The population of downtown Dallas has boomed in the last 10 years. According to Downtown Dallas, Inc., the number of residents has increased by 71% in the last decade. It estimates that 13,000 people live downtown, with 80,000 within a two-mile radius.
Last month, KRLD's parent company, Audacy, spent a week examining the state of downtowns across the country. As part of KRLD's coverage, business analyst David Johnson spoke to several people working to maximize space in downtown Dallas for his daily feature CEO Spotlight.
"You've got a tremendous amount of office space where a lot of it (was) built in the 1980s and you just don't need it anymore. And so what they're doing is going back in and putting in residential," Johnson said. "All of a sudden you carve it up and you've got a lot of places for people to live. Well, you need a lot of places for people to live -- we have tremendous in-migration to this area."
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Jennifer Scripps, the CEO of Downtown Dallas, Inc. says two distinct demographics make up much of downtown's population.
"We have more going on if you walk down downtown streets now in the evenings. Lots of dogs getting walked, lots of four-legged friends in all of our parks. A lot of the baby boomers are deciding, 'I don't need the house and the pool and I want to travel,'" Scripps said. "So we are seeing kind of a population that's barbelled between young professionals, maybe pre-children or stroller age, with older, individuals that are deciding they want the convenience of urban living."
News episodes of Texas Wants to Know are released every Thursday in the Audacy app or anywhere you listen to podcasts.
