Earlier this month, the Bondurant city council approved plats for two developments that will add 240 homes, the Des Moines Register reported. The once-small suburb more than doubled in population between 2000 and 2010 to become Iowa’s 99th-largest city. In 2015, a special census reported a population of 5481, vaulting it past SIXTEEN county seats and closing in on more.
Now, while “housing units” include individual apartments in federal census statistics, those are practically nonexistent in rural Iowa. With that taken into account, building 240 houses is roughly the 2010 census equivalent of adding:
- Burt (pop. 533, 232 housing units)
- Delmar (pop. 525, 227 housing units)
- Garwin (pop. 527, 254 housing units)
- Latimer (pop. 507, 230 housing units)
- Maynard (pop. 518, 239 housing units)
You get the idea. Adding merely the 440th-largest city in Iowa (Garwin) to what officially was the 99th-largest but is now unofficially around 71st would propel Bondurant past seven more county seats to be breathing down Orange City’s neck at the 6000 mark.
That is, if it didn’t happen already. The special census was three years ago, after all.