Welcome to Y’all Street: bullish Dallas aims to steal New York’s financial crown | Business

As the warm sun rises over the Dallas skyline, SUVs and pickup trucks speed past a modest construction site that is helping fuel the city’s Texas-sized financial ambitions.

Goldman Sachs, among the towers owned by Bank of America and JP Morgan, has cordoned off 800,000 square feet of space for a new Dallas campus that could house more than 5,000 employees. But the $700m (£530m) project is more than just a regional expansion plan for one of America’s biggest banks. It’s another victory for the lobbyists behind Dallas’ “Y’all Street,” the Texas city’s aggressive push to steal New York’s fiscal crown.

Once a hotspot for bankers, the Dallas-Fort Worth metro area has seen a 40% increase in the financial sector workforce to 386,000 over the past decade. Banks and investment houses already eager to lean into Texas’ fossil fuel industry and growing technology and artificial intelligence sectors have been lured by multimillion-dollar subsidies and new fast-track labor courts, as well as Texas’ complete lack of corporate and income taxes.

In the last 12 months alone, 10-year property tax reduction and a $2.7 million grant helped persuade Canadian lender Scotiabank to relocate from North Carolina, bringing 1,000 jobs to the state. Meanwhile, Nasdaq and NYSE, seeking to obtain potential listings, opened branches of their exchanges in Dallas.

This follows news of a local Texas stock exchange (TXSE) that launched later this year and is trying to undercut rivals with looser listing rules that could attract right-wing executives. This includes a clear absence of diversity requirements that Nasdaq once used to bring more women and minorities to American boards. Now, the more liberal Big Apple is in TXSE’s crosshairs; A recent TV ad shows a Texas longhorn destroying Wall Street’s famous bull statue. “Welcome to the real bull market” TXSE announced.

Marketing efforts aside, how serious is Dallas about stealing financial jobs from New York? “We’re very serious about this,” says Eric Johnson, Dallas’ mayor. “We think the country is shaping up politically, we really stand out as a place that embraces business.”

His team is specifically targeting companies that have allegedly been put off by left-leaning policies, such as that of New York’s social democratic mayor, Zohran Mamdani. Johnson said Mamdani’s plans, which include subsidized child care and groceries as well as a possible 9.5% increase in property taxes, would hurt companies that he said are major employers. “These are policy differences that cause people to look at places like Dallas, where we do the opposite,” Johnson said.

And Dallas’ efforts intensify; This month, Johnson is sending a 10-person delegation to New York to meet with Wall Street executives and draw them south. “My office is certainly in contact with people across the country about relocating corporate headquarters or expanding operations here. And we don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.”

Even London, which is often worried about losing business to New York, may have a new rival. “We travel internationally and talk to international companies,” said Mike Rosa, senior vice president of the Dallas Area Chambers business lobby group. “The idea of ​​an international bank… moving their headquarters entirely to Dallas has come true. The idea of ​​establishing Dallas as the headquarters of the bank so it can be more successful, that’s very real,” he said. “And we have the necessary equipment and supplies to continue advancing and growing our international footprint.”

Part of the pitch is to be closer to large commercial customers and major technology firms that are increasingly shifting their center of gravity to the Lone Star state.

Throughout the 2020s, Texas surpassed California as home to the largest number of NYSE-listed and Fortune 500 corporate headquarters of any American state. These include Oracle, which moved from Silicon Valley to Austin in 2020, and Elon Musk’s three startups (Tesla, X and SpaceX) that moved from California in recent years. ExxonMobil is the latest victory, with the oil company announcing last month that it would shift its base from New Jersey to Texas.

Dallas-Fort Worth’s population also grew rapidly, reaching 8.5 million people since 2010, the fastest increase among the 385 U.S. metropolitan areas.

“The real story was people moving in from other parts of the United States,” said Cullum Clark, an economist at the George W Bush Presidential Center at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas. It comes at a time when New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco are experiencing net outflows. Clark said some of this was his own choice politically, noting that there was “significant data” showing that conservative-leaning people were fleeing liberal-leaning states.

Politics aside, businesses are now finding it easier to recruit staff. Aasem Khalil, head of Goldman Sachs’ Dallas office, still remembers getting a call in 2016 from current CEO David Solomon asking him to move his career and family to a then-900-person office in Dallas. Khalil, a lifelong New Yorker who knows Dallas as a temporary stopover for meetings, said “it’s confusing.”

But Dallas has proven to be well-connected and a convenient departure point for serving businesses in Latin America; Nonstop flights to locations as diverse as Fargo, North Dakota, and Seoul helped ferry managers attend meetings around the world. Meanwhile, increasing demand for bankers eventually meant SMU and the University of Texas began churning out business and finance graduates who could be hired at firms like Goldman.

Ultimately, “not everyone wants to be in New York,” Khalil said, adding that it can be a “difficult place to live” even for wealthy bankers. “For a lot of people, Dallas is more their cup of tea.”

But while the increase in high-paying jobs has been welcomed across the political spectrum, it is unclear whether an influx of wealthy bankers will solve all the problems. And some experts warn Y’all Street could put pressure on poor families, especially when it comes to rent prices.

“Growth is a good problem,” Clark said. “But that being said, nothing happens without side effects.”

“A growing population, and particularly a growing population of high-wage people, is creating pressure and creating new stresses on the system,” Clark explained. “And if these people aren’t given enough support, someone is the clear loser from these changes.”

The rise in rental prices over the past 15 years has disproportionately harmed low-income families, where rent eats up more than half of their wages. “This is an enormous challenge, and there are a lot of people going through this. And it’s not just the poorest of the poor; there are several hundred thousand people who are heavily burdened with housing costs,” Clark said.

Figures collected by the Dallas research group Child Poverty Action Laboratory (CPAL) show that the number of households in the city of Dallas earning more than $100,000 increased by 87,000 in the decade through 2023, while those earning less than $35,000 fell by 61,000. Some of this can be explained by wage growth, but lower-income workers are more likely to be pushed out of city limits and into farther suburbs.

Due to limited public transportation, traffic congestion and commute times are increasing. This has forced some workers to take lower-paying jobs closer to where they can afford to live, putting further pressure on household finances. “For people who are already struggling financially, [the population boom] “It creates more competition for housing and resources, and so the wages they earn don’t go as far,” said Ann Baddour, director of the Fair Financial Services Project at the Texas Appleseed advocacy group.

This is also seen in financial statistics, including an 81% increase in debt collection requests in Dallas between 2022 and 2025. “That’s always a leading indicator because people will borrow to make a living and then at some point everything will collapse,” Baddour said.

The city also struggles with chronic homelessness. Clearing camps from visible areas including the old central business district downtown. Nonprofit group Housing Forward emphasized that Dallas won’t just move people “block by block” and has committed to connecting 22,939 people to housing since 2021. The group said the number of homeless people has fallen for the fourth consecutive year, although it remains a visible problem, including in the city centre.

Still, Dallas and Y’all Street lobbyists are racing to keep up with the growth they’ve encouraged. “If you believe you’re going to be in a high-growth environment, you better have a plan in place for housing and be ready to absorb that,” Clark said. “I actually don’t think the city of Dallas has that right now, so we’re not prepared enough.”

Dallas is now trying to quickly resolve the issue. last year, reduced parking requirements for new developments and to make it easier to enforce by rewriting building regulations. through smaller-scale developments for multifamily buildings.

But even Dallas’ wealthy bankers face fierce competition at the top end of the housing market.

Linda McMahon, a former J.P. Morgan banker and president of the Dallas Economic Development Corp., recalls a private equity mogul who recently made a generous private offer on a home in Dallas’ affluent Highland Park before tearing it down to start from scratch. “He probably spent twice as much, but that’s not unheard of,” McMahon said. “The prices are so low for people from California that they can come and do this. So the high-end real estate market is very competitive.”

Campaigners like Baddour warn that without targeted support, inequality in the Dallas and Forth Worth metro area is likely to rise.

“There needs to be a deliberate choice and a deliberate effort to make sure that this doesn’t just reinforce some of the dynamics that create a somewhat two-tiered economy – those with access to money, markets, resources and those without.” Baddur said. “There needs to be a conscious effort to close this gap here.”