Dallas Employment Stagnant as Suburbs Boom

Several large corporations have opened headquarters in the suburbs of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, the core city has not grown at the same pace. "Recent headlines about large corporate relocations and consolidations, led by the highly publicized moves of Toyota, Liberty Mutual, and State Farm, are just the latest wave of a long trend of employers choosing to locate outside Dallas’s city limits, particularly in Collin and Tarrant counties," W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm report in D Magazine. Companies choosing suburban locations is common in a number of metropolitan areas, but the disparity in Dallas is much larger than other cities around the state and the country. "The Austin, Houston, and San Antonio MSAs haven’t kept pace with DFW in net job creation since 1990. However, their core cities all added more than twice as many jobs as Dallas," Cox and Alm write.  

There are number of different theories as to why the Dallas suburbs have pulled in more businesses than the city has. "Suburbs often offer an edge in cost, a key to any business. It starts with cheaper real estate. Taxes are likely to be lower, too. Suburban governments may be business-friendly, eager to bend over backwards to accommodate new employers by cutting red tape and offering financial incentives," Cox and Alm write. They also theorize that the core city is less attractive to many employees who might prefer to live in cities like Plano or Frisco.