A Surprisingly Accurate Unofficial Guide to Dallas/Fort Worth Suburbs
--
At first, I thought this would be too much of a “hyper-local” story. But then I realized that not only are there currently 7,759,615 residents of the DFW metroplex right now (holy shit, but I can tell that we live in a place with 894 people per square mile, because you’re all on the roads with me), there are probably countless others who have some intimate knowledge of the sprawlmonster known as DFW. By the way, that population figure is from the 2021 Census, and I think I remember reading somewhere that like 225 people move here each day, so you can calculate the probable accurate current population.
The “anti-city council” definitions of the various suburbs
That was what really started all of this for me. I had a random thought one night that stuck with me: What would be the exact opposite of the city council’s “official” slogans? What if we came up with what the suburbs are actually known for instead? And that’s how this list was born. They’re really more like if someone pointed at me and named a town, and asked what my impression of each one is. So here goes.
Let’s start with the big 4 first.
Dallas
It’s a real city city. While Fort Worth has a sizable number of skyscrapers, mostly concentrated in a few blocks downtown, Dallas has miles and miles of skyscrapers. If you love city skylines like I do, you know that Dallas beats Fort Worth hands down.
But it also has big-city types of problems. I’ve recently walked in a rather harrowing two-mile cross-section of the Fair Park neighborhood after dark after a concert (needless to say, I was very lost.) Being a small woman alone with a lot of homeless and often drunk or high men on the street is uniquely uncomfortable. I think that we do far too little for our unhoused neighbors, but that also doesn’t mean that I feel safe walking past a very large group of them, either.
Yes, the city has all the things that make cities worth living in, like the symphony, the opera, the DMA, Klyde Warren Park, etc. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough experience with individual neighborhoods to speak on them with any genuine familiarity. I love vibrant neighborhoods like Oak Lawn, Lower…
