The spectacular growth of the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area

 Joel Kotkin:

Located on the Southern Plains, far from America’s coasts and great river systems, the Dallas–Fort Worth metropolitan area epitomizes the new trends in American urbanism. Over the past decade, DFW has grown by some 1.3 million people, to reach a population of just under 7.7 million, making it the nation’s fourth-largest metro, based on new figures from the 2020 census. Rather than building on natural advantages, the metroplex owes its tremendous growth to railroads, interstate highways, and airports, plus an unusual degree of economic freedom and affordability.

There’s an adage in Texas about a braggart being someone who’s “all hat and no cattle.” But you can’t say that about “Big D,” rapidly emerging as the de facto capital of the American Heartland. The DFW 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. 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.

Population, too, has surged almost three times faster than the average for the nation’s 50 largest metros. 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. Demographers project that DFW will reach 10 million people sometime in the 2030s, surpassing Chicago to become America’s third-largest metro area.

Dallas–Fort Worth is emerging as a megacity but a distinctly polycentric one—more like Los Angeles than New York or Chicago. As of 2017, the Dallas central business district contained only 11 percent of DFW’s total office space and only 5.2 percent of the region’s office space under construction. Even including Fort Worth’s smaller downtown, the area has a smaller share of its office space in traditional downtowns than almost any other large American city. Since 2010, more than 87 percent of the metro area’s population growth has been outside the city of Dallas, as has virtually all the region’s job growth. That growth has been concentrated in two corridors: one stretching from the northern suburbs almost to the Oklahoma border; and another radiating outward from downtown Fort Worth.
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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. Only four of the 53 U.S. 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. 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.

These factors have helped the region amass major advantages on living costs and costs of doing business over the largest metros of the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. According to one measure, Texas’s cost of living is about 6 percent below the national average, while California’s is about 50 percent above. Median home prices in DFW were 4.3 times median household income in late 2020, compared with an average of 5.6 times median household income in the nation’s 20 largest metros and as high as nine times in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley.

DFW’s location and cost advantages have become powerful magnets for businesses. Already home to the headquarters of well-established companies like Texas Instruments, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Kimberly-Clark, and DR Horton, DFW in recent years has rapidly acquired headquarters for such elite companies as the California-based Jacobs Engineering, Fluor, Toyota Motor North America, McKesson, Tenet Healthcare, CBRE, and Charles Schwab.
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Avoiding the evils of liberalism can lead to greater growth and prosperity for an area.  

When I was in college several years ago, there was a common expression of "bigger than Dallas."  Right now there are fewer places that can make that claim.  

I eventually gravitated toward Houston and worked as an attorney in the finance business that greatly expanded the development of that metro area.  Southwest Airlines got its start flying people between the two metros and some people actually used the airline for commuting on occasions.