Quote:
Originally Posted by TexasPlaya
Will there be enough Crown Castles and Academys to make up for the energy transition?
I personally think we are in the midst of another O&G supercycle for the rest of the 2020s much like the one from ~2000-2014 until the commodity bust happened. But after that things will get dicey.
Also the hurricane and flooding issues hurt corporate relocations.
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I only gave two examples. There are several other large ones like KBR. There's been a couple companies that dropped any mention of energy or oil out of their name entirely because they hardly supply for that industry anymore.
As far as corporate relocations go, Houston has never been the magnet DFW or Austin is, but the area still gains corporate headquarters even after the historic flooding of the 2010s. All the city has to do is show flood mitigation efforts, which there are plenty and it has shown their worth already with a few storms Houston has had the last couple years.
These are giant legacy companies with many different parts. They aren't going to just vanish. Like look at all the companies that fall under Shell NA HQ (things like Jiffy Lube, Timewise, etc.). At worst these energy companies will buy out whatever green startup emerges, but even then, creating green energy requires the use of fossil fuels, so it goes right back.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Crawford
Right, but this is a circular argument. I'm asking why Caterpillar (and a host of other HQ) are moving HQ jobs to DFW. I don't think the answer is "bc there are jobs in DFW."
Fine, if people love sprawl, hate cities, hate anything built before 1990, don't want trees, hills, water, whatever, but why DFW specifically, when there are a whole host of U.S. metros with plentiful sprawl.
And DFW isn't all that cheap anymore. I do work with a firm in Flower Mound (an upscale Fort Worth suburb) and the homes aren't cheap. They're big, ugly boxes, but the prices people pay would get you a nice home in CA or NY.
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Because DFW has the most manicured suburbs in America. DFW is void of natural features outside of rolling terrain (although SW Dallas County is Texas Hill Country-like), so the suburb city planners went all out with man-made features (DFW has like 10+ area recreational lakes). DFW is pretty forward thinking as far as landscaping goes too which freshens the appearance. You have a simply grid layout making it easy to get around. Each suburb also competes with each other so they try to build the best town centers, which improves the QOL for residents as there are more options to choose from. DFW has some of the most built up suburbs in the US. Also Flower Mound isn't a FW suburb (it is pretty strictly Dallas and people who live there associate with DAL more than FW).
There are very few areas in America that match the middle/upper-middle class critical mass that the north DFW burbs bring. I'm talking consistency of niceness, middle class areas
at worst, with no breaks in between. Only places in America I can think of like this is South Orange County (CA), Johnson County (KS), and Silicon Valley. For someone in their 30s-40s with a young family, there's almost no better place in America to raise a kid if what you value most is safety, great schools, reasonably priced homes, access to parks, responsive city services, moderate weather, and access to major metro amenities.
You can always take a short flight from DFW and visit somewhere scenic. Heck, you can take a couple hour drive to the mountains in SE Oklahoma. DFW may not be as cheap as it used to be anymore, but it is still pretty cheap for a metro of 8M people. DFW is still cheaper than Chicagoland for example. Gas is over $1 higher in Chicagoland, and property taxes in Illinois are as bad as TX, if not worse.
And lastly, Caterpillar already had employees in DFW. Most of these companies who move there already had hundreds, if not thousands of employees present already. An outlier to this was Toyota.