Thursday, March 30, 2023

GROWTH

 I was just reading this morning new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau and guess what was the fastest growing county in the entire country last year?

It was Mighty Maricopa!

Yes, Maricopa County in Arizona, which is dominated by the Metro Phoenix area, was the fasted growing county in the United States in the past year.

It added something over 50,000 people to it's population, which is now at about 4 and a half million people.

So then I did some more Googling around and found that the population of my little "town", Prescott Valley, is now estimated to be over 49 thousand souls and the "little city" to the southwest of us, Prescott, is estimated  to have about 15 hundred fewer people.

I can still remember the first time I laid eyes on Prescott Valley, in 1972 when we moved to Phoenix from Indianapolis, Indiana.

We drove through it on a reconaissance tour of a small part of our new state one weekend.

The standing joke though mostly reality was that Prescott Valley was just street signs and crooked land speculators.

Those guys were getting rich convincing folks back in our country's hinterlands that Prescott Valley was a retirement paradise.

It took a few decades for the place which still officially calls itself a "town" to take off but now it's growing at a rate of nearly 2 percent a year.

The county I live in, Yavapai, now has an estimated population of just below 244 thousand.

Which should answer SWMBO's frequent questions when we are out in the community "Where are all these people coming from and where are they going?"




Of course, with all of that additional traffic, there are inevitably scenes like this.



So enjoy the growth if you can, fellow Prescott Valley-ites, but for my and yours and everyone else's sake, learn to drive a little more slowly and a lot more carefully.

The city fathers and mothers can call it just a "town" but it's actually part of a metropolitan area of over 100 thousand people now.

The Old West is hard to find nowadays.

13 comments:

  1. My city's population is 43,000. I definitely think the Valley needs to change its designation!

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  2. I have been doing some home shopping in the Clarkdale/Cottonwood area and am amazed at the growth and the $$$. Getting out of the big city is becoming a lot more difficult.

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    1. We lived between Clarkdale and Old Cottonwood back when we returned to Arizona. It had yet to be gentrified and was relatively inexpensive. Not any more.

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  3. Humans are overpopulating all the nice sunny warm places. Well really, humans are overpopulating the whole planet.

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  4. I suspect that the reason so many Americans are moving to the Phoenix area is the secret popularity of "Oddball Observations" across the nation - especially "The Friday Funnies". I think that you are what is called an "influencer" Bruce!

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    1. Catalyst (Bruce) blushes modestly, tugs at forelock.

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  5. I left my hometown Bend Oregon in '65, in the years since it's grown from 10K to 120K. I left Butte MT 4 years ago, it was 20K when I arrived in '98. It's now 26K. Coincidence?

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  6. Many people I know are moving to Arizona so are they could be mostly Washingtonians. Or Californians perhaps? I like Yorkshire Pudding's explanation.

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  7. That's a huge difference to when you first moved there.

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  8. I'm with Yorkshire Pudding! 👍

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  9. from Cheerful Monk, of course.

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  10. the population of our town is 1,783 ...... and that's nice.

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