Well, we all know that if Southern CA has a problem, it's too few people and too little congestion. The place has barely grown over the past century. The 405 is a ghost town.

There should be at least 40 million people in LA, with the same road and rail network as today, of course. Otherwise, CA will never match up with the glories of TX.

None of this rambling, has anything to do with anything. Great post!

Wow, 14 pages!

Yeah I don't know what Japan has to do with any of this. There's virtually zero movement of people into and out of Japan. It's like the exact opposite of California.

Charles Schwab just announced that, following the completion of their takeover of Ameritrade, they will move HQ from San Francisco to the DFW suburb of Westlake. Westlake is located 20 miles north of downtown Fort Worth in far northeastern Tarrant County near the Alliance Airport development. Schwab already has over 2,000 employees on a suburban campus there. That seems like a seismic culture shift from a downtown SF headquarters to a suburban office development in Texas. Mercedes Benz Financial Services is also headquartered at the Westlake location.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/business...6-14860683.php

Another loss for CA.

Why would so many companies relocate from a place with perfect weather....it certainly isn't the local governance. :P

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An airplane full of "talent" can certainly land in DFW just as easily as LAX.

Interesting that home prices in Westlake are the highest in Texas with an average of about $1.7 million. Residential Westlake is home to mega-McMansions mostly in lakefront or country club developments, but there are tons of affordable housing options within a 20 minute commute from the Schwab campus down towards Fort Worth or up in Denton County. I am pretty sure the low housing costs and low overall tax environment dictated this move.

Westlake is also a very small city of 7 square miles with less than 1,000 people, and zoned itself this way to "keep people out". You're right that there are definitely low cost options to the west in North Fort Worth and parts of Keller.

It's a loss if we care about bragging rights, and forumers certainly do, but for people who are actually impacted by this merger, the article indicates the vast majority of San Francisco positions will not be relocated to the Texas suburbs:

Also, before haters get too giddy about San Francisco losing a finance headquarters, let's remember the same merger is doing the same thing to Omaha.

Also from the article:

I do agree that a diversified economy that isn't overly reliant on one sector would be ideal, but a net gain of 71,544 jobs ain't too shabby either.

SF can take the hit. They are gonna be just fine. The real news, as far as I am concerned, is that the DFW area continues to attract large corporate relocations, and this is a big one for the Fort Worth side of the DFW area. Historically most of the relocation action has been in Dallas, Irving, or up towards Plano.

It's strange to me. Dallas is the biggest metro in the South and also growing the fastest in terms of population and job growth, yet I still feel like Atlanta and Houston are more prominent, especially culturally.

That might be because if you seperate Dallas from Forth Worth, the Dallas area would be about 5 million people.

The DFW area doesn't separate that easily. Too much of the economic engine is located mid-cities, and commuting patterns are all over the region. Heck, DFW Airport is technically in Fort Worth along with the American Airlines HQ. I think it is more a case of the DFW area competing for attention with an almost identically sized Houston that is only 200 miles away, and then there is Austin (and San Antonio) just down the road as well. Atlanta kind of stands on its own as the preeminent city of the Deep South.

As austlar1 mentioned, the two cities are too intertwined and there is a lot of people and economic activity in between them that tie the entire metro together. Even if you did peel off Fort Worth, Dallas still would be on the same level as Houston and Atlanta.

that's a good point. we often compartmentalize "the south" into this one big giant monolithic region because that's what the census bureau does for the US with its four big macro-regions, but the south is so freaking big that an alpha city like atlanta has more than enough room to shine all on its own.

up north, shit got split up into the northeast and the midwest, so we think of those places as their own separate realms, and they are to a degree, and thus we don't have a single issue with seeing NYC as the super-alpha of the northeast and chicago as the super-alpha as the midwest.

but it's important to to remember that the distance between atlanta and dallas/houston is ~700 miles, roughly the same distance as NYC to chicago. atlanta has enough space to be its own super-alpha of its hinterland, texas and parts west be damned.

shit gets MUCH trickier in texas itself where houston and DFW are so neck and neck with each other and only 225 miles away from each other.

They aren't relocating. They're just using the Westlake office as the official HQ post-merger. But almost no one is moving. The SF office remains.

And it makes sense for Schwab to grow in TX prairie as opposed to downtown SF. Schwab is a trading platform, like Vanguard (which is, not coincidentally, located in an exurban office park, and not Wall Street). These aren't super high pay/high skill jobs. They don't need to be paying $150 psf in some hyper-inflated tech bubble. I wouldn't waste any time growing a company in downtown SF if it weren't purely tech-focused or provided support for such firms (law/consulting/VC).

SF has the lowest unemployment in the country. They have too many jobs, and not enough people. It would probably be better for the region if Schwab left, but that isn't happening. That whole region needs to cool off a bit, and slowly depressurize, or there's gonna be another epic bust.

Living in Texas, I've always viewed Atlanta as the leading metro in the South and Texas as its own thing even if Texas (especially east Texas) shares many attributes with the rest of the South.

Yeah, to me, TX is big enough to be its own region. Atlanta is the capitol of the South, but I'm not counting TX (or FL).

It also can be viewed this way.

Using your 200 miles scenario, the population is 3-4 million more within that distance of Atlanta compared to Houston and Dallas. And to use your word "compete" and to surmise the usage; it can also be viewed that the "competition" maybe and probably is stiffer within the Atlanta radius because it comes from more Metros (although smaller) and in different states/jurisdictions.