North Texas added more than a million new residents over the last decade, which has strengthened the economy, Laila Assanie, a senior business economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, told KERA Radio.

The Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metroplex area is the fastest growing metropolitan area in the U.S.

According Assanie, more than half of new North Texas residents moved from outside of Texas: 33 percent came from other states; 20 percent are immigrants.

“It’s not as if we’ve seen growth just in the urban core or just in the suburbs,” she said. “We’ve actually seen growth in the northern suburbs, in the southern suburbs and in the central city as well.”

DFW is now the top apartment market in the nation, with the region adding more than 150,000 apartments since the beginning of last decade, Assanie says.

Assanie told KERA that nearly a million new net jobs were created in the last ten years. Only New York City and Los Angeles reported higher numbers.

According to Assanie, four sectors directly benefitting from the growth are finance and insurance, professional and business services, transportation and warehousing.