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Dallas

Growing, Shrinking, and Rethinking

Since the 1870s, when Dallas became the junction for north-south and east-west railroad lines, it has been one of the nation’s primary trade centers. The city began growing then, and it hasn’t stopped. In the 1920s, cotton increased the local land value, and in the 1930s the discovery of the East Texas Oil field 100 miles outside the city turned Dallas into a boomtown.

High tech companies, such as Ling- Temco-Vought and Texas Instruments, further fueled economic growth starting in the 1950s, and despite slowdowns, Dallas mostly maintained a high level of economic and population growth through the 1990s.   The resulting physical growth has mostly been outwards and uncontrolled, turning the city into one of the country’s most dramatic examples of urban sprawl. The Dallas - Fort Worth area is referred to as an extended region, which includes two separate cities and a combined population of 5 million. And it’s still growing.

But as Dallas has spread, its inner city has stagnated. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, primarily African American neighborhoods inside Dallas lost a slight percentage of their population, while population in the suburbs grew by 40 percent. The city’s homeownership rate has declined over the last decade, and the ratio of low-income renters to low-cost housing is about three to one.

Further, the city suffers from acute racial disparities in income: according to the 2000 U.S. Census, typical household income for blacks lags that for whites by $23,000; the Hispanic-white gap is $19,000.   This largely aligns with a similarly striking gap in educational attainment: fifty percent of all whites in Dallas have college degrees, compared to 14 percent of blacks and 7 percent of Hispanics.