In 1966, lawyer Herb Kelleher met a client, investment banker Rollin King, for a drink in the bar at the venerable St. Anthony Hotel in downtown San Antonio. Kelleher was looking to start a business, and King, a pilot, had noticed that Texas business executives often chartered planes to fly between large cities in the state because ordinary airfares were so high. Kelleher and King were both entrepreneurs, and they discussed starting an airline to serve Texas, much as Pacific Southwest Airlines had done in California.
The legend is that King drew a triangle on a cocktail napkin, showing how the new airline would connect the state’s major markets. Like so much mythology about Texas, this legend is only partly true. King did not draw a triangle on a cocktail napkin that day. But he did hatch the idea with Kelleher, who went on to be the airline’s CEO. The following year, they incorporated what is now Southwest Airlines, and four years after that, Southwest became the first substantial discount air carrier — connecting Houston, Dallas and San Antonio. It’s now the third-largest airline in the United States, carrying more passengers than even United Airlines.
Kelleher and King are emblematic of the people who have created modern Texas. They grew up elsewhere — Kelleher in New Jersey and King in Ohio — but headed to Texas as young men to make their fortune. They went not to a rural area or a small town but to a big city. They were, in today’s parlance, entrepreneurial “disruptors,” challenging a well-established system of air travel in the service of a new idea and fighting a four-year legal battle against established airlines — Continental and Braniff — before starting service. And they understood that Texas’ prosperity depended not on rural areas and cowboy mythology but on an interconnected urban economy based in four large metropolitan areas. In other words, they understood that the Texas Triangle is — as urbanist Joel Kotkin put it decades later — the “economic guts” of the state.
Indeed, in starting Southwest Airlines, Kelleher and King practically invented the idea of the Texas Triangle. Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston were both large, prosperous metropolitan areas, but their economies were separate. (In those days, business leaders in the two cities tried hard to stay out of each other’s way.) San Antonio was a mostly a military town. Austin was a small state capital with a university.
But in the half century since the Triangle was supposedly drawn on the cocktail napkin, these four metropolitan areas have grown rapidly and their economies have become increasingly interdependent. The Texas Triangle has become one of the fastest-growing and most economically powerful regions in the world.
In writing our new book The Texas Triangle, we are very much inspired by the spirit of King’s apocryphal cocktail napkin. We believe the Texas Triangle defines the “New Texas” and will play a dominant role in determining its economic future, its demographic patterns and its political priorities. It’s very much in the interest of the state as a whole to encourage the continued growth and success of the Texas Triangle.
An economic powerhouse
Today, some 19 million people live in the Texas Triangle — defined solely as the 35 counties that make up the metropolitan areas of Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, San Antonio and Austin. That’s about two-thirds of the people who live in Texas — and almost the size of metropolitan New York City.
What’s more, in the last decade, 85 percent of the population growth in Texas has occurred in the Triangle. Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston have added more people than any other metropolitan area in the nation, a little more than 1 million each. Austin and San Antonio together added almost another million. The Triangle includes five of the 13 biggest cities in the nation — the densest concentration of large cities in America. And with the latest Census news — showing that Texas’s population increased robustly while California’s has actually dropped in the last year — the Triangle has become even more of a demographic powerhouse than before.
Economically, too, the Texas Triangle is a powerhouse. The four metropolitan economies had a combined GDP of approximately $1.3 trillion in 2018 — about 6.3 percent of the U.S. economy and almost 70 percent of the Texas economy. The Triangle is bigger than the regional economies of Los Angeles, Hong Kong, London or Paris; it’s double the size of the Chicago region’s economy.
If the Texas Triangle were a separate country, it would have the 15th-largest economy in the world, larger than the economies of Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia or the Netherlands.
And the Triangle is not just a gigantic economic outpost. It’s a center of corporate decision-making. Forty-nine of the Fortune 500 companies are based in the Triangle, about as many as there are in all of California and almost as many as in New York State.
Furthermore, as economists Robert W. Gilmer and Samuel Redus have pointed out, the Triangle’s metropolitan economies are deeply intertwined, thus strengthening the power of the Triangle as an economic region.
Not without tension
We live today on an urban planet. For the first time in history, more than half of the world’s people live in cities — and virtually all of the world’s population growth will take place in cities for the foreseeable future.
At first glance, Texas may not appear to be a logical candidate to participate in this new urban world. After all, the whole mythology of Texas — reinforced constantly in popular culture through stories like Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove,” icons like Willie Nelson, and movies like “Giant,” based on Edna Ferber’s unflattering 1952 West Texas novel — is decidedly rural.
Moreover, the transition to the “New Texas” is not without tension. Although 85 percent of the state’s population is within Texas’ 25 metropolitan areas — the state’s political decision-making too often lags behind in recognizing this reality.
As recently as 2019, then House Speaker Dennis Bonnen was caught on tape threatening to make the 2021 Legislative Session “the worst ever” for cities.
Sheer demographic and economic numbers leave no doubt that the anti-urban attitudes of some state lawmakers are increasingly out of date.
Potential Pitfalls
Any review of the promising prospects of the Texas Triangle also must consider factors that could curtail that success. History is replete with examples of seemingly inevitable economic juggernauts that were derailed or diminished by man-made errors or natural setbacks. An honest assessment of the Texas Triangle’s trajectory requires that we consider the pitfalls on the path ahead.
An obvious hurdle would be a massive global recession that undermines the dominant sectors of the Texas Triangle metros. Despite many built-in advantages, the Triangle — like everywhere — is vulnerable to deep global economic downturns, such as the COVID-19 crisis of 2020. And despite the growing diversity of the Triangle’s regional economy, it’s still particularly vulnerable to major setbacks in the oil and gas industry, as the world also experienced in 2020.
Another risk is that public policy failures, particularly by state government, might slow the growth of the Texas Triangle metros. Toxic partisan infighting between Democrats and Republicans in Austin could entangle the state’s leading cities and metros with new restrictions on their ability to manage ongoing growth and could even undermine what has been a broad consensus in favor of growth-oriented policies.
As the Texas metros grow in political power and electoral clout, it should be clear that the fight is greater than the squabbles of the recent past over social issues such as transgender bathroom rules. But the risk is that the Legislature might become more reluctant even than it has been to invest in urban and suburban schools, leading to shortages of skilled workers. Faced with growing fiscal pressure, the state might fail to invest in infrastructure improvements necessary to the Triangle’s future growth.
Failure to prepare for future pandemics or climate change might undermine the Triangle’s future. Among the United States’ leading cities, Houston is one of the most vulnerable to hurricanes and rising sea levels. All the Texas Triangle cities face long-term challenges from hotter weather, drought, and increasingly destructive storms.
A new era requires a new approach
A lot has changed about Texas since 1960.
Even as Texas has built a modern urban economy and a conservative Republican political structure, it faces a very different set of public challenges than it did 60 years ago. Ironically, many features of the “Old Texas” that have fueled the state’s success have the potential to undermine the future success of the “New Texas.” Recent economic success owes much to Texas’ small-government tradition, including the absence of a state income tax, flexible labor markets and a relatively light-touch approach to business regulation (though federal investment has been critical in several economic sectors).
At the same time, however, Texas underfunds its schools, and education attainment is low compared to other powerful states. Texas ranks last in the percentage of residents with health insurance. Housing affordability is a growing problem even in a state traditionally known for inexpensive housing and traffic congestion is a major issue in all of the Triangle’s cities. Texas also struggles to ensure that its water and energy infrastructures keep up with the demands of a rapidly growing population.
Now that Texas is an urban state, it must shed its own self-image as rural. Texas’ enormous growth requires new thinking about policies and priorities — thinking that embraces Texas’ urban growth, especially in the Triangle.
Cisneros is a former mayor of San Antonio and was U.S. HUD secretary from 1993 to 1997. Hendricks is a former writer and editor at the San Antonio Express-News. Clark is a member of the economics faculty at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas and is director of the Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative at the George W. Bush Presidential Center also in Dallas. Fulton is the president of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research in Houston.
This piece is an excerpt from their book “The Texas Triangle” published by Texas A&M Press.
"Opinion" - Google News
May 16, 2021 at 03:05PM
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Opinion: Texas, quit playing rural and act like the urban powerhouse you’ve become - Houston Chronicle
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