people to its fast-growing total from July 1995 to July 1996, the last year for which metropolitan statistics are available.

"This growth has been fueled by substantial migration into the Las Vegas area during the 1990s," Perry said. "And when you factor in the births to these new residents, it adds up to an incredibly rapid increase in population."

The Las Vegas metropolitan area, which covers Clark, Nye and Mohave counties, grew from 857,646 people in 1990 to 1,201,073 in 1996 -- a 41 percent increase, the largest of any metropolitan area in the nation so far this decade.

No other city has come to close to such rapid growth. One other region has seen its population swell by more than 30 percent this decade: Laredo, a small Texas town on the Mexican border whose population has grown by 32.7 percent because of increased trade.

Nevada was not alone in the West with its rising population, as the entire region added 1.6 percent more people in 1997, the most in the nation. The other fastest-growing states were Arizona, up 2.7 percent in 1997; Utah, 2.1 percent; Georgia, also 2.1 percent; and Colorado, 2 percent.

Perry said it was not statistically possible to track where all the domestic migration into Nevada was coming from. But, Perry added, anecdotal evidence showed that many Californians had fled its downtrodden economy earlier in the 1990s and landed in nearby Nevada.

That trend, however, is changing. With its rebounding high-tech economy, California's population grew 1.3 percent in 1997, faster than the national average of 0.9 percent.

Overall, the national population grew from 265.2 million in July 1996 to 267.6 million in July 1997.