What America’s Fastest-Growing Cities Tell Us About the Future

Last month, Walmart asked me to do a signing for my book, Capitalism For All: Inclusive Economics and the Future-Proofing of America, at their new store opening in Celina, Texas. The actor Anthony Anderson and I signed books, talked about the future of America, and I left wondering: Why Celina? What made Walmart choose this particular exurb outside Dallas for a major store opening and author event?

Last week, the Census Bureau answered that question. And it revealed something much bigger than why one retailer chose one Texas town.

Celina is the fastest-growing city in America, with 24.6% growth in a single year. But Walmart didn’t send me there because of its growth rate. It sent me there because Celina represents where American capital is actually flowing—and what that tells us about a debate the market has already moved past.

Celina is around 53% white, nearly 17% Asian, about 14% Hispanic, and just over 9% Black. Its Asian population has grown by over 900% since 2020. The median household income is $170,894, and the poverty rate is under 5%.

The five fastest-growing cities in America are all in Texas. Fulshear (21% growth) has a median household income of $187,035 in one of the most diverse counties in the United States. Princeton, the third-fastest-growing city in the nation, is over 39% white, nearly 27% Black, and almost 26% Hispanic. Majority-minority. The median household income is $105,200. Melissa and Anna round out the top five, all following the same pattern: multiracial, college-educated, high-income communities where families of different backgrounds are choosing to build lives together.

The same pattern repeats outside Atlanta. Gwinnett County is 31% white, 28% Black, 24% Hispanic, and 13% Asian—and approaching 1 million residents. Forsyth County, one of the fastest-growing in the region, is nearly 62% white and almost 20% Asian, with a median household income of $143,784. Meanwhile, the rural counties with weaker financial infrastructure and lower incomes are losing population.

For decades, the American conversation on race and inclusion has been about whether we should include Black and Brown Americans in prosperity. Whether corporations should diversify. Whether government should enforce equity. It has been a moral argument, a political argument, a values argument. And it has been losing—or at least, stalling.

The market stopped listening to that debate. Instead, it asked a simpler question: Where is capital going to grow? And the answer is revealing something the political conversation has yet to absorb: Black and Brown Americans are not being included in prosperity. They are driving it.

These communities didn’t set out to become diverse. No one planned Celina’s more than 900% growth in Asian residents. No diversity initiative created Henry County, Ga.’s transformation from just over 88% white in 1990 to majority-minority today with a fivefold increase in population. 

What happened instead was simpler and more instructive: people of all backgrounds made economic decisions. They chose where housing was affordable. Where jobs were plentiful. Where schools were good. And in making those choices individually, they accidentally built some of the most diverse, fastest-growing, and wealthiest communities in America.

In 2020, Citigroup estimated that racial discrimination had cost the U.S. economy $16 trillion over two decades, a figure economists have since updated to over $21 trillion. For years, that counterfactual felt abstract. Now we have the inverse image: what the economy looks like when that gap narrows. It looks like communities that didn’t choose diversity because they were morally obligated to. They chose prosperity and diversity came with it.

This matters because it suggests something the political argument never could. You can debate whether diversity is right. You cannot debate whether it is profitable.

The next 30 years will test whether this trend accelerates or reverses. It’s estimated that more than $84 trillion in intergenerational wealth transfer will flow over the next two decades. The question is where it will concentrate. The Census data suggest it will follow the fastest-growing communities, which are precisely the ones that integrated, not by choice, but by market force.

For those still arguing about whether America should become more inclusive, the market is sending a message. That debate is over. Capital has moved on. Walmart has moved on. The question now is whether policy, politics, and culture can catch up to what the market already knows.