2000: 28,284, and the two parts' two ages

April 1, 2000 · PHC-1-16

The second count added 8,043 people — the largest single-decade gain the place will likely ever print: 28,284 residents on 26.217 square miles of land, a density of 1,078.8 persons per square mile on that census's own geography (the township parts: the Clay part 1,827.4 per square mile on its 5.64 square miles, the Harris part 873.6 on its 20.58). The median age had climbed to 37.8. Children under eighteen were 8,962 (31.7 percent); the sixty-five-and-over population was 2,285 (8.1 percent); women outnumbered men 14,317 to 13,967. The age bands print the subdivision generation mid-course: 5,285 residents aged thirty-five to forty-four and 5,293 aged forty-five to fifty-four — the two largest cohorts in the place — against 1,962 children under five.

Households and houses at the building wave's crest: 9,184 households, 8,176 of them families; 7,598 married-couple families, over half raising their own children; an average household of 3.06 and family of 3.26. Of 9,401 housing units, 9,184 stood occupied and just 217 vacant — a homeowner vacancy rate of 1.2 percent and a rental vacancy rate of 1.1 percent, the tightest housing market in this section's whole record. Ownership was near-total: 8,985 of the occupied units (97.8 percent) were owner-occupied and 199 were rented, those 199 households holding about 600 people in a place of twenty-eight thousand. Group quarters held 189 people — 176 institutionalized and 13 not — every one of them in the Clay township part; the Harris part's group-quarters count was zero.

Sources:

1. 2000 Census PHC-1-16, Summary Population and Housing Characteristics, Indiana: Table 1 (the parts' age and sex lines), Table 6 (race and Hispanic or Latino, places), Table 8 (households and families, places), Table 10 (relationship by sex, places — the parts' group-quarters lines), Table 12 (housing units, places), Tables 15–16 (area and density).