![]() Likewise, only five of these metros have more growth-friendly land-use rules, based on a data set compiled by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. metros with more than 1 million people outperform DFW on an index of economic freedom measuring tax levels, government spending, and labor rules developed by economists at SMU’s Bridwell Institute for Economic Freedom. Today, Dallas is pulling away economically from the nation’s long-established urban centers because of a distinctive policy orientation: growth-friendly, with lighter-touch business regulation and lower taxes than longtime urban centers in the Northeast, the Midwest, or California. Gunther described downtown Dallas as “a mini-Manhattan.” ![]() New York travel writer John Gunther dismissed Houston as uncouth and money-obsessed in a 1946 profile but praised Dallas as “a highly sophisticated little city,” with fine hotels, restaurants, and department stores, epitomized by Neiman Marcus. It is what it is … because the men of Dallas damn well planned it that way.” Starting in the 1930s, the Dallas Citizens Council, a business group representing what historian Darwin Payne has called “the local oligarchy,” remade the city, building parks and cultural institutions, promoting the growth of Southern Methodist University, and creating annual tourist attractions-especially the State Fair of Texas and the Cotton Bowl college football classic. As Fortune observed in 1949, “Dallas doesn’t owe a thing to accident, nature, or inevitability…. Texas remained, in the words of governor (and Dallasite) Pappy O’Daniel, “New York’s most valuable foreign possession.”īut even as they genuflected eastward, the young city’s business leaders had big plans and a talent for self-promotion. Still, the state’s economy depended on resource extraction, an industry controlled by the big eastern cities. In the early 20th century, the Texas oil boom raised the region’s profile, making Dallas a local financial center. If DFW is really going to vault into the ranks of top-tier global cities, it will need to offer not just suburban safety and quality of life but also more options for those who want to live in a traditional urban setting, as well as better economic opportunities for residents of neighborhoods that have been left behind. Demographers project that DFW will reach 10 million people sometime in the 2030s, surpassing Chicago to become America’s third-largest metro area.Īt the same time, some of the region’s core urban areas, particularly Southern Dallas, continue to struggle. Much of this growth has come from net domestic migration: Among America’s top 20 metros, DFW boasts the fourth-highest rate of net inbound migration (including millennials), and the area has experienced a massive surge in its foreign-born population. Population, too, has surged almost three times faster than the average for the nation’s 50 largest metros. DFW’s economy has grown markedly faster than those of its three largest rivals (New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago), and it has come through the COVID-19 pandemic with less employment loss than any other metro among the nation’s 12 largest. The Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex is now home to 24 Fortune 500 company headquarters, trailing only New York and Chicago 40 years ago, the region had fewer than five. This is an edited version of a post previously published by the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
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