The issue.
The City of Dallas has been losing population since 2018. It peaked at 1,343,573 residents that year, and has shrunk every year since. The state of Texas keeps growing. The Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex keeps growing. The suburbs around the city keep growing. The city at the center of the metro is the only place in the region going the other direction. We are now the hole in a donut that is still growing.
Three things.
- Lower taxes per Dallasite. Dallas’s $6.9 billion in bonded debt and $11.2 billion in committed pension contributions are fixed dollar amounts that won’t shrink. Today, each of 1.3 million Dallasites carries about $13,800 of them. At two million, each would carry about $9,000. Same bills, more shoulders, lower burden per resident — without raising rates or cutting services.
- Better services on the same land. Every fire station, water main, library, park, and school in Dallas is already built and already paid for. Adding 700,000 residents on the same 385 square miles means more revenue spread across the same infrastructure — and enough density to make transit, retail, and walkable amenities economically viable in places that have waited decades for them.
- More places to age. A twenty-three-year-old in a one-bedroom over a garage. A young couple in a twelve-hundred-square-foot starter house. A sixty-five-year-old in a townhouse five blocks from the old four-bedroom. A seventy-eight-year-old in a senior cottage within walking distance of her grandkids’ school. Dallas built these in every neighborhood before 1965. It could again.