The arrival of 2024 comes after another strong year for the DFW economy, as federal data shows the Metroplex created the second-most new jobs of any metro area in the country.
NBC 5 spoke with local economists about what 2024 could bring for job growth in DFW.
Near DFW Airport, Pho Kobee restaurant is usually closed on New Year’s Day. But the owner told NBC 5 that recently they’ve been seeing an uptick in customers, so they decided to keep serving.
“We just wanted to see how business is over here,” said Lam Thal. “I do have another restaurant too, it’s in Fort Worth, we’re open New Year’s Day and it’s pretty busy.”
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“Just location I guess,” Thal added.
Economists said recently, that the whole DFW area has benefited from a great location.
US Census data showed that at 7.9 million people, the DFW metro makes up only 2% of the population of the US. But 4.5% of all new US jobs created from August 2022-23 were located in the Metroplex, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
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During that period, DFW saw more than 154,000 new jobs created, second only to the New York City area.
“What doesn’t surprise me is that our area and Texas has kept pace and in fact outperformed the rest of the US economy,” SMU economics professor Michael Davis said.
Davis told NBC 5 the growth here has been happening across multiple industries and hasn’t been driven by one specific factor.
But he said the DFW metro area has several advantages, including good regulation conditions for new business, and a lot of land to develop.
“So if you want to build a building, if you want to build an apartment complex, or a housing project to accommodate people moving here, we can do that in Texas more easily than in many, many other places in the country,” Davis said.
NBC 5 asked what 2024 could bring for the Dallas-Fort Worth economy.
Davis said the easy prediction would be for the recent pattern of strong job numbers to continue.
“We’ve also come through a period of quite rapid inflation that seems to be attenuating now but it’s still a concern,” Davis said. “Interest rates are now higher than they’ve been in the past, they seem to be coming down. But we’ll just have to wait and see.”
