Texas

The Austin Business Journal reports that Meta (former Facebook) has leased all 33 office floors of the under construction Sixth and Guadeloupe Tower, which is due to open in 2023.  read more »

Economic development professionals in Texas will remember this November for a long time as the month saw announcements for three record-breaking, colossal construction projects. It’s fair to call them “Texas-sized.”  read more »

Politicians, pundits, and the public at large have voiced deep concern that electricity was tragically unavailable to many Texans during the recent period of extreme cold. Claims that lax ERCOT planning caused the problem are exaggerated.  read more »

Hope you emerged from this crazy winter storm + power/water outage week relatively unscathed. I certainly learned the value of stockpiling water and draining water pipes (esp. with a power outage), and ERCOT learned that it's a bad idea to cut off power to natural gas pumps across the state during a winter storm.  read more »

The big news this week is all the different tech companies announcing their moves to Texas.  read more »

On today's episode of Feudal Future hosts Joel Kotkin and Marshall Toplansky are joined by guest Kevin Shuvalov. Kevin served as Regional Political Director for the Republican National Committee, where he worked with state parties and campaigns in his region to grow Republican majorities in the Senate, House, and Governorships.  read more »

The Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area (DFW) will be the new headquarters of McKesson, the nation’s largest pharmaceutical distributor, the company announced this week. DFW will now have three of the top 10 companies in the Fortune 500 (ranked by total revenue). No other metropolitan area has more than one of the top 10. Dallas-Fort Worth is also home to Exxon-Mobil, the second largest company and AT&T, ranked ninth.  read more »

Texas cities may well be the cutting edge of American urban life. Here are two videos by Amanda Horvath that reflect the reporting done in the recent Texas Way of Urbanism report from the Center for Opportunity Urbanism.  read more »

Everyone knows that Texas is big. In the self-storage world, Texas would be a 10x30 storage unit, the biggest of the bunch. But many people (namely, Yankees and Europeans) may not realize just how massive the Lone Star State really is. How that at 261,231 square miles of land, Texas would be the 39th-largest country by land area in the world, coming in just behind Zambia and ahead of Myanmar. Since there are, give-or-take, roughly 200 countries in the world, that means that most of them are in fact smaller than Texas.  read more »

Texas metropolitan areas continue to dominate economic growth, according to the latest Metro Monitor, produced by the Brookings Institution. The four top metropolitan areas in overall economic growth through the recession and "recovery" (our parentheses) have been:  read more »