FRISCO, Texas — The growth north of Dallas has been so dizzying that people talk about it as if it were a storm, or some other force of nature.
That’s how Heather Cowan describes it. She came to the area in 1995 to raise a family after graduating from college in South Dakota. Six months ago, she and her husband moved farther north to the quiet of Gunter, 50 miles from Dallas, “to get ahead of the curve,” as she put it. Even in rural Gunter, though, Cowan said she was starting to “feel” the growth.
She was right: The next day, Century American Development Group announced it had closed on a thousand-acre parcel in Gunter that would form part of a new development, Platinum Ranch, with 4,200 homes.
The corridor north of Dallas is capping a decade as one of America’s fastest-growing regions, pulling in droves of newcomers from California to India and turning them into newly minted Texans. The companies are coming, too. Among them are Toyota, Amazon Web Services, State Farm and others.
Where cattle once outnumbered people, new shopping malls, housing developments and office towers now reign, and a region that was once overwhelmingly white and country is now increasingly South Asian and techie.
It is also brimming with a kind of morning-in-America confidence. While the struggle to build housing has become a seemingly insoluble crisis in other parts of the country, locals talk about when—not if—Dallas’s northward march will reach Oklahoma.
If that sounds implausible, it may seem less so since Texas Instruments announced a few weeks ago it would invest up to $40 billion to build a mammoth semiconductor campus in Sherman, just 12 miles from the state line but still within commuting distance of Dallas’s northern satellites. A first laboratory is set to begin production later this year.
To drive along Preston Road, which extends 70 miles from Dallas, weaving through the towns that form its expanding frontier, is to encounter a patchwork of new chain stores and restaurants, building sites laden with steel pipes and concrete tubes, and rumbling earth movers. Signs dot the roadside advertising land for sale and communities that exist only on billboards and brochures.
It seems possible to watch in real time as the building blocks of modern American suburbia come together: first the schools, then the hospital, the fast-casual restaurants and the church. There are a surprising number of nail salons and pool contractors. And orthodontists.
“My God! We have so many dentists and orthodontists it’s crazy,” said Mary Ann Moon, who leads economic development in Prosper, a bedroom community along the route. They were, she explained, just “following the mouths.”
Arguably, Frisco is the epicenter of the North Texas boom. It was mostly agricultural land in 1990, with a population hovering around 6,000. It has since surpassed 240,000—and planners expect the city to reach a capacity of 350,000 residents in the next five years or so. Frisco is now on high school number 12.
“There are very few native Frisconians,” said Jeff Cheney, the mayor. “Pretty much everyone here is from somewhere else.”
Frisco succeeded Plano, a 1980s-vintage suburb just to the south. In turn, Frisco is being leapfrogged by Prosper, 10 miles north and home to a brand new, $53 million high-school football stadium.
It is an article of faith that Celina, a bit further up the road, will be next—and even bigger. New schools are already being built in anticipation. What sealed its future was a decision to build a $460 million, six-mile extension of the Dallas North Tollway, which parallels Preston Road, and should reach the city in 2027.
“The talent pool in North Texas is incredible. It’s a destination for young people now,” said Raymond Bellucci, chief operating officer at TIAA Retirement Solutions, which moved into a new 15-story office tower in Frisco in August. Denver, which had been its regional hub, was still “incredibly attractive,” Bellucci explained, “but we were looking more long term at: where does TIAA want to be?”
TIAA’s tower, fueled by alternative energy and stuffed with golf simulators, foliage-adorned “living” walls and other such baubles, sits in a $1.5 billion, 91-acre development built by Jerry Jones called The Star that is anchored by a splashy headquarters for his Dallas Cowboys.
“He puts a star on everything,” said Rex Glendenning, a land broker who cobbled together the parcel for the football team owner.
Glendenning has been betting since the 1987 savings-and-loan crisis ravaged the state and his own finances that Dallas would eventually gobble up the farm lands in and around Celina, where his great grandfather settled in 1887. Every year since, whatever money he had leftover he would use to buy property in the area.
“Some people are like, ‘Well, Gosh, are you mad that the new toll road is going to go through your farm?’ ” said Glendenning, 68, who has everything a casting director could ask for in a Texas land baron: the late-July drawl, a herd of prized Longhorns and the handmade alligator-skin boots embroidered with the golden REX Realty logo. “I’m going, like, ‘Well, no. I’ve been planning on it for 35 years.’”
An abundance of land may be Dallas’s greatest natural resource. It is harvested by developers and spun into houses, communities and then entire cities.
Civic leaders tend to boast about their focus on the future. For Dallas, though, it was an imperative: After the Kennedy assassination in 1963 their hometown was dubbed the southern “City of Hate.” They responded by building a metropolis whose hospitality toward business was a compulsion.
A pillar of their project was the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, a logistics hub whose location—roughly equidistant to the East and West Coasts—has made it a selling point for executives like TIAA’s Bellucci. Meanwhile, the Dallas Cowboys, their cheerleaders and the television soap opera named after the city became unintended civic ambassadors.
“We’ve got to be about the least nostalgic city anywhere,” said Cullum Clark, an economist and director of the Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative.
The booming cities north of Dallas are not without their issues. They have shown scant interest in building affordable housing for the low-skilled workers who will fill many of their service jobs. They will need to manage water. Their aesthetics may be in the eye of the beholder. And there is August.
Candace Evans, a native Chicagoan, moved to Dallas with her husband in 1980 and publishes a popular real-estate website, Candy’s Dirt. She describes the Dallas vibe as “a good place to be wealthy” and—like Los Angeles—just a bit phony. “You know, the $30,000 millionaire?”
It is also, she noted, addicted to growth—much of it unlocked by the airport and then the Tollway. “That Tollway is like liquid gold,” Evans said.
Years ago, as the six-lane highway approached, Frisco made a couple of fateful decisions. Unlike Plano, it decided not to participate in DART, the region’s public transit system. Instead, it invested its share of the Texas 8.25% sales tax in infrastructure in order to lure companies and real-estate developers.
Frisco also poured money into schools. The idea was to become the destination of choice for well-educated workers as companies moved major facilities to North Texas. An emphasis on smaller schools has yielded a dozen high schools, 43 elementaries—and a wealth of mascots, from Racc00ns to Rangers.
“Intentionality,” is an oft-heard buzz word in Frisco. That is, rather than allowing developers to build willy-nilly, everything proceeds from a master plan—integrating parks and nature trails into one neighborhood or prioritizing townhouses and urban density in another. “We wanted to be intentional about creating a sense of place and making different areas unique,” Mayor Cheney explained.
Seemingly, no detail is too small. When a city-commissioned study of cellphone data revealed that Frisconians were leaving to spend money at microbreweries elsewhere, the council changed ordinances to allow for distilleries, breweries and wineries. It then enticed the Rollertown Beerworks from Celina to set up shop.
Chad Sterling is chief executive of Altair Global, a consultancy that helps other companies relocate workers. His own firm moved to Frisco six years ago after decades in and around Dallas.
Sterling was “blown away,” he recalled, when the mayor called to welcome him before Altair had even opened its doors. It was, he believed, a small but meaningful sign of the alignment between government and business in Texas, a state that misses no opportunity to remind New Yorkers and Californians that it has no personal income tax.
“There’s not a lot of red tape that you have to go through. The process is very easy. And, certainly, from a tax standpoint, the low rate is very advantageous,” Sterling said.
At some point, he reckoned, the “growth spigot” would turn off—but not anytime soon. “There’s still a lot of growth north of the Celina area pretty much to the border of Oklahoma that’s still out there to be had,” Sterling said.
Those pouring money into Frisco are a “who’s who” of Texas developers that includes Craig Hall, Ross Perot, Jr., Fehmi Karahan and the Hunt family. It is Jones, though, who put a halo over the city when he brought the Cowboys in 2016.
Ford Center, the 12,000-seat indoor stadium where the Cowboys practice, is the focal point of The Star campus. Frisco’s school district contributed $20 million to help build it. If that sounds misguided, Frisconians view it as a shrewd investment: Not only did it help to lure Jones, it also gives local high schools a place to play their games at a fraction of what it would cost to build their own facilities.
Said Cheney: “When you look at high-school football stadiums in Texas, you’ve got to spend $60 million or you’re not trying.”
A decade earlier, the Hunt family built a Frisco stadium for their FC Dallas soccer club. “If you looked at the old aerials…it looks like they built a 20,000-seat stadium in a cow pasture, which is what they did,” Cheney recalled.
More recently, Frisco has lured the Professional Golf Association from its longtime headquarters in Palm Beach, Fla., to a new 600-acre complex that includes a high-end resort and two courses. The PGA hosted this year’s women’s championships there, with the men’s edition to follow in 2027.
Bordering its headquarters on one side is a forthcoming, 2,500-acre city-within-a-city called Fields, which will have its own collection of golf-adjacent luxury housing, hotels, shops and 11 million square feet of office space. A Universal theme park is set to open next summer.
Her main focus, says Gloria Salinas, Frisco’s vice president of economic development, now is to recruit more employers like the PGA and TIAA—both to diversify the tax base and so that fewer Frisconians have to commute. “Plano 20 years ago is where we are now,” Salinas said. “We have another 15 to 20 years of large corporate development ahead.”
It can be disorienting to land in a place that is growing so quickly, and where everything is so new. Holly and Andi Haven, a mother-daughter local real-estate team, talk about the opening of a local grocery store or Whataburger outlet as if they were historical events.
Who is their typical home-buyer? A middle-class, conservative Christian family of four from California, who are searching for a good school district. They will likely end up trading a c0ndominium for a four-bedroom house and feel like millionaires.
It might be in a Prosper master community like Light Farms, where antique tractors are a decorative motif, or Windsong Ranch, which boasts a 5-acre man-made lagoon. The town’s median home price is a hefty $894,000. Mingling is easy, Holly said, particularly for the stay-at-home mothers: “You can just kind of pop in, go to the community pool and meet all your neighbors.” The vibe is Real Housewives-meets-blockparty: If someone is toting a Yeti cup, there’s bound to be alcohol in it.
Far from remaking the place in the image of California, the Havens discovered, many of the newbies come to embrace Texas tradition with the zeal of converts. They attend the high-school football games on Friday nights and shell out as much as $300 for over-the-top chrysanthemum corsages to wear to homecoming. “They love it,” Andi said. “They didn’t have it [where they’re from].”
Patrick Kennedy, an urbanist, marveled at how Austin seemed to cycle through multiple identities in the 23 years he had lived in Texas—from defiantly weird college town and state capital to tech behemoth and wealthy Californian enclave, among others.
By contrast, Dallas and its surroundings seemed to keep being Dallas—adept at enveloping newcomers. “It doesn’t feel that different because it’s always been a city of transients,” Kennedy explained.
Newcomers are increasingly diverse. Forty-four percent of Frisco’s students are Asian, according to the school district’s data. Of those, the majority is estimated to be South Asian.
On a bustling Indians in Frisco Facebook group, members advertise bandhej silk saris, catering and, of course, real estate listings. In some of the newer Prosper neighborhoods, Indians and Indian-Americans account for more than 90% of the lots, according to Moon, the economic development head.
“This is no longer good ol’ white boy country,” she said.
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