Beneath the Glitter Are Fault Lines in Dallas County's Economy

It's easy to look at outward signs of prosperity and assume that Dallas County is doing just fine. But that's like proclaiming a movie to be a cinematic gem based only on watching its trailer. Despite its many shiny new buildings, Dallas County is actually getting poorer — and its income disparity continues to play out along racial lines, according to a new report from the Communities Foundation of Texas. Removing barriers to economic success is crucial to growing the county's tax base and producing a pool of skilled workers and middle-class consumers.Dallas County must face the troubling reality that, by many measures, it is an outlier in Texas — and not in a positive way. From 1999 to 2015, median household income in the county plunged 16 percent, an eightfold faster decline than Texas as a whole. During that same time, the county's median household income was $10,000 lower than that of the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan statistical area. On average, Hispanic workers earned 58 cents and African-American workers earned 54 cents for every dollar earned by white workers in the county.   Continue reading...