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Boom with a view: the peril and promise of being one of the fastest-growing cities in Texas.

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In a state full of legendary boomtowns, the city of San Antonio has long been the odd man out. While Houston, Dallas, and Austin all experienced multiple economic explosions in the past quarter century, San Antonio held fast to its old identity--a drowsy, largely poor, peacefully irrelevant tourist and military town where you could get a good chalupa, wander through the Alamo, and take a sun-dappled stroll along the river. The city remained, charmingly, the Land That Time Forgot. [paragraph] No more. In ease you haven't been stuck in one of its newfangled traffic jams, San Antonio is now riding the crest of a broad, diversified boom that is unlike anything Texas has ever seen. Corporate campuses of granite and travertine blossom like bluebonnets on the city's undeveloped outer edges. Vast residential subdivisions bearing names like Redbird Ranch march north and west across parts of the Hill Country that until recently housed only rock quarries and raccoons. Roads are being torn up and rebuilt, pipelines and power lines laid, limestone ridges blasted with dynamite and sculpted by Caterpillar tractors. It is hog heaven for builders, boosters, and developers and a slowly gathering nightmare for environmentalists, residents of old core neighborhoods left behind by the skyrocketing growth, and a lot of folks who liked San Antonio as it was. Either way, there is no stopping it--at least not yet--and there is no going back.

Though the local economy was beginning to change by the late nineties, most people date the San Antonio boom from 2003, when Toyota and 21 of its suppliers made the stunning announcement that they would be building a pickup truck plant with 4,700 jobs in what was previously considered the middle of nowhere--a stretch of sparsely populated ranch land about ten miles south of downtown. Since then, the city has seen the sort of growth most...

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