Why isn't NM growing fast like other SW states ?

[muon2]

It always been an odd state to me. It is stagnant in population while other states in the region like Texas , Arizona, Colorado , Nevada and Utah are booming.

It has the same climate as a place like Arizona which has a huge retiree population and a booming Hispanic population.

So why aren't people moving there ?

Click on this link:

Arizona and New Mexico population

Then uncheck the Arizona box, and see how much faster New Mexico grew when not compared with Arizona.   Then check Montana.   And Idaho.

Albuquerque is 3900 feet, so would a bit of an altitude problem for retirees.  And that it actually had a population, meant it could not be totally remade into a retirement paradise like Phoenix which was just miles of cotton farms.

As your link reveals, NM benefited from the post war population increase largely fueled by Los Alamos and to a greater extent Sandia. Since 1970 both NM and ID have slightly more than doubled while MT has grown at half that rate, and perhaps investment in federal labs in ID has had a hand in that as in NM.

I have found Albuquerque a fine city to visit on my two trips there in the last 15 years. I would think it might have some of the same attraction to emigrants as Front Range cities like Colorado Springs and Pueblo.

[muon2]

It always been an odd state to me. It is stagnant in population while other states in the region like Texas , Arizona, Colorado , Nevada and Utah are booming.

It has the same climate as a place like Arizona which has a huge retiree population and a booming Hispanic population.

So why aren't people moving there ?

Click on this link:

Arizona and New Mexico population

Then uncheck the Arizona box, and see how much faster New Mexico grew when not compared with Arizona.   Then check Montana.   And Idaho.

Albuquerque is 3900 feet, so would a bit of an altitude problem for retirees.  And that it actually had a population, meant it could not be totally remade into a retirement paradise like Phoenix which was just miles of cotton farms.

As your link reveals, NM benefited from the post war population increase largely fueled by Los Alamos and to a greater extent Sandia. Since 1970 both NM and ID have slightly more than doubled while MT has grown at half that rate, and perhaps investment in federal labs in ID has had a hand in that as in NM.

I have found Albuquerque a fine city to visit on my two trips there in the last 15 years. I would think it might have some of the same attraction to emigrants as Front Range cities like Colorado Springs and Pueblo.

Does Pueblo really attract that many outsiders? I thought it was sort of rust belt in the rockies type place.

That's true to some extent in that the city has been stagnant since the 80's. However the surrounding area (such as Pueblo West) has contributed to double digit growth for the county in each of the last two decades.