PRINT THIS PAGE | E-MAIL THIS PAGE

Saturday, November 29, 1997

Alamo City cheering news that it's bigger than Dallas

By KELLEY SHANNON

Associated Press

SAN ANTONIO - In a state where bigger is better, San Antonio is beaming about its leap ahead of Dallas in population to become the second-largest city in Texas.

U.S. Census Bureau figures released last week also showed San Antonio jumping from its previous ranking of 10th-largest city in the nation to No. 8.

"I guess the people in Dallas are going to have to stop talking about 'Big D' and starting talking about 'Big S.A.,' " San Antonio Mayor Howard Peak said with a chuckle.

Seriously, though, Peak pointed out the Dallas metropolitan area, which includes surrounding areas, is larger than San Antonio's. And that is a more "realistic" population figure, he said.

Heywood Sanders, an urban administration professor at Trinity University in San Antonio, agreed.

"It's an enormous difference in terms of metropolitan area," he said.

Dallas' had a metropolitan area of 2.96 million in 1995, and San Antonio had 1.46 million. Houston, meanwhile, had a metropolitan area of 3.7 million people, according to Sanders' figures.

Dallas grew from 1,007,618 in 1990 to 1,053,292 in 1996 and now is the third-largest city in Texas and ninth-largest in the nation, the Census Bureau said.

The city of San Antonio grew from 959,295 in 1990 to 1,067,816 in 1996.

Houston remained the largest Texas city and the fourth-largest in the country with its 1996 population of 1.7 million.

One reason San Antonio has grown larger than Dallas is because it has had more opportunities to annex outlying unincorporated suburbs, Sanders said, noting that Dallas is surrounded by other incorporated cities that cannot be annexed.

"In part, we're growing because as a city we're constantly spreading out and covering more and more territory," Sanders said. "We're a big city without much around it."

But the census numbers provided plenty of fodder for local newspaper columnists and townspeople, some of whom are fiercely proud of San Antonio and not content with sitting in the shadows of Houston and Dallas.

Especially Dallas.

San Antonio Express-News columnist Roddy Stinson, recalling a similar battle between the two cities over population 20 years ago, cheered the notion of Dallas eating San Antonio's dust.

"And no one enjoys watching the grimy Dallas faces in the rearview mirror more than this longtime chronicler of the Big D decline," he wrote.

Express-News columnist David Anthony Richelieu reminded readers that for 200 years San Antonio was the largest city in Texas and that it relinquished that title only in 1930.

"Big D forgot that San Antonio has history on its side," he wrote.

Estela Rodriguez offered her opinion from behind the counter of the shoe repair shop she manages.

"You always hear so much of Dallas," Ms. Rodriguez said. "San Antonio was thought of as small, the River Walk, beautiful. And Dallas was always, oh my God, glitzy, big."

Fascination with San Antonio's size is partly due to "hometown boosterism" and a "peculiar local pride in being able to say, 'We've beaten Dallas,' " Sanders said.

Mayor Peak, whose background is in urban planning, downplayed the big-city rivalry and said he's just glad San Antonio is getting bigger at a moderate pace.

"We've got a good, steady, but manageable rate of growth," he said.Send a Letter to the Editor about This Story | Start or Join A Discussion about This Story
Send the URL (Address) of This Story to A Friend: