Originally Posted: October 26, 2017
Dallas is the nation’s ninth-largest city, but in the eyes of Mayor Mike Rawlings, it’s simply a neighborhood that’s part of a larger “city-state” known as the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
And that entire area, he said Thursday, will have to work together as a region to compete in “job wars” to help bring even more diversity and economic growth to the region.
“I see myself as a citizen of D-FW, and a mayor of a great neighborhood called Dallas,” Rawlings said. “I think we are in a good place in that upcoming job wars that we’re going to have.”
Rawlings made his remarks at a symposium on the campus of Southern Methodist University to address trends in migration to urban and suburban regions among minorities, immigrants and millennials. It was hosted by the SMU Cox School of School Business Folsom Center for Real Estate, the SMU Economic Center and Houston’s Center for Opportunity Urbanism.
Selling the region instead of individual communities is one reason Dallas and Fort Worth recently worked together on a regional pitch for Amazon’s HQ2 rather than pitching to the company as separate cities, Rawlings said. READ MORE