Frisco Is Booming, But Here’s What Keeps Its City Manager Up at Night

If you spend any time in Frisco — much less work, live or play there — it’s difficult to imagine this boomtown ever winding up in the trash heap of urban history.Yet that’s the doom-and-gloom scenario a recent Manhattan Institute policy director posed in his “North Texas must stop building disposable suburbs” essay, which was published a few weeks ago in The Dallas Morning News.Michael Hendrix, who grew up in Arlington in the 1980s and now works in New York, described Dallas-area suburbia as cities that “stagger on, zombielike, as bills pile up” for aging roads, malls and housing because of bad design and even worse financial planning.Hendrix also forecast that residents and business owners will burn through the best years of cities such as Frisco, Prosper and Flower Mound, then forsake them for the next shiny locale.Having spent much of the last year reporting on cities throughout North Texas, my view of the suburbs — both their present and their future — is a lot more optimistic than what Hendrix described.But I’m no suburban studies expert, so I decided to talk to someone who is: George Purefoy, the only city manager that Frisco has ever had and the top boss there since 1987.  Continue reading...