Interesting that we immediately associate poor with black. In Dallas, you have mostly black suburbs like Lancaster, DeSoto, Cedar Hill and Duncanville, while you have others with huge black populations like Grand Prairie, Arlington and Mansfield. These are not middle class suburbs with new schools and mostly nice, new homes, good shopping, lakes etc. A lot of this has been migration out of South Dallas and Oak Cliff that has caught on as middle class blacks move to the area. You have some of the phenomena the article is talking about, but what they are referring to is happening mainly in the northern inner-ring suburbs. Places like Garland, Mesquite, Richardson, Carrollton were the middle-class and working class suburbs. Lots of smaller suburban spec housing and lots of "adult" apartment complexes. From personal experience you had a couple of things going on. Garland has a lot of industrial jobs and lots of older suburban housing. So illegal immigrants flocked their and place like Carrollton and south Irving where they could get a green card job or at least get a decent house and work construction in the newer suburbs like Rowlett, Plano, Coppell, North Irving. You also had a lot of property owners renting this cheap housing, so the city poor started moving in just as....................white flight to the newer burbs was happening. I remember at my school, the "rich" kids were moving to Rowlett and north Garland or even Plano. Rinse and repeat and now they are moving to Frisco, Allen, McKinney, Southlake. Rinse and repeat again and you are seeing places like Prosper, Celina, Justin, Royse City that will blow up in the next 10 years. So you're seeing some of these burbs be really pro business to lock in white collar jobs in their city and build out their housing stock with more expensive homes. Plano, Irving, Southlake and Frisco are examples of this. They started building large corporate campus type complexes to lure Fortune 500s and built out with mainly upper middle class housing in less than 10 years. Irving and Plano saw the writing on the wall and changed quickly.
At the same time, Dallas is gentrifying quickly. When I got out of college you had a few hoods that were middle class, and lots of wealthy in North Dallas. Now you've had Uptown blow up. North Oak Cliff starting to blow up. East Dallas blowing up. I live in East Dallas and you can literally see them destroying block after block for new townhouses and apartments. To the east of us, white people are moving in from the burbs in droves. Our neighborhood is still hood a couple of streets away, but people are moving in and fixing up the old houses. They are keeping the little food joints around though. Just interesting to see having grown up in one of the burbs that quickly got poor and moving to a place that was on the periphery and is blowing up economically. I'm sure this is happening all over the country.
