D Magazine Top 10 suburbs require 90% White Population
Categories: Dallas
Written By: Shawn Williams
After reading D Magazine and Curt Sampson’s excellent article on Dallas County exoneree James Woodard (27 years). I had a little time on my hands so I scanned through their ranking of 62 Dallas Suburbs.
I thought I would do one of my patented non-scientific experiments and see how diverse the Top 10 and Bottom 10 suburbers were. Well actually I just checked to see what percentage of white residents live in each city. This isn’t a knock on D’s list or their criteria for that matter. Just a look at good old American segregation.
The information that is represented below isn’t surprising since U.S. neighborhoods are as segregated as they have ever been. It’s just that now there are no laws (but sometimes contracts) prohibiting integration, we just choose not to. Notice that all of the cities in the D Magazine’s Top 10 had a population with at least 90% white residents, with the exception of Murphy (76%).
One other interesting bit of information that I found during this “strenuous” search was that Lancaster (pop. 25,894) is the largest majority African-American city in Texas. So when people tell me that white folks are keeping school bond proposals of the ballot, I’m going to need a little bit more explaining.
Click here to see the entire D Chart with a list of the factors that they used to compile their rankings.
D Magazine Top 10 Dallas Suburbs
City/Percentage White population
1. University Park 95%
2. Southlake 94.5%
3. Colleyville 93%
4. Trophy Club 94.2%
5. Parker 90%
6. Highland Park 97.2%
7. Murphy 76%
8. Highland Village 97%
9. Keller 93.7%
10. Flower Mound 90.2%
Bottom 10
62. Hutchins 43.1%
61. Cockrell Hill 44.6%
60. Balch Springs 62.9%
59. Wilmer 47.9%
58. Seagoville 78.8%
57. Irving 64.2%
56. Arlington 67.7%
55. Addison 67.8%
54. Lancaster 37.6%
53. Waxahachie 70.5%
July 24th, 2008 at 2:01 am
Maybe it is because I am not from the DFW area that this bothers me so much.
Leaving aside the notion that all the criteria for that list lends itself to a certain elitism and soft bigotry, this notion that the whole DFW area is a suburb of Dallas really grates on my nerves.
Fort Worth and Dallas should share a similar perception as Baltimore and Washington, considering they are almost the exact same distance apart. Each city has a distinctive personality and each would command national attention on its own as a result of the inherent value of the individual metropolises. I would love to know the background on how it is that Fort Worth found itself as some kind of over grown suburb.
Im trying to figure out how it is that WHOLE cities can be considered Suburbs.
Arlington has almost 400K people and its considered a suburb…of Dallas?
By that Logic, Fort Worth would be a suburb of Dallas, too.
The irony is, Four of the top 10 burbs on that list are actually suburbs of Fort Worth.
Irving and Arlington should be considered cities in their own right. Once you get over 100K people, you aren’t really a suburb of anything.
July 24th, 2008 at 5:01 am
I am not all that surprised by the results or that the inhabitants are predominately white. I did find it interesting that the instruction spent per student was fairly equal (if the reporting was accurate). So now this comes back to my original concern regarding education. If relatively the same amount of funds are being spent in the top ten as they are in the bottom 10 then there is a disconnect in the message getting across. Could be a number of reasons but I think it would be beneficial if the state would hire an outside consulting firm to find out were the disconnect is happening.