Site Admin

Joined: 15 Jun 2005
Posts: 2316
Location: Indianapolis, IN

Today's Indy Star listed the growth for all counties in Indiana. Marion county itself gained only a couple thousand residents. This is to be expected since Marion county is already one of the most densely populated counties in the U.S. and there is basically no room for growth. The surrounding counties that make up the metro area have shown significant growth.

(County/2005 Pop/2000 Pop/04-05 Chg/00-05 Chg/Pop Increase

Boone County 52,061 46,107 2% 13% 5,954
Hamilton County 240,685 182,740 5% 32% 57,945
Hendricks County 127,483 104,093 3% 22% 23,390
Hancock County 63,138 55,391 4% 14% 7,747
Johnson County 128,436 115,209 2% 11% 13,227
Morgan County 69,778 66,689 1% 5% 3,089
Shelby County 43,766 43,445 0% 1% 321

Of the 7 counties that border Marion only Shelby County (the smallest) didn't experience at least a 5% growth rate. Morgan and Shelby are the 2 of 7 that didn't experience 11%+ growth. Total population increase for the 7 counties for the 5 years since the 2000 census is 111,673. This gives us a chance at a quarter of a million population increase in 10 years.

Source of stats: Indy Star
URL: http://www.indystar.com/apps/p...?AID=/20060316/NEWS01/60315029

Site Admin

Joined: 17 Jun 2005
Posts: 949
Location: Carmel, IN

Demographics is kind of a hobby of mine. I like to use Wendell Cox's website at Demographia. Check this link for stats on all the US metro areas:

http://www.demographia.com/db-metmic2004.pdf

Note that the Indy metro area's population still ranks 28th in the country, and we're close to busting the 2 million mark. We're growing by about 25,000 residents per year, so we'll likely be hitting 2 million at some point in 2007. Note that these are metro areas, not cities themselves. Looking at cities themselves, Indy ranks 12th in the country.