Started in 2004, the festival offers a 5k run, arts and crafts booths, athletic competitions and musical showcases put on by the local schools, all in honor of the pungent vegetable. It was onions, after all, that put Princeton — and Collin County, for that matter — on the map. In the 1940s, when the population was only 500, Princeton’s farmers were sending thousands of pounds of onions across the country every year.
That was the first time they realized they needed more bodies in town.
In the center of town a migratory camp was built. Seventy-six cabins, each equipped with two beds and an oven, were erected for several hundred migrants who flocked to Collin County during the onion and cotton seasons. In 1945, the humble dwellings became home to German prisoners of war who, for eight months, were paid $2 a day for their labor. Months after the war ended, they were sent home.
Eventually the camp became the J.M. Caldwell Sr. Community Park — one of four parks in Princeton. A plaque commemorates the land’s history, and a rusted water tower still looms over the park’s baseball fields and picnic areas.
It was water that initiated Princeton’s second population trickle. In the ‘50s, construction of the Lake Lavon reservoir helped attract people to Princeton, and by 2000 the town was home to 3,477 people. (For comparison, Friday Night Lights’ small-town Odessa, Texas, had a population of 91,000 in the same year.) Onions were no longer the pulse of Princeton; instead, the burgeoning city of Plano, about 20 miles away, had become the business center of Collin County.
In 2020, the U.S. census found just over 17,000 residents called Princeton home. Estimates from 2023 show that number had jumped 64%, to 28,000. Census data shows that Princeton is now the third-fastest-growing municipality in the entire country. Three other Collin County towns, Prosper, Anna and Celina, also make the list.
The once sleepy town has woken up, but the growing pains have been frustrating for residents and leaders alike.
“No one was prepared for the mass growth that we had,” Princeton’s mayor, Brianna Chacón, said in an interview with the Texas Standard earlier this year. “And it is too much. It is too quick, and no one was adequately prepared for this.”
Traffic is a major pain point with Princeton’s residents; as families have moved in, roads are deteriorating and the city hasn’t been able to keep up with needed maintenance. The town’s backroads and housing developments surround four-lane U.S. Highway 380. Two lanes travel east, two lanes travel west. All four are congested through much of the day, and unnavigable during rush hours.
Most residents commute out of Princeton to work, and Chacón said that most residents are spending “a good majority of their day” sitting on Highway 380 instead of “being at home with their families.”
The Texas Department of Transportation has proposed turning the four-lane highway into an eight-lane freeway, but funding has yet to be identified. Princeton’s most recently approved city budget allocates $17 million for the streets that are city-managed. (The town’s $112.7 million budget for the upcoming fiscal year is a 59% increase from last year’s.)
The police force is short 30 officers, and the local school district is expected to grow by 10,000 students in the next decade, forcing district leaders to evaluate where, exactly, those children are supposed to go and who is supposed to teach them.
And water is an issue. Tommy Mapp, Princeton’s director of public works, said an assessment of the city’s water connection supply had once found that the city had five years before it would be tapped out. That number is now closer to three years.
“We’re looking for a little bit of breathing room, some time to reevaluate how we’re growing,” Mapp told the City Council in September, as the seven representatives and the mayor talked over what to do about Princeton’s “unsustainable” growth.
In a unanimous vote, the council agreed a pause was in order. A 120-day moratorium on residential property permits was issued in an attempt to buy the city’s police, utility and infrastructure departments some time to figure out what to do. That moratorium expires at the end of January and could be extended, if needed, Chacón said.
The Exurban Flight
There is something to be said for how devoted Dallasites are to their neighborhoods. Local shops in Bishop Arts, Deep Ellum, Lake Highlands and Oak Lawn sell hats and stickers that advertise Dallas’ trendiest pockets; and, whether you want to admit it or not, there is a sect of Dallasites that proudly wears those hats and slaps the stickers onto water bottles like their neighborhood is some club.And Dallasites like to stay in their neighborhoods. Legacy West in Plano makes for the exciting occasional day trip, but anything north of that may as well be Oklahoma. Lake Highlands has a Top Golf and a Target — what more could they want? Oak Cliff has run clubs and craft breweries — what more could they want?
It would have been easy for Dallas to go on, oblivious to what happens up north, if not for the results of the census released earlier this year. For the first time, North Texas’ impressive growth was not spearheaded by Dallas County but by the suburbs and those northern Collin County towns we had, for so long, ignored.
In 2023, more people left Dallas County than moved here. Dallas ranked 8th in the country for negative net domestic migration, losing 34,000 residents seeking something Big D, evidently, doesn’t offer. The modest population growth that did occur was thanks to more Dallas County babies being born than Dallas County residents dying.
The latest census data points to a trend happening across Texas’ most populated cities, says David Garcia, policy director with the housing policy group Up For Growth. The organization publishes an annual report on housing availability, and this year’s study found that Dallas-Fort Worth ranked as one of the worst metro areas in the country for housing underproduction. With affordable housing lagging behind demand, in Dallas-Fort Worth and the cities’ suburbs, residents are now fleeing to the exurbs in search of affordable housing, Garcia said.
“I think there's a perception that a lot more home building happens in Texas, and that the rules and regulations there are a lot more permissive to home building. I think that's generally true, but what we're also seeing is that there's tremendous demand in Texas for housing fueled mostly by domestic migration,” Garcia said. “What we found in most Texas cities was that most of the growth was happening on the suburban and exurban fringes.”
For Dallas, that growth has crawled north thanks, in part, to the Dallas North Tollway. The tollway is managed by the North Texas Tollway Authority, and property values surrounding NTTA roadways have doubled since the start of the century,The Dallas Morning News reported earlier this year.
While Dallas’ northern suburbs have been growing for decades, real estate agent Lacey Brutschy noticed a shift in the north-of-Dallas development in 2017, when Legacy West was opened in Plano. The live-shop-eat-stroll development was, and is, cool, and has solidified the growth trend along the North Dallas Tollway that Brutschy had long had her eye on. Plano’s coolness has crawled up and east over to Allen, which has then crawled up to McKinney, like a pinpoint that grows radially outward.
“These developers will go and they'll buy land that is cheaper, but in order for that land to be desirable, it needs to be close to the last thing that was large,” Brutschy said. “You're talking about a product that is much cheaper to purchase. If you're looking for a first time home, you could still get them in Princeton in the [$200,000s] when this was originally being developed.”
North Texas towns develop in two ways, she explained. The first is a tried and true method, but the second, trendier option has exploded in popularity in step with Collin County’s population.
The first option: Build an impressive school district “and they will come.” This approach was perfected by Southlake, whose school system was a draw for high-dollar residents whose taxes helped fuel the district’s success.
The second, trendier option: Develop walkable communities with a niche. Known as “master-planned communities,” where the sprawl of white picket fence neighborhoods is broken up by community gardens, trails, lazy rivers and dog parks. Harvest, a 1,200-acre community in Celina, boasts a live music pavilion and food trucks. Generally, Brutschy said, an elementary school is adjacent to or in the center of the new developments.
But in Princeton, she didn’t see either of these methods happen. Instead, houses went up “quickly and cheaply,” and considerations like traffic studies or bringing in another grocery store were left in the dust.
“I would assume that Princeton saw development money and said yes, instead of trying to figure out how to best make Princeton a livable, modern city that would attract people that absolutely adored living in Princeton,” she said.
What Brings People to Princeton
TJ Glowicz was living in Arlington when he found out his employer was relocating to McKinney in 2022. The idea of a 50-mile commute was “abysmal,” so he started looking to Collin County to find a new home. Princeton stood out from the competition for one reason.“I moved there for housing prices,” Glowicz said.
The price of housing is a huge draw for the town. Of Brutschy’s clients interested in leaving Dallas and heading north of Plano, 75% are hoping to find a home they can afford. It’s rare she hears interest in a “rural lifestyle” as a reason for looking in the area.
The town is packed with developments with names that sound like candle scents: “Princeton Crossroads” and “Cypress Bend” and “Lake Meadow.” The homes are varying degrees of McMansion-y depending on the development. Plots of land sprout signs advertising for developments still to come, but if the upturned dirt and wood house frames don’t denote the newness of the neighborhoods, the small trees planted in each front yard should.
When Glowicz decided to purchase a home in a 2016 Princeton development, he was excited to hear that a new shopping center anchored by a Market Street grocery store was in the works. Two years later, he is still waiting for ground to be broken, and the demand for the grocery store is becoming more noticeable by the day.
“There's only that one Walmart that kind of serves all of Princeton, and that's starting to get pretty crowded,” Glowicz said. “If you need light bulbs and you don't want to go down to Ace and pay the extra three or four dollars, then you're gonna end up sitting in like a 10-minute line trying to get to the self checkout.”
Neighboring towns do have grocery options — Allen has a Whole Foods and an HEB, Prosper has a Target, McKinney has a Kroger — but getting to each requires planning. Glowicz says he “plans his week around the shopping” because the traffic in Princeton has gotten so congested in the last few years. Highway 380 backs up during rush hour, and the overflow traffic clogs up backroads, he says. It is clear to him that “they did not plan” for the number of cars trying to make their way through the town.
Still, there are more things he likes about Princeton than he dislikes. Even with the town’s rapid growth there is a strong sense of community; the annual onion festival is a staple, and the 4th of July celebration offers an “impressive” fireworks display. It’s the kind of place where neighbors look out for each other, Glowicz said.
And with the steady stream of young families moving in, there is an energy to Princeton’s gatherings. Only 6% of residents are over the age of 65, census data shows, and more than 38% are under 18. In a “State of the District” luncheon last spring, Princeton Independent School District Superintendent Donald McIntyre warned that commercial growth in the town will be pivotal to the district's success, “so we get more tax dollars without [more] students.”
At the Sept. 23 Princeton City Council meeting where the moratorium was approved, Dorinda Powell, a longtime resident who has witnessed developers “devour” the land in Princeton, applauded the pause as a “smart move.”
“I feel I speak for Princeton ISD as well, being a retired teacher myself,” Powell told the council. “This gives the school district a chance to try to catch up.”
Princeton developed quickly and cheaply without much consideration for traffic increases or the need for more commercial development.
Mike Brooks
Introducing the Moratorium
In implementing a temporary moratorium on residential building, Princeton is hoping to catch its breath. In a September council meeting, Chacón said the first time a moratorium was suggested to her was in 2021.“I have been wanting to do this for a long time,” she said.
Princeton is not alone. In the Carolinas, where a sizable population surge is underway, once-small towns have implemented similar halts on building. Like Princeton, they cite traffic congestion and utility availability as concerns.
“Our rush hours are generally between 3 to 7 p.m., and anywhere in that time, it will take you 30 to 45 minutes to get to a place where it would generally only take you seven minutes to go,” Terrance Johnson told the Observer. Johnson was voted onto the Princeton City Council in the November election. “So the residents are feeling it,” he added.
Before running for council Johnson sat on the city’s economic development corporation board, and although he doesn’t know what “could have [been] done to completely annihilate” Princeton’s traffic, he does believe that the council needs to prioritize commercial development to keep the town’s amenities in line with the population demand.
Johnson is critical of the work done by Princeton’s previous city councils. As the town’s population exploded in the last four years, he believes a lack of planning has put an unnecessary strain on city resources.
While he “wasn’t privy” to the executive sessions that led the council to believe the moratorium was the right way to proceed with Princeton’s development, Johnson is concerned that the ordinance “sends the wrong message” to commercial developers who could see the pause as a sign the town’s leaders do not want to continue growing. He’s an economic development guy at heart; a new grocery store and a movie theater are at the top of his list for businesses he’d like to see move to town.
“Does [the moratorium] say that we're not prepared or we don't welcome [development]? That the type of work that they'll need to make their industry successful, are we putting a stop on that?” Johnson said. “I was worried about the messaging more than putting a pause on the housing.”
The timeout on building does not affect developments that are already in the works, or any projects that have already been approved. Until the moratorium is over, developers are able to apply for a waiver to build which would be voted on by the council.
A grocery store, a movie theater, new restaurants and new schools need water to build and operate, and supply of water is a concern that officials are hoping the moratorium will help address.
In September, Mapp told the council that the pause will allow a planned extension to the town’s pump station time to get ahead of Princeton’s growth curve. Several elevated water storage tanks are also in the works to be built in the next few years.
“There is a cost to build the infrastructure to support outward growth,” Garcia said. “It's not cheap to build all these new roads and run sewer and utility lines out to these far-flung places.”
The Observer asked how much the bolstering of Princeton’s water supply will cost the town, but did not get a response.
Whether the residents like it or not, Princeton has become much more than an onion town.
One-hundred-twenty days will not be nearly enough time to fix all of Princeton’s issues, Chacón told the council as the moratorium was approved. But it could be a start on figuring out what has gone wrong up to this point, and what the way out will be.
“I do think that things have changed for forever,” Chacón said. “We’ll never be that little small town again. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do something better moving forward.”
