Dallas and the Favored Quarter Phenomenon
In recent decades, the role of downtowns as preeminent employment centers has changed dramatically, giving way to a decentralized and increasingly stratified mismatch between workers and their jobs.
Big city downtowns, once the dominant office centers for their entire regions, acted as centralized transit hubs which provided employment to people from all corners of the region. Poor and wealthy alike had access to jobs; everyone from clerks to high-powered CEOs could find employment suited to their particular skills.
Over the last several decades, however, there’s been a paradigm shift. Our region—Dallas/Fort Worth—illustrates this. According to prominent commercial real estate services firm CBRE, there’s about 27 million square feet of office in Dallas’ Central Business District. That’s about 12.2% of office space in the entire DFW region. Throw in Downtown Fort Worth (8.6 million square feet), and the two primary cores of the Metroplex account for 16.5% of all office space in the region.
In other words, 83.5% of all office space remains outside of our two major downtowns. Some of this space is located in other walkable, transit-accessible places such as Uptown Dallas. But most offices, and the jobs they support, require a car to reach.
And it’s not just the number of jobs that matter; it’s the type of positions available. Employment in Central Business Districts (and adjacent neighborhoods like Uptown) tend to focus on headquarters, banking, law, insurance, consulting, and advertising as well as government offices. The cost of doing business in such places is high, and less-elite support services are relegated to more remote locations. As one illustration of this, the Downtown Dallas and Uptown/Turtle Creek areas boast nearly 25% of the region’s Class A (highest quality office) space, and only 8% of all Class B office space. Of course, central city employment centers do require a certain number of lower-skill jobs including: receptionists, security guards, dishwashers, custodians, etc. Still, lower-skill jobs requiring less formal education are disproportionately found in more suburban and fringe areas of the metroplex.
The map to the left comes from the Dallas Chamber of Commerce and illustrates the population density of the DFW area with different employment centers overlaid as numbered, black points. The favored quarter phenomenon becomes fairly evident when looked at through this map; a large, North-Northwesterly quadrant radiating out from Downtown Dallas are home to a massive population as well as seven of eleven large employment clusters. On the other hand, glaring pockets of high population density completely devoid of significant employment centers become apparent in eastern and southwestern Dallas County.
What’s more, coveted tech sector jobs show an exceptional clustering within the favored quarter, North-Northwest of Downtown Dallas. This situation is not unique, as map after map of every service-based industry from financial services to hospitality reveal the same pattern in effect. Even blue collar jobs exhibit a highly-concentrated clustering favoring an area that’s often considered a more white-collar, services-oriented part of the metroplex.
Above: Concentration of High-Tech Businesses (left) and Manufacturing Businesses (right)
The suburbanization of low-paying work necessitates car ownership, which represents a considerable cost burden to workers. And if all of the adults in a household work low-paying jobs, each worker may need access to a car. Taking into consideration the costs of car payments, gas, insurance, maintenance, registration, and tickets among other expenses, car ownership imposes a high cost of employment for low-wage workers.The substantial cost of holding down a job then forces many into a poverty trap, artificially created and reinforced by our automobile-centric planning.
It gets worse.
While this situation is clearly harmful to those who cannot comfortably afford a car, it may appear desirable to households that can comfortably maintain one car per worker as, without a centralized office work, an upper middle class class family can live in an affordable house in the neighborhood of their choosing and enjoy a short commute to work.
Yet, this is clearly not the case for everyone. Commute times and distances are up since 1980. And housing, despite the amount of land we’ve consumed to improve affordability, has become less affordable.
How could this be? Why are we commuting longer and longer distances, becoming more dependent on automobiles, spending more on transportation, and, yet, still paying more for housing? Why have we failed so catastrophically?
Key to the explanation is a phenomenon that developer and author Chris Leinberger - friend of the Downtown Collaborative - coined the Favored Quarter Phenomenon in his excellent book The Option of Urbanism. In that book, Leinberger pointed out that employment, while no longer centralized, is still highly clustered. And most of it is clustered in a “slice of pie” which covers about a quarter of each region, starting from the center and expanding toward the periphery. This Favored Quarter also enjoys most of the upscale housing and shopping. Because of the large tax base, communities in these areas can offer superior amenities, better schools, and generous incentives while keeping taxes low.
Sounds familiar? It should. The Dallas Chamber’s map of DFW commercial office space reveals the largest office concentrations—and most significant office parks or buildings—are either in the center or the areas north, northwest, or northeast of the center. These are pockets of high-income which command increasingly-high rents and real estate prices (Radical Cartography’s map showing income in the DFW region illustrates this beautifully). Whether in the central city or the rural hinterland, the less well-off must drive large distances to work. As a consequence, they have less control over their schedules and the expense of owning a fleet of automobiles limits their ability to save and invest their modest incomes. The spatial mismatch of working class jobs and housing is not simply a transportation issue; it’s a question of dire importance to social mobility.
And that is how we end up with approximately 45% of Dallas (the Southern Sector) home to only 15% of the population. The Southern Sector is on the fringes of the DFW economy, and that trend is only hardening. This spatial pattern ends up reinforcing long-ingrained dynamics of poverty. People in these areas must either move (and pay high rents) or remain in communities which deprive them of the opportunities enjoyed by the rest of the population.
So how do we address this in such a way as to offer greater opportunities to the entire region?
As with any complex challenge, it doesn’t lend itself to a simplistic “Silver Bullet” solution. For example, the traditional policy of luring new large employers and corporate headquarters is generally ineffective in this area. Such “big fish” will not flock to Southern Dallas any time soon, thanks to the inherent network and clustering benefits of relocating to North Dallas and its suburbs. The Favored Quarter structure cannot be overcome by a few tweaks or tax incentives, and we don’t have the resources to subsidize our least advantaged into prosperity.
Instead, we need a series of flexible responses that include:
Supporting the incubation and expansion of local businesses in the Southern Sector
Creating better public transit—and doing more with what we already have
Supporting a greater variety of housing options near existing job centers
The Favored Quarter Phenomenon is deeply ingrained in our economic and land use systems. It is my hope that those of us who are interested in the issues of land use, transportation, and economic opportunities become more conscious of this complex issue so that we may begin to form policies to help address it.