Quoted: The phone number shakeup coincides with a regional population boom, said David Egan-Robertson, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Population Lab.
Demographers don’t typically focus on telephone area codes as units of study — they tend to be more interested in subdivisions used by the U.S. Census Bureau like political districts, Egan-Robertson said. Still, he noted, when an area grows, more residents and more businesses will probably need more phone numbers.
“When there’s a lot of population growth, there’s also a whole layer of commercial growth that may be going on,” he said.
In other words, when a region booms, the birth of a new area code could be one side effect.