Dallas - Economy

Economy

In its beginnings, Dallas relied on farming, neighboring Fort Worth's Stockyards, and its prime location on Native American trade routes to sustain itself. Dallas' key to growth came in 1873 with the building of multiple rail lines through the city. As Dallas grew and technology developed, cotton became its boon and by 1900 Dallas was the largest inland cotton market in the world, becoming a leader in cotton gin machinery manufacturing. By the early 1900s Dallas was a hub for economic activity all over the Southern United States and was selected in 1914 as the seat of the Eleventh Federal Reserve District. By 1925 Texas churned out more than ⅓ of the nation's cotton crop, with 31% of Texas cotton produced within a 100-mile (160 km) radius of Dallas. In the 1930s petroleum was discovered east of Dallas near Kilgore, Texas. Dallas' proximity to the discovery put it immediately at the center of the nation's petroleum market. Petroleum discoveries in the Permian Basin, the Panhandle, the Gulf Coast, and Oklahoma in the following years further solidified Dallas' position as the hub of the market.

The end of World War II left Dallas seeded with a nexus of communications, engineering, and production talent by companies such as Collins Radio Corporation. Decades later, the telecommunications and information revolutions still drive a large portion of the local economy. The city is sometimes referred to as the heart of "Silicon Prairie" because of a high concentration of telecommunications companies in the region, the epicenter of which lies along the Telecom Corridor located in Richardson, a northern suburb of Dallas. The Corridor is home to more than 5,700 companies including Texas Instruments (headquartered in Dallas), Nortel Networks, Alcatel Lucent, AT&T, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Nokia, Rockwell Collins, Cisco Systems, Sprint, Verizon Communications, XO Communications and until recently CompUSA (which is now headquartered in Miami,FL).

In the 1980s Dallas was a real estate hotbed, with the increasing metropolitan population bringing with it a demand for new housing and office space. Several of Downtown Dallas' largest buildings are the fruit of this boom, but over-speculation and the savings and loan crisis prevented any further additions to Dallas' skyline. Between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, central Dallas went through a slow period of growth and has only recently recovered. Since 2000, the real estate market in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex has been relatively resilient. However, Dallas is among the largest cities in the U.S. where rent declined significantly. Whereas the national decline in rent is approximately 4%, Dallas rent declined an average of 8% in early 2010.

Texas Instruments, a major manufacturer, employs 10,400 people at its corporate headquarters and chip plants in Dallas. Defense and aircraft manufacturing dominates the economy of nearby Fort Worth.

The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex has one of the largest concentrations of corporate headquarters for publicly traded companies in the United States. The city of Dallas has 12 Fortune 500 companies, and the DFW region as a whole has 20. In 2007–08, Comerica Bank and AT&T located their headquarters in Dallas. Irving is home to four Fortune 500 companies of its own, including ExxonMobil, the most profitable company in the world and the second largest by revenue for 2008, Kimberly-Clark, Fluor (engineering), and Commercial Metals. Additional companies headquartered in the Metroplex include Southwest Airlines, American Airlines, RadioShack, Neiman Marcus, 7-Eleven, Brinker International, AMS Pictures, id Software, ENSCO Offshore Drilling, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Chuck E. Cheese's, Zales and Fossil. Corporate headquarters in the northern suburb of Plano include HP Enterprise Services, Frito Lay, Dr Pepper Snapple Group, and JCPenney. Many of these companies—and others throughout the DFW metroplex—comprise the Dallas Regional Chamber.

Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the world's largest breast cancer organization was founded and is headquartered in Dallas.

In addition to its large number of businesses, Dallas has more shopping centers per capita than any other city in the United States and is also home to the second shopping center ever built in the United States, Highland Park Village, which opened in 1931. Dallas is home of the two other major malls in North Texas, the Dallas Galleria and NorthPark Center, which is the 2nd largest mall in Texas. Both malls feature high-end stores and are major tourist draws for the region.

According to Forbes Magazine's annual list of "The Richest People in America" published September 21, 2011, the city itself is now home to 17 billionaires, up from 14 in 2009. In 2009 (with 14 billionaires) the city placed 6th worldwide among cities with the most billionaires. The ranking does not even take into account the 8 billionaires who live in the neighboring city of Fort Worth.

Dallas is currently the third most popular destination for business travel in the United States, and the Dallas Convention Center is one of the largest and busiest convention centers in the country, at over 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m2), and the world's single-largest column-free exhibit hall.