The secret sauce of North Texas suburban growth - The Dallas Morning News

Americans are flocking to suburban towns, and North Texas suburbs are among their fastest-growing destinations. An online tool recently launched by The New York Times helps explain why.

The Times calculator lets users prioritize among some 30 attributes they care about in choosing where to live, and it then provides a personalized ranking of several thousand localities. The takeaway: America’s high-growth cities are succeeding because they give most Americans what they want in a hometown.

The calculator is a fun tool, but one thing it doesn’t explain is why some suburbs are attracting so many more new residents than others that seem to offer similar benefits. The growth patterns in North Texas are not coincidental; there is a secret sauce that explains why, for example, Frisco, which does very well in the Times assessment, is growing faster than Euless, which the Times ranks No. 1.

If a family cares about jobs, schools, crime, quality of life and affordability, the calculator points them mostly toward suburbs in heartland metropolitan areas. Trying several combinations of these preferences, I found the top 50 recommendations every time included the North Texas cities of Plano, McKinney, Frisco and Allen — along with towns such as Eden Prairie, Minn.; Carmel, Ind.; and Dublin, Ohio.

It’s not surprising that these suburbs are growing rapidly, since millions of Americans value living in safe, affordable communities with good schools, quality-of-life amenities and high-opportunity workplaces. Of the 972 counties with population over 50,000, more than half of the fastest-growing 50 are suburban counties within large metros. Only one is a large metro’s core county, Travis County, which contains Austin.

Even if people care about their neighbors’ political affiliations, the relatively “purple” North Texas suburbs make the top 50 for all preference combinations, though suburbs in Minnesota drop out of the top 50 for those who prefer living around Republicans and the Ohio suburbs don’t make it for people preferring Democrats.

It’s remarkably hard to come up with a list of preferences that leads the calculator to recommend coastal cities such as New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco. These cities only make the top 50 if one cares intensely about bars and other urban amenities but not about schools, crime, or affordability. That explains why young high-income professionals without kids might prefer them, but most other populations settle elsewhere.

And I was unable to come up with any preference combination that pushed my hometown of Dallas into the top 50 recommendations. This may account for why Dallas grew only 9% from 2010 to 2020, based on new census data, while Collin and Denton counties grew between 36% and 37%.

Texas suburbs may be a “new land of plenty,” according to a widely circulated Times article by columnist Farhad Manjoo, which accompanies the calculator and describes why. He points to the desirability of inner-ring North Texas suburbs such as Arlington, Euless, Garland and Mesquite.

But Manjoo’s analysis doesn’t account for which Texas suburbs are growing fastest. The four inner-ring suburbs noted in the article have grown just 7% on average since 2010, compared with 40% for the Collin County cities of Allen, Frisco, McKinney and Plano.

Manjoo focuses on unemployment rates, affordability and racial diversity but leaves out other attributes that many prize, such as schools, safety and quality of life.

America’s fastest-growing localities are primarily suburbs that increasingly perform all the functions of a city, from good housing choices and schools to job centers and appealing recreational amenities, as the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative shows in a forthcoming report. Having a rich mix of jobs and neighborhoods keeps commuting times down and makes local life more interesting.

The four Collin County suburbs have daytime working populations roughly equal to their nighttime populations of working residents, in contrast to the four inner-ring cities — bedroom communities where the ratio of daytime to nighttime population is relatively low.

Each of the fast-growing suburbs is investing aggressively in greenspace and walkable mixed-use centers and ranks among America’s top cities for quality of life at the right price point, based on WalletHub survey data. These cities have also outperformed in new housing investment, issuing five times more building permits than inner-ring suburbs relative to population between 2010 and 2019. That’s why home price-to-income ratios are lower in the Collin County suburbs.

Cities that give most people what they want are winning in the competition for talent, which in turn attracts businesses and makes suburbs like Frisco very prosperous places.

People in the Collin County cities with associate degrees or some college earn median incomes 29% higher than people of similar educational attainment in the inner-ring suburbs. The Collin County suburbs also create rich opportunities for diverse populations, which explains why Black populations have grown 52% on average in the four Collin County cities since 2010, compared with 18% in the inner-ring suburbs.

It’s not enough for cities to be affordable. To thrive, they must be diverse, vibrant places to live and work — the secret sauce that’s helping many North Texas cities win.

J.H. Cullum Clark is a director of the George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative. He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.

Find the full opinion section here. Got an opinion about this issue? Send a letter to the editor and you just might get published.

Adblock test (Why?)

"Sauce" - Google News
December 12, 2021 at 02:31PM
https://ift.tt/3GERfUD

The secret sauce of North Texas suburban growth - The Dallas Morning News
"Sauce" - Google News
https://ift.tt/35DSBgW
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update

Bagikan Berita Ini