Quote:
Originally Posted by llamaorama
I think this is somewhat incidental.
Tarrant County is sort of a weird hybrid between a traditional core urban county and an exurban one if you think about it. Fort Worth has grown because northwesterly pointing $$$$ Dallas sprawl in the direction of Southlake, Westlake, Roanoke, etc collided with it's northern edge. Elsewhere seems very slow growth and less affluent. So you have older city areas and 1950s suburbs and then suddenly, post-2010's McMansion development.
Also if you look at a map of the city limits of Fort Worth it's obvious why its among the largest cities to be run by a Republican mayor. 20 years ago it had maybe 300,000 people and now it has 900,000 and all of that is due to annexation of new sprawl.
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Twenty years ago, FW had a population of 534,000 rather than 300,000. There's been fairly substantial population growth in the west/southwest quadrant of the city during the past twenty years, but the bulk (65% or so) of FW population growth has been towards Denton County to the northeast of downtown. It's worth noting that annexation is much more difficult, if not impossible, due to the new annexation law passed in 2019. Tarrant County had a population of 1.45 million in 2000. Today it is about 2.1 million The GDP of the FW division of the DFW metro is roughly $130 Billion, which is about the the same size as the San Antonio GDP. Fort Worth is home to a fairly large number of very wealthy old and new money families and a substantial professional/business class with upper middle class incomes. It is also home to a shrinking middle class and a disproportionately large number of low income households. There are beautiful posh neighborhoods like Rivercrest, Westover Hills, Colonial, Park Hill, and Mistletoe Heights near the center of the city just west and southwest of downtown. Tarrant County fared pretty well with corporate relocations in recent years, but downtown Fort Worth, which is actually a very pleasant place, has not been able capture a headquarters relocation of any size during that time frame. In theory downtown Fort Worth is well positioned for growth, but that all remains to be seen. In 2020 Biden won in the city of FW by a few percentage points. Tarrant County even went Blue for the first time in decades, but the razor thin margin of victory for Biden was under 2,000 votes countywide out of almost 850,000 votes cast.
Disclaimer: I was born and raised in Fort Worth. My family has been there since the late 1800s. I left to go to college in New Orleans and never really looked back. Actually could not wait to get out of the place. Still, I have a certain soft spot in my heart for The Fort that allows me to overlook some of its more glaring deficiencies. There is a level of willful/hateful ignorance operative among old timers in the city that crops up often when I visit. This is especially true with regards to the hot topics of our current era. Fort Worth has a proud history and also a shameful history. The latter is best left undisturbed. I participate in a Facebook Fort Worth history group where this lesson repeats itself with enough regularity that I remember all too well why I decamped so long ago on a life-long exploration of some of America's more tolerant and open minded cities.
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