The affordable housing shortage is reshaping parts of rural America 

When Suzanne D’Amico moved from Dallas an hour north to Celina, Texas, there was one grocery store, longhorn cattle down the road and no lights on the horizon at night.

When Suzanne D’Amico moved from Dallas an hour north to Celina, Texas, there was one grocery store, longhorn cattle down the road and no lights on the horizon at night. Farmers wearing overalls gathered for morning coffee, teenagers packed the local pizzeria after Friday night football games, and neighbors prayed together at church on Sunday. 

“It felt like we were on another planet,” said D’Amico, who has lived for nearly 30 years in Celina where she raised her children. “We weren’t just outside the city, we were completely gone from anything we considered at the time remotely civilized.”

But D’Amico’s slice of small town America is quickly vanishing. Like rural communities across the country, Celina is seeing a housing boom that made it America’s fastest growing city in 2023. Now, pastures have been replaced with densely packed homes, golf carts zip around planned communities where tractors once plowed and local businesses are being replaced with big box chains.

While the expansion of the suburbs is nothing new, a surge in home prices over the past several years has supercharged the trend, pushing homebuyers across the country further out from city centers to areas like Celina where land is cheaper and more plentiful and local barriers for developers tend to be lower.

Since the start of the pandemic, the population in rural areas has been growing for the first time in at least a decade, a U.S. Department of Agriculture analysis found. Among the 500 fastest growing cities in the country, the number of those more than 30 miles from a city center increased by 26% between 2019 to 2023, according to Census figures.