Dallas

Dallas exists because of a legislative trick in a Texas courtroom. When John Neely Bryan settled the grassy bluffs at the forks of the Trinity River in 1841, he founded a town with no natural harbor, no navigable river, and no obvious reason to thrive. What Dallas had was politicians who understood network effects before the term existed.

In the 1870s, as the Texas & Pacific Railway planned its east-west route, Dallas representatives inserted a clause requiring the junction with the Houston & Texas Central line to fall within one mile of Browder's Springs—a location known only to them, and conveniently within a mile of the Dallas County Courthouse. Before opponents realized what had happened, Dallas had made itself the center of Texas rail commerce. The population doubled within six months of the railroads' arrival. By 1890, Dallas was the most populous city in Texas.

The oil boom that began at Spindletop in 1901 brought wealth, but Dallas made a strategic choice: rather than compete with Houston for refining and petrochemicals, it captured the business side—banking, insurance, and corporate headquarters. This niche partitioning proved prescient. While Houston became America's energy capital, Dallas became its back office. The pattern accelerated: more headquarters attracted more headquarters through preferential attachment, each Fortune 500 company making the next more likely to follow.

Today Dallas-Fort Worth hosts 24 Fortune 500 headquarters—trailing only New York and Chicago—with three of the nation's ten largest companies by revenue. It recently surpassed Chicago as America's second-largest financial services hub. DFW Airport, the world's second-busiest by passenger volume, replaced the railroad junction as the connectivity engine. Corporate relocations continue flooding in, particularly from California: Fisher Investment bringing 1,200 jobs from Washington, Frontier Communications adding 3,000 from Connecticut.

The metroplex added 180,000 residents between July 2023 and July 2024, with 58% from international migration. Fort Worth crossed one million residents in 2025. Demographers project DFW will reach 10 million in the 2030s, surpassing Chicago to become America's third-largest metro. By 2026, the same network effects that made Dallas a railroad hub will determine whether it can absorb this growth while maintaining the light-touch regulatory environment that attracted it.