At last week's council meeting, city staff blamed the extreme loss of momentum in the Inland Port on the developer's bankruptcy and the recession. First of all, blaming the developer for his bankruptcy is like hitting the guy over the head, taking his wallet and then criticizing him for not having more money. And what about that recession? How did it affect the area around Alliance?
Using data from 2010, The Gadberry Group, a market research firm specializing in tracking affluent ZIP codes, last year published a study that described Haslet, a town near Alliance, as the nation's second hottest wealth-building location, driven largely by Alliance. Nearby Keller was the third fastest growing in the country.
Jared Boggess
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The U.S. Census Bureau reported that average household income in Haslet in 2010 was $87,140. Gadberry used its own data and algorithms to deduce that more than 300 millionaires lived in the immediate Haslet area in 2010 and that average household net worth in 2010 was $222,833.
Between the 2000 and 2010 censuses, Fort Worth itself grew by 200,000 residents, a growth rate of 38.8 percent, making it the fastest growing city of more than 500,000 people in the nation.
In that same period from 2000 to 2010, Dallas grew by 9,276 persons for a growth rate of 0.8 percent. Fort Worth's growth rate was 48 times that of Dallas.
In the last decade, Dallas County grew by 149,240 souls, according to the census, for a rate of 6.7 percent. So, of those people who did decide to come live in Dallas County, 139,964 elected not to live in the city of Dallas. Of the newcomers, 94 percent settled outside the city.
Let's look more closely at the area of the Inland Port in southern Dallas. The analyses available in 2006 when this conversation got going found that the Inland Port development, fully realized, would produce 60,000 new well-paid jobs with benefits in southern Dallas.
I looked at an analysis published by the Mayor's Southern Dallas Task Force of the three census reporting tracts where all of that growth would have taken place had it not been for the successful campaign to stymie it. The first census tract in Pleasant Grove has fewer than 10,000 jobs for almost 100,000 people, half of whom have less than a high school education. Per capita income is less than $12,000 a year.
I could walk us through the other two tracts, but you get the picture. I can get tears in my eyes looking at this stuff. Southern Dallas has got some bums in the alleys, but it also has hungry, ambitious, bright-eyed, young people looking for a shot. At least they're bright-eyed for a while. Then they find out they don't have a shot, and those bright eyes go hard and dull.
This was a shot that was taken away from them. It didn't just fly away. It didn't die on its own. People killed it. John Wiley Price killed it. Tom Leppert killed it. The Dallas Morning News killed it.
But if we spend all our time thinking about all that crap, we're just killing ourselves even worse, doing it to ourselves. Here's the thing: It ain't over. The basic advantage is still there. The highways didn't go away. Nobody has ripped up the train tracks yet, although NCTCOG is working as hard as it can to jam them up with passenger rail, which will be the same thing as ripping them up. If NCTCOG gets away with that, all of our rail will be useless for freight, and Perot's up around Alliance will be built of bars of gold.
This gets us back to the dynamite in the saddle, the part that may hurt. When Leppert effectively killed the Inland Port, he did it in part by taking it away from the City Council, where it had strong champions, and putting it "in-house," as a staff assignment for city bureaucrats.
To get this thing up and running again, it will have to be surgically removed from City Hall and given to somebody outside, somebody big, somebody national. It needs to be in the hands of somebody who can pick up a phone, get a senator or congressman or top White House policy person on the other end of the line and start talking shop without too much hello.
I think the surgery should be performed without benefit of anesthetic. But that's just me. The main thing is to get it done. Right about now.
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