We won an overtime thriller in Dallas on Sunday night. Looking at the civic data below of our two cities, I couldn’t help but reflect on the comparison we made two weeks ago when we played the Carolina Panthers. Dallas is, much like Charlotte, a classic Sunbelt city, while Philly is a classic Rustbelt city.
Between 1950 and 2010, Dallas grew from 430,000 to 1.2 million people, and from 112 to 340 square miles. During that same period Philadelphia declined from nearly 2.1 million to 1.5 million and remained the same size geographically. Dallas’s economy is based to a much greater extent on private employers, such as Walmart, American Airlines, AT&T, Texas Instruments, Tenet Healthcare, and, of course energy and energy-related industries. Philadelphia’s economy is based far more than Dallas’s or Charlotte’s on government and nonprofit employers.
While total unemployment in Philadelphia is above the national average (6.8 percent), Dallas is a bit below (4.1 percent)—and this is reflected in Dallas’s lower poverty rate and higher median incomes ($42,846 compared to $37,192 in Philadelphia).
But there’s more to a city than just its economic data, says Professor Richardson Dilworth of Drexel’s Center for Public Policy. “The dominant culture of Dallas is one that is uniquely uninterested in its history,” he explains. “There is no great way to measure this, but people who have written on the topic of Dallas history, and who have lived in Dallas, largely agree that Dallasites (or however they refer to themselves) are uniquely ignorant about the history of their city.”
Dilworth cites three books that make this case. Harvey Graff’s The Dallas Myth: The Making and Unmaking of an American City; Patricia Hill’s Dallas: The Making of a Modern City, and Michael Phillips’ White Metropolis: Race, Ethnicity and Religion in Dallas all identify a business elite that sought to forget about racial and labor strife and focus instead on new business opportunities.
“Philadelphia may be more expensive and have less employment opportunities, but certainly it has a stronger collective memory, and one in which conflict and violence are prominent themes,” says Dilworth. “It seems fair to say that, while more companies may have invested money in Dallas, more people have a personal investment in Philadelphia as a shared memory, and one in which the past is used in an attempt to grapple with serious issues of racial, ethnic, and class conflict—and, occasionally, even cooperation.”
Next week, we take on Miami.
Note: We play Dallas twice this season, but only count the city once in our Civic Scorecard.