Conroe ready ‘to explode’
Newly crowned fastest-growing city welcomes newcomers
The news was the talk of downtown Conroe.
The county seat for bustling Montgomery County is the fastest-growing city in the country among cities with more than 50,000 residents, according to the latest U.S. Census Bureau figures.
At Shepard’s Barber Shop, established 1912, where a pole outside swirls in patriotic colors and Elvis Presley once got his hair cut, owner Leon Apostolo considered the implications.
New customers were trickling in daily — by his count, four or five a day. But vehicle traffic is picking up, and folks seem to be in a rush all the time. Apostolo doesn’t feel quite as safe as he once did, with a nod to the .45 within arm’s reach of his green chair.
“I miss the laid-backness,” confessed Apostolo, who has worked at the shop 39 years now, since he was 17. “But it’s still a great town. I don’t plan on going anywhere.”
Just around the corner, Gayle “Mimi” Burke leaned on the
front counter of “Mimi’s on Main,” her antiques and collectibles shop, and bubbled with pride over the distinction. To her, there’s no downside to the growth, which spiked 7.8 percent during the 12 months leading up to July 2016.
“We’re growing by leaps and bounds,” Burke boasted, reeling off a list of recent developments.
There’s Grand Central Park, a 2,046-acre masterplanned community being built on the city’s south side, on the former Camp Strake Boy Scouts property. There’s the new 5,400home community by The Woodlands Development going up on the north side of Conroe. The 385-acre Exxon Mobil campus just across the county line.
New shops popping up
Burke paused to greet customers, “Hi, Darlin’, come on in. Help yourself to coffee and cookies.”
Then, as Special Olympics Torch Relay runners and police motorcade passed by the window, she continued praising Conroe’s development — subdivisions, big box stores and new shops and restaurants popping up along the oncelanguishing town square.
“It’s really awesome to see things have grown. It’s really going to explode in five years,” said Burke, who has lived in Conroe 17 years. “But we still have that small town feeling. It’s not just an extension of Houston.”
This isn’t the first time Conroe, population 82,286, has recorded notable growth.
In 2015, it was one of the 13 fastest-growing cities by percentage, ranking sixth below other Texas cities like San Marcos, Georgetown and Frisco. The next year, according to Census numbers released Thursday, Conroe zoomed to the top spot and became the headline on news stories across the country.
Forty miles north of downtown Houston, Conroe is the county seat of one of the fastest growing counties in Texas. Montgomery County netted more than 19,700 residents between July 2015 and July 2016, as Houston-area suburbs continued to expand.
In fact, Texas had four of the five fastest-growing large cities in the U.S., each orbiting a major city. Following Conroe was the Dallas suburbs of Frisco and McKinney, which grew by 6.2 percent and 5.9 percent, respectively. Georgetown, an Austin suburb, was the fifth-fastest growing city with a population increase of 5.5 percent.
Officials in the Texas cities and the state’s demographer attribute the growth to various factors, including the state’s robust jobs market and the cities’ diversified economies, lower costs of living and skilled workforces that earn higher wages.
“A lot of times when people think of Texas, they think about cowboys and roping cows. But really we have ... cutting edge manufacturing, technology and finance, and certainly all of the oil extraction activity as well,” Texas State Demographer Lloyd Potter said.
For Conroe Mayor Toby Powell, a self-described “ol’ boy” who has lived in the city all his 76 years, the growth is no surprise.
In fact, Powell said, Conroe officials already had been planning for increased demand for city services and infrastructure. A new police station has just opened, and a new fire station is under construction. The city also has purchased 75 acres of land to build a second sewer plant.
Traffic congestion already can be seen just a few minutes away from its town square lined by old-fashioned street lamps and dotted with benches extolling the city’s history. Along Highway 105, which runs east-west through Conroe, shopping centers are home to chain stores and restaurants like Target, Home Depot, Panera Bread and Chipotle Mexican Grill, and queues of cars back up at lights and turn lanes.
Country aura is a draw
Keeping Conroe’s smalltown sensibility, while managing growth and encouraging large-town amenities, requires a balancing act, Powell acknowledges. After all, that country aura is what first draws many residents to the city.
Conroe native Mike Canada, proprietor of Conroe Central Market, a downtown antique mall that features a record room stocked with vinyl albums, says the place where he was born and raised already feels like “a different town.”
“I miss the trees and forested areas,” said Canada, referring to the vast swatches of land that have been scraped clean to make way for new development. “At the same time, the growth keeps it from becoming a dead town.”
And for Canada, that’s good enough. He doesn’t see himself leaving.