hottest headlines of 2024

Billionaires and 'burbs top Fort Worth's hottest 2024 city life stories

Rob Walton, Alice Walton, Jim Walton, Walton family, Walmart heirs, billionaires, world's richest

Siblings and Walmart heirs Rob, Alice, and Jim Walton belong to the world's richest family.

Photo by Rick T. Wilking/Getty Images

Editor's note: As we look back at the most-read Fort Worth city life stories of 2024, we see that readers really liked to know how the other half lived. Three of the top 10 headlines starred Walmart heiress Alice Walton and her family. Another hot story was about a local suburb that ranked among the wealthiest in the U.S., and another, about Fort Worth's status as an economic boomtown. Readers also ate up news about top high schools and colleges.

Here are the top 10 most popular city life stories of 2024 in Fort Worth:

1. Fort Worth billionaire Alice Walton crowned world's richest woman. Walmart heiress Alice Walton has taken back the title of world's wealthiest woman. According to a SeptemberForbes report, Walton has toppled L’Oreal heiressFrancoise Bettencourt Meyersof France to become the richest woman on the planet for the first time since 2022.

2. Fort Worth billionaire Alice Walton has world's richest family in 2024. Fort Worth billionaire Alice Walton and her kin are back on top as the world's richest family, according to Bloomberg's 2024 list of the wealthiest families on the planet, released in December. To reclaim their crown, the Waltons toppled actual royalty: the Al Nahyans, Abu Dhabi's ruling family, who came in first last year and fell to second in 2024. Qatar's ruling dynasty, the Al Thanis, came in third.

3. Affluent Fort Worth neighbor ranks among wealthiest suburbs in U.S. Wealthy Americans, increasingly, are bypassing behemoth cities like Los Angeles or New York City and settling down in smaller suburbs like Fort Worth neighbor Southlake. So said a July household income study by GoBankingRates, which listed Southlake among the wealthiest American suburbs in 2024.

4. 2 Fort Worth high schools rank among America's best in 2024, says U.S. News. Two Fort Worth high schools are dominating U.S. News and World Report's prestigious annual list of the country's best public high schools. The 2024 rankings from U.S. News, released April 23, included Fort Worth ISD's World Languages Institute and Fort Worth ISD's Young Women's Leadership Academy.

TCU ranks in the top 100 for college athletics and best student life. Facebook/TCU Showgirls

5. Fort Worth's TCU earns high honors in new ranking of top U.S. colleges. The new academic year had just started, but there was already a report card for TCU students to write home about. Niche, an education review and ranking website, rated Texas Christian University the eighth best college in Texas and the 81st top private University in America (out of 915) for 2025. Out of all 1,517 U.S. colleges ranked in Niche's new survey, TCU comes in at a respectable No. 163.

6. Fort Worth billionaire Alice Walton is world's 2nd richest woman, says Forbes. The rich got richer this year, and that includes Fort Worth billionaire Alice Walton, who is now the second wealthiest woman in the world, says Forbes. According to the 2024 Forbes World’s Billionaires List, released April 2, Walton has a net worth of $72.3 billion, up from $56.7 billion in 2023, $65.3 billion in 2022, and $61.8 billion in 2021.

7. Prosperous Fort Worth declared No. 2 best economic boomtown in America. Move over, Austin: Fort Worth's booming financial prosperity earned the city an impressive ranking of No. 2 in a list of best U.S. cities for economic growth. It outperformed all major cities in Texas. The July study, "America's Boomtowns: Top Cities for Economic Growth," from flexible workspace listing provider CoworkingCafe, ranked America's boomtowns based on population growth, GDP, employment rates, and other economic factors.

8. 2 Fort Worth suburbs make list of America's most livable small cities. Some Fort Worth suburbs stick out from the rest thanks to their happy residents, and now Mansfield got the spotlight in July. The tiny but mighty city 20 miles southeast of Fort Worth was one of six Texas cities to earn a top-100 ranking in SmartAsset's 2024 "Most Livable Small Cities" report.

Sergeant Billy Randolph Fort Worth Police Sgt. Billy Randolph, RIP. Linked In

9. Fort Worth police officer on duty hit by alleged drunk driver and killed. A Fort Worth police officer died after being hit by a car while in the line of duty. Sgt. Billy Randolph died on the morning of August 12 while working a motor vehicle accident on I-35W near Sycamore School Road. During the course of the cleanup and investigation, he was standing outside his vehicle when another vehicle drove through the accident scene and struck him.

10. 7 North Texas cities rank among safest and most affordable in U.S. Crime may be a concern for some Texans, but North Texas has it pretty good: Seven local cities – McKinney, Frisco, Grand Prairie, Plano, Carrollton, Richardson, and Denton – were named the safest and most affordable places to live in the U.S., as declared in a new report by GoBankingRates, released in June.

alice walton colleges economic boomtown high schools hot-headlines police officer small cities walmart heiress wealthiest suburbs

List News

Fort Worth elbows past Austin in ranking of biggest cities in Texas

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Fort Worth is climbing up the list of the biggest cities in Texas. According to a report from the Texas Demographic Center (TDC), Fort Worth is now the fourth largest city, with a population of nearly 1 million people.

According to the center's Texas Population Estimates report, which was released in November, Fort Worth's population measured more than 989,878, with an increase of 7.7 percent, or 70,963 people between 2020 and 2024.

The increase nudges Fort Worth past Austin, which previously held the No. 4 spot. According to the TDC, Austin's population is now at 986,928.

Houston takes the top spot, with 2.3 million residents, followed by San Antonio and Dallas. These top 5 cities are also the same cities where CultureMap has a bureau.

Texas overall has grown to a population of 30.7 million residents. It's grown by 1.6 million residents since 2020, likely thanks to all those out-of-state transplants who now call the state home.

This revelation comes months after Fort Worth claimed a spot as the 12th largest city in the U.S., based on the U.S. Census Bureau's Vintage 2023 Population Estimates. The TDC study was conducted between July 1, 2023 and January 1, 2024 and also tracked age, sex, and race/ethnicity by county.

"Fort Worth has been one of the fastest-growing large cities for several years," says Director of Texas Demographic Center Lloyd Potter in an email. "Although historically, Fort Worth has been growing steadily, the speed and size of growth have increased recently. While we do not have estimates of components of change for places, about half of Tarrant County’s population change can be attributed to net in-migration and about half to more births than deaths (natural change) between 2020 and 2023."

Here are the following top ten largest cities in the state and their populations:

Houston - 2,318,657
San Antonio - 1,496,876
Dallas - 1,308,404
Fort Worth - 989,878
Austin - 986,928
El Paso - 672,802
Arlington - 414,344
Corpus Christi - 317,742
Plano - 292,485
Lubbock - 266,289

It's just the latest accolade for Fort Worth, which recently made it to the top as a city to celebrate Christmas and one of the most fun cities.

The study sourced data from the U.S. Census and TDC annual surveys. According to the TDC, The January 1, 2024 estimates are obtained by adding births to and subtracting deaths from July 1, 2023 through December 31, 2023 to the July 1, 2023 estimates.

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