Spike in population causes surge in I-35 developments

​​​NEW BRAUNFELS – While San Antonio officials have lately focused on how to deal with an expected 1.1 million more people in Bexar County by the year 2040, their neighbors along I-35—New Braunfels, San Marcos, Schertz, and Selma—are booming as well. 

One day, they will form a tightly packed megalopolis from San Antonio to Austin, with no distinction from one city to the next.

This closely follows nationwide trends: more people drawn to suburban areas on the edges of big cities where there is ample land for single-family homes, a community-minded environment that families crave, and lower housing prices. 

Plus, there’s proximity to a major interstate for easy access to the benefits of big cities.

The I-35 corridor—starting in San Antonio at Loop 410 and extending up toward New Braunfels—accounted for nearly a third of the new housing starts in the San Antonio region between the third quarters of 2014 and 2015, said Jack Inselmann, regional director of Metrostudy, a national home construction researcher.

Of the 15 fastest-growing cities in the U.S. from 2014 to 2015, four of them—Georgetown, first, New Braunfels, second, Frisco, fourth, and Pflugerville, 11th—were on or near I-35, and all were on the fringes of bigger cities. 

Together, those places are beginning to merge into an even larger megaregion that connects San Antonio and Dallas, and that’s part of the still larger Texas Triangle that takes in Houston as well.