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FROM THE PUBLISHER Has Fort Worth Shrunk?

The big city/small city battle is over. Dallas won.
By D Magazine |

READERS HAVE QUERIED ME OVER THE Love Field controversy, with one question looming over all the others: Why is Fort Worth being so feisty? Why the lawsuits and threats of more lawsuits?

I have an answer, and it won’t please Fort Worth. My answer has nothing to do with law or politics or aviation. It has to do with demographics, or more specifically, a field of marketing known as psy-chodemographics. This marketing term describes how people think of themselves and, in this case, where they live.

Twenty-five years ago, when DFW Airport was built, Dallas and Fort Worth were locked into a big city/small city relationship. In psychodemographic terms, the cities were weighted about sixty-forty. Fort Worth’s status as an almost-equal partner to Dallas resulted from the fact that almost everyone in Tarrant County looked to Fort Worth as their principal city. When asked in Chicago or New York where they were from, residents of Colleyville or Arlington would likely reply, “Fort Worth.”

Not anymore. In 1970 Arlington was a sleepy suburbof 90,000. Today Arlington is a city of 300,000-and along with Chicago, Boston, Denver, and L.A., one of the few cities in America with two daily newspapers. With two newspapers working every day to proclaim the uniqueness of the place, and with its civic spirit galvanized around such landmarks as The Ballpark, Arlington has removed itself from Fort Worth’s sphere of influence. Nobody from Arlington thinks they’re from Fort Worth anymore.

Even worse for Fort Worth’s self-image is the news from northeast Tarrant County. Those five-acre spreads and multi-million dollar houses in Southlake and Colleyville, and the tract homes in Grapevine and Flower Mound, are not being bought by people from Fort Worth. The larger ones are being bought by refugees from Dallas, and the smaller ones by immigrants from somewhere else in America. Nice a place as Fort Worth is, residents of northeast Tarrant County don’t look to Fort Worth as their home city. For shopping and dining, they look to Dallas and Addison. And when they’re asked in Chicago where they’re from, they answer “Dallas.”The Star-Telegram may still hold a 4-1 subscription lead over the Morning News in these fast-growing suburbs, but for how long? Even Channel 5, the station originally founded by Fort Worth’s and the Star-Telegram’s redoubtable Amon Carter, now uses the Dallas skyline as the backdrop for its evening news broadcast. American Airlines may give Fort Worth as its corporate address, but how many of its local employees, spread from suburb to suburb, say they are from Fort Worth?

Meanwhile, Dallas County itself has grown more muscular in the past 20 years. In 1970, for example, Garland had a population of just 80,000; today it stands at 200,000. Coppell was barely a dot on the map with a population of 1,700; today it’s at 28,000 and growing like topsy.

These psychodemographics have real impact, not only for a station like Channel 5, but also for a magazine named D. When this magazine was relaunched, some people made the argument that our name was outdated. These trends make me think that it may have been outdated 20 years ago, but the times have caught up with us. Of our top 50 newsstands, 28 are in the suburbs, in stores that didn’t exist 20 years ago, serving people who didn’t live here 20 years ago. People who buy a magazine named D are probably saying they live-psychodemographi-cally-in a place called Dallas.

Fort Worth may have grown, but in marketing psychology, it has shrunk. Dallas may have experienced only small gains, but psychologically it has mushroomed. The once nearly equal partnership is being capsized by Dallas’ overwhelming dominance. And that may explain the legal temper tantrums from Fort Worth.

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