It's not dinner time yet, and it's past lunch hour, but the Slick Pig BBQ on the outskirts of this small Southern city is hopping with customers.

And anyone who's not buying a pork sandwich is out driving down the main commercial street that arcs through Murfreesboro.

Once a sleepy Tennessee town with a Civil War past, it's now a booming mini-metropolis poised for continued growth. Population here grew 51 percent in the 1990s and has surged another 26 percent since then.

This small city near Nashville, in the center of the state, typifies a broader pattern nationwide. Everyone knows about the rapid rise of Sun Belt cities like Atlanta, Phoenix, and Las Vegas. But a sizeable share of the nation's population growth is also happening in smaller cities that might escape notice unless one stops to look.

Often these cities, too, are in the Sun Belt – and the fastest growing ones now are overwhelmingly not on the gold coasts but in affordable inland areas. A recently released list of the fastest growing US cities, as tracked by the Census Bureau, makes the point.

"All but one or two [of the top 10] were in the South or in the West … the 'inner Sun Belt,'" says demographer Kenneth Johnson of Loyola University in Chicago. And almost all, he says, are "on the outer edges of a bigger city."

The rise of this inner Sun Belt is driven by affordable and available land – and the jobs that are gravitating to it. Here in Rutherford County, Tenn., within an easy drive of Nashville, home prices have avoided both boom and bust.

In fact, across much of the South, the steady tandem growth of housing and paychecks has helped many communities escape the housing slump that has hit much of the nation over the past year.

In Murfreesboro, it seems, everyone has a job, a house, and a car, and they are driving down Memorial Boulevard to get to Lowe's or the Hobby Lobby. Managing all this growth is a challenge, but many residents say so far, so good.

"It's grown nicely," in a way that's good for business, says Sara Foy, as she serves up sandwiches at the Slick Pig. "We're progressively getting busier."

Ms. Foy has worked at the small restaurant, with a smokehouse out back, for four years. She moved here with her parents from Vermont about a decade ago, part of the ongoing migration of families and working-age people to the Sun Belt.

The snowdrifts of Vermont were a motivating factor, Foy says. But the dominant force for many migrants to places like Murfreesboro is the chance to live a suburban lifestyle without a long commute.

"It has to do with affordability. It has to do with freshness. It has to do with a mix of jobs and amenities," says William Frey, a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington. "The more affordable regions of the country are growing faster."

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