Killeen, Texas Population 2024

Situated in Bell County, Texas, Killeen is the 21st most populous city in Texas. The city is located about 70 miles north of Austin and 3 miles outside the Fort Hood military base. The economy of Killeen depends largely on the cantonment of Fort Hood, located directly adjacent to the city. Over the years Killeen has seen rapid population growth, due to the high influx of soldiers and their families.

Real Estate and Diversity

Killeen, TX, was ranked in 2007 as the most affordable housing market in the whole of the United States with an average cost of $136,725.

In 1950, there were no blacks living in the city of Killeen until the construction of Camp Hood. A few years into the decade, Marlboro Heights, an all black subdivision was developed, and in 1956 the city school board voted in favor of integration. Today, almost 40% of Killeen's population is black and the city has almost closed the white and black homeownership gap (https://money.cnn.com/2018/04/17/news/economy/kileen-texas-homeownership/index.html).

Population Growth

At the turn of the 20th century, Killeen saw a population of around only 800. Today, this has grown to over 145,000, due mainly to the military presence in the city. Between 1940 and 1950, the population of Killeen had gone up by a multiple of over 5, from 1,300 in 1940 to over 7,045 in 1950, with an annual growth rate of 18.41%.

This population only continued to grow in the decades that followed, reaching over 23,000 in 1960, over 35,000 in 1970, over 46,000 in 1980, over 63,000 in 1990 and almost 87,000 in 1990, more than 10 times that what it was 100 years earlier. It's estimated that the population of the Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood area will grow 23% between 2015 and 2030 to reach 550,000 people.

As the railway expanded its tracks through Texas in 1881, what was a small farming community by the name of Palo Alto soon became a booming town, taking its name from Frank P. Killeen, the railroad’s assistant general manager. In the year that followed, stores, a school, and a saloon had all been built, and by 1884 the town had a hotel, a lumberyard, a blacksmith shop, two saloons, two cotton gins, two gristmills, five general stores, and roughly 350 people.

Killeen remained relatively small and isolated until the 1940s and World War II. The aforementioned Camp Hood was constructed in 1942 (renamed Fort Hood in the 1950s) as a training post to meet the demand for soldiers. This brought with it people in the thousands, not only from soldiers and their families, but contractors, laborers, and construction workers also, turning Killeen almost overnight into a military boom town. By the 1970s, Killeen had grown into a thriving city of over 35,000.