BY THE NUMBERS
Dallas punches in at No. 2 on new list of cities that best attract business
The companies, the jobs, and the people keep moving to North Texas. According to a recent report, Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington ranks No. 2 among U.S. metropolitan areas for attracting new companies.
The ranking, which was researched and published by Site Selection Magazine, found that DFW attracted 426 business projects last year. This put the metro in second place of the list that analyzed larger regions.
It's the third year in a row that DFW has landed in second place, and the metro had a year-over-year improvement in number of deals; 2021 reported 389 new business projects in the area.
In fact, the top three cities – Chicago, Dallas, and Houston, respectively — have remained the same for all three years. For 2022, the Chicago metro garnered 448 projects, while Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land reportedly had 293 projects. Farther down the list, Austin-Round Rock had 132 projects, putting them at No. 7.
Site Selection's report focused on how companies can manage increasing economy digitization, and retain in-office workers while balancing skyrocketing telework opportunities.
Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Center for Transformative Placemaking at Brookings Metro, said though the rise of remote work does "hollow out" downtowns, they're not "all doomed."
“Telework is here to stay, but it is not clear levels of telework have stabilized for the near or long term," she said. "There is also evidence that work agglomeration increases productivity. There is good reason to expect more RTO [return to office] than there has been so far.”
When discussing large, business-centered cities like Dallas, Brookings Metro senior fellow Mark Muro says the city is powered by "huge professional services, businesses, and health sectors that continue to become increasingly digital." Muro and his colleague Sifan Liu are studying highly digitized economies and their place in modern society.
“Across the nation’s 56 biggest metros, as much as 30% of all jobs were highly digital as of 2020, while low-digital jobs encompassed just 22% of the workforce,” they said in the report. “By contrast, highly digital occupations account for only 20% of the workforce in the nation’s more than 500 micropolitan areas, where low digital jobs account for 26% of the total. And pay gaps reflect those divides.”
The full report can be found on siteselection.com.
