Reston Census Shocker: Big New Buildings Lead to Lots of New People

The U.S. Census has released its final 2010 Census data for Virginia -- which is almost as exciting as the new phone books arriving -- and this fancy map revealed a shocking fact: Big new buildings lead to population growth, as you can see by the giant green circles that envelop the fancy high-rise condos built in and near Reston's fake downtown gritty urban core over the past decade. We'll give you a minute to wrap your mind around that: big new buildings lead to population growth. Ponderous!

Preliminary census data suggested that Reston's population actually shrunk over the past decade, from 56,407 to 53,759, which has led to some recent hand-wringing about whether growth projections for our beige community are all they're cracked up to be. But just picture a row of giant green circles popping up along the Toll Road, and it's pretty clear that the area is going to continue to grow. What kind of growth, however, still remains to be seen.

Update: One of our commenters crunches the numbers:

There is more of an interesting story in these census numbers. This latest data dump from the Census Bureau did not aggregate numbers for "Reston"; the latest official numbers for Reston we have are from the American Community Survey, which, as Restonian noted, showed a surprising decrease in the population of Reston from 2000 to (2005-2009 average).

However, from the data in the Washington Post's fancy map, which are at the block group level, one can work out some rough numbers for Reston. I have taken the block groups bordered by Route 7 on the north, Hunter Mill Road on the east, Lawyer's Road and Fox Mill Road on the south, and Fairfax County Parkway on the west (going beyond the parkway south of the Toll Road and not so far near Route 7).

Within these boundaries, there were 57,909 residents in 2000 and 61,961 residents in 2010. The roughly 4,000 additional residents are almost entirely accounted for by the new highrise developments in and near Town Center that Restonian highlighted.

At the same time, within these boundaries there were 39,489 non-Hispanic whites ("Anglos") in 2000 and only 39,440 Anglos in 2010. As a result, the percentage of Anglos in Reston's overall population decreased from 68.2% to 63.7%.

This is not quite as dramatic as the decrease in Anglo representation in Fairfax County overall, which dropped from 64.4% in 2000 to 54.6% in 2010 (the county's Anglo population actually decreased by around 60,000 during this period). But it is symptomatic of a trend across northern Virginia - even Loudoun County has become much less Anglo. The only local jurisdiction where Anglo representation in the population increased is Arlington County (data are not available for areas on the other side of the Potomac, but American Community Survey data also suggest that the percentage of Anglos increased in the District of Columbia).

While Reston has always been home to a diverse population, the rest of the county -- and the region -- is catching up.