City News

Dallas Public Library now loans out laptops and more city news

A 2016 survey found that more than 42 percent of Dallas residents did not have an internet connection in their homes.

Photo by PeopleImages

In this week's roundup of Dallas news, the library is now loaning out laptops. There's a decision to be made about a DART Rail project in downtown Dallas. There's a road being closed permanently that runs beneath I-45. And there's a company name change for the daily newspaper.

Here's what's happened in Dallas this week:

Road closure
TxDOT has permanently closed a segment of South Harwood Street, from Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to South Boulevard. This closure is needed because they're widening I-45.

It's part of the S.M. Wright Phase II project, which will reconfigure the existing interchange between I-45 and SH 310 (S.M. Wright Parkway), Cesar Chavez Boulevard, and Good Latimer Expressway.

The project will transform S.M. Wright Freeway into a six-lane, street-level boulevard with traffic signals. Freeway overpasses will be removed, and the boulevard will include landscaping and sidewalks.

The closure is a two-block strip of South Harwood that currently lies beneath I-45. Fine more info on their website at www.smwrightproject.com. The project is scheduled to be complete in 2023.

Library laptops
Dallas Public Library is now allowing residents to borrow laptops, bundled with hotspots for wi-fi access.

Laptops can be placed on request just like a library book and picked up through the Library To Go curbside service. They must be returned in person to the same location where they were borrowed, during library open hours.

Laptops can be requested online at www.dallaslibrary.org, by phone at 214-670-1400, or by contacting a local branch. They can be checked out for 30 days with the option to renew if there are no outstanding requests.

The library is using Chromebooks, which are laptops built exclusively to access the internet; they come loaded with Microsoft Office. The library has rolled out 100 at nine library locations, and will roll out an additional 1,125 in April at 20 locations.

The Chromebooks are funded through a grant from the Texas State Library and Archive Commission and are specified for neighborhoods with the greatest digital divide. The laptops were purchased with a CARES grant to help deal with the challenges of COVID-19.

A 2016 survey found that more than 42 percent of Dallas residents did not have an internet connection in their homes. In 2020, Dallas Public Library began checking out hotspots, but those were only available on your cellphone.

DART D2 downtown route
Dallas Area Rapid Transit is asking the Dallas City Council to make a decision on which route they prefer for D-2, the second rail route that's being proposed for downtown Dallas, to relieve congestion from the single route that runs through downtown now.

A decision needs to be made by March 24 in order to get $800 million in federal funding.

The decision is complicated by a popular proposal to remove I-345. If that happens, the replacement could be moved underground, which is where the D2 would also be located, so they'd be competing for the same space.

No more Belo
The parent company of the Dallas Morning News is seeking to change its name from A.H. Belo Corp. to distance itself from its founder, Alfred Horatio Belo, who was a Confederate Colonel in the Civil War. New name: DallasNews Corporation. They'll ask shareholders to approve the name change in May.

That's not the only Belo in town: There is also Belo Garden Park, located near the old newspaper building downtown; and the Belo Mansion, a banquet venue on Ross Avenue that's currently owned by the Dallas Bar Foundation.

The name change provides a positive distraction from the company's reported loss of $6.9 million for the year, as well as its plan to initiate a reverse stock split, which companies do to try and boost their stock price. The newspaper has a total of 48,903 digital subscribers.

news-you-can-eat

population report

Booming Dallas suburb was the fastest-growing city in the U.S. in 2024

City of Dallas - City Hall/Facebook

Dallas' population has grown to nealry 1.33 million residents.

The Dallas suburb of Princeton grew faster than any other city in the United States in 2024, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The new population report said Princeton's population has more than doubled in the last five years. The city saw a dramatic growth rate of 30.6 percent from July 2023 to July 2024, now boasting a population of just over 37,000 residents. The suburb is located 42 miles northeast from downtown Dallas.

The report also revealed Dallas retained its No. 9 spot on the list of the 15 most populous cities in the U.S. Dallas gained more than 23,000 residents during the one-year period, bringing the city's population to 1,326,087 people in 2024.

Elsewhere across North Texas, Fort Worth surpassed 1 million residents and eclipsed Austin as the 11th largest city in the nation. Fort Worth had the fifth-highest numeric increase in population last year, 23,442 residents, to bring the city's total population to 1,008,106 residents.

Houston and San Antonio were the only Texas cities to have higher numerical growth rates than Fort Worth. Houston gained 43,217 residents – the second-highest increase nationwide – while San Antonio ranked No. 4 in growth with an additional 23,945 residents.

Austin has yet to surpass the 1 million population threshold and has a population of 993,588 residents, the report says. The city now ranks 13th on the list of most populous U.S. cities after ranking 11th in 2024.

Sandwiched between No. 11-Fort Worth and No. 13-Austin is San Jose, California, whose population of 997,368 puts it in the 12-largest spot.

Fastest growing U.S. cities
Six additional Texas cities made the list of fastest-growing U.S. cities, with several in the DFW Metroplex:

Fulshear, near Houston (No. 2) with 26.7 percent growth (54,629 total population)
Celina (No. 4) with 18.2 percent growth (51,661 total population)
Anna (No. 5) with 14.6 percent growth (31,986 total population)
Fate (No. 8) with 11.4 percent growth (27,467 total population)
Melissa (No. 11) with 10 percent growth (26,194 total population)
Hutto, near Austin (No. 13) with 9.4 percent growth (42,661 total population)

The Austin suburb of Georgetown's growth has continued to slow since 2023, and it no longer appears in the list of fastest-growing cities. However, it did surpass 100,000 residents in 2024.

San Angelo, a small city in West Texas, also surpassed the 100,000-population threshold.

Most populous U.S. cities in 2024
New York City maintained its stronghold as the biggest in America in 2024, boasting a population of nearly 8.5 million residents. Los Angeles and Chicago also retained second and third place, with respective populations of nearly 3.88 million and more than 2.7 million residents.

"Cities in the Northeast that had experienced population declines in 2023 are now experiencing significant population growth, on average," said Crystal Delbé, a statistician in the Census Bureau’s Population Division. "In fact, cities of all sizes, in all regions, showed faster growth and larger gains than in 2023, except for small cities in the South, whose average population growth rate remained the same."

The 15 populous U.S. cities as of July 1, 2024 were:

No. 1 – New York, New York (8.48 million)
No. 2 – Los Angeles, California (3.88 million)
No. 3 – Chicago, Illinois (2.72 million)
No. 4 – Houston, Texas (2.39 million)
No. 5 – Phoenix, Arizona (1.67 million)
No. 6 – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1.57 million)
No. 7 – San Antonio, Texas (1.53 million)
No. 8 – San Diego, California (1.4 million)
No. 9 – Dallas, Texas (1.33 million)
No. 10 – Jacksonville, Florida (1 million)
No. 11 – Fort Worth, Texas (1 million)
No. 12 – San Jose, California (997,368)
No. 13 – Austin, Texas (993,588)
No. 14 – Charlotte, North Carolina (943,476)
No. 15 – Columbus, Ohio (933,263)

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