Lone Star Rising

Texas now hosts more Fortune 500 companies than any other American state. They include AT&T, Dell and Texas Instruments; oil giants such as Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips and Valero; American, Continental and Southwest Airlines; Fluor, a huge construction firm (recently lured from California); J.C. Penney; Halliburton; and 52 others. Texas claims to have been responsible for 70% of all the net new jobs created last year in America’s 50 states, though since only a few states created any jobs at all that is not quite as astonishing as it sounds.

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All this has brought people flooding in and made Texas America’s fastest-growing state. Net domestic inflows have been running at around 150,000 people in recent years, whereas California and New York have seen net outflows. Next year’s national census is expected to show that flourishing Houston has replaced struggling Chicago as America’s third city. Of the ten largest cities in America, three are in Texas.

Those three, Houston, Dallas and San Antonio, together with the state capital, Austin, and Fort Worth, make up what the boosters call the Texaplex: a densely packed triangle, with each side measuring about 300 miles, that is home to roughly 80% of the state’s population of 24m (second only to California’s 37m). This “Texas triangle”, containing America’s third-largest airport (Dallas-Fort Worth) and its second-busiest port (Houston, despite being 50 miles inland), has emerged as one of the most dynamic regions in all of America.

Joel Kotkin, an urbanologist based in California, recently compiled a list for Forbes magazine of the best cities for job creation over the past decade. Among those with more than 450,000 jobs, the top five spots went to the five main Texaplex cities—and the winner of the small-cities category was Odessa, Texas. A study by the Brookings Institution in June came up with very similar results. Mr Kotkin particularly admires Houston, which he calls a perfect example of an “opportunity city”—a place with lots of jobs, lots of cheap housing and a welcoming attitude to newcomers.

He is certainly right about the last point: not too many other cities could have absorbed 100,000 refugees, bigheartedly and fairly painlessly, as Houston did after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans. With vibrant Asian communities alongside its balanced Hispanic, white and black mix, with no discernible racial tensions, and with more foreign consulates than any American city except New York and Los Angeles, Houston is arguably America’s most enthusiastically cosmopolitan city, a place where the future has already arrived.

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