Still waiting for a ‘Texas Miracle’
State’s smaller cities struggle to overcome job growth inequality
LONGVIEW — On the eastern plains of Texas, local leaders are trying to stop the bleeding of talent to the bright lights of Dallas and Austin. They are sprucing up downtown, completing 10 miles of walking trails, investing in parks and schools and making other improvements they hope will entice young workers to stay and help this part of the state finally claim a share of the Texas Miracle.
Few parts of America have nurtured faster job growth than Texas in the years since the 2008 financial crisis, in what is now the longest-sustained economic expansion in American history. But that growth has largely left cities like Longview in the dust. No state — not even California, long held up as the embodiment of America’s widening geographic inequality — has seen a larger post-recession divergence between its elite cities and everywhere else.
Nearly all the net growth in jobs and new businesses in Texas over the last decade, Labor Department data show, has been concentrated in four large metropolitan areas — Austin, Dallas,
Houston and San Antonio. Those areas accounted for more than four out of every five jobs created in the state since the recession ended, their populations swelling with surges of young and talented workers. Collectively, the four saw double the rate of job growth as the rest of Texas.
A similar geographic inequality is playing out in other places in America, alarming officials at the Federal Reserve. While the latest jobs report showed the economy’s continued strength after 10 years of expansion, the effects have been uneven, with the wealthiest parts of the country reaping a disproportionate share of the gains. The economy has evolved toward more technology and service jobs, favoring areas with highly educated workers and high-end professional service industries — and leaving smaller, traditionally blue-collar towns like Longview at a disadvantage.
While the richest neighborhoods in Texas’ most dynamic cities have grown much richer as the recovery wore on, the poorest parts of the state fell even further behind. The Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank, sorts ZIP codes across the country on a five-point scale, with “prosperous” at the top and “distressed” at the bottom. Research from the group found that from 2008-16, the most prosperous ZIP codes in Texas — heavily concentrated in those star metro areas — accounted for more than two-thirds of the state’s net growth in jobs and business establishments.
More than 2 million Texans live in ZIP codes that fell from “at-risk,” which is the second-lowest group, to “distressed” over the same period. A majority of those ZIP codes are rural — many of them lie in areas that rely disproportionately on the volatile oil and gas industries and lack economic cushions when energy prices fall and drilling slows.
“It’s certainly not a risingtide-lifting-everybody story,” said John Lettieri, president of the Economic Innovation Group. “The gains are not being segregated in other states in the way that they are in Texas.”
In the Texas economy, he added, “it’s superstar cities, and then it’s rural and everybody else.”
Longview falls squarely in “everybody else,” but its leaders are optimistic they can move up. The city of 81,000 people is the center of a metropolitan area of 220,000 near the Louisiana border. It gained jobs after the Great Recession but lost all of them when oil prices fell through 2015 and 2016. Small businesses started to go under. The Chamber of Commerce lost 33 members in one year alone.
There were only 1,800 more jobs in the Longview area in April than there were 10 years ago, according to the Labor Department, an annual growth rate of less than 0.2 percent. Gregg County, which includes Longview, lost more businesses than it created from 2012 to 2016, the innovation group’s data show.
Beer test
Population in the Longview metro area grew about 2 percent from 2010 to 2018, according to the Census Bureau. Austin’s grew 26 percent. In a sort of proxy statistic for young urban professionals, Austin added 33 breweries from 2013 to 2018, according to the Brewers Association, a trade group. Longview added one. “In the last 10 years,” said Kelly Hall, president of the Longview Chamber of Commerce, “we saw young professionals like my son, they graduate from college and where do they go? Megacenters. Austin, Dallas, San Francisco.”
Economic distress and the struggle to bring in young talent are linked, economists say.
“You need to have so many things to be able to get to where you need to be to attract people and businesses,” said Pia Orrenius, a vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “One of the things you need is the workforce. A place like Longview, it’s a little bit harder to compete.”
Manufacturing, energy and health care jobs dominate in the Longview metro area. CHRISTUS Good Shepherd Medical CenterLongview is the largest employer in the city. Still, the median income and the share of adults with a college degree both fall well below the state average.
Longview’s leaders are trying to change that. Mayor Andy Mack, an oral surgeon, won election on a platform of wooing the city’s college-educated children back to town. He pushed for passage of a $104 million bond package that funded parks, schools and infrastructure, including the walking paths. He’s happy to tell you how affordable a starter home here is.
“We have everything you need in Longview,” Mack said recently, after a luncheon sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce that focused on community health. “We have plentiful land. We have adequate water, which most places don’t have. We have everything you need. All we need is for people to realize that we’re here now.”
A few years back, Jack Buttram and his wife, Sarah, realized Longview did not, in fact, have everything they wanted. The list of what was lacking started with good, local beer, Buttram, who was at the time an avid home-brewer, said in a recent interview.
“It pretty much came down to, we’re either going to move to Colorado, where all the stuff we love already exists,” he said, “or we were going to stay here and make some stuff that we love happen.”
They stayed. Buttram teamed up with a friend, John Oglesbee, who ran a medical billing company but dreamed of something hoppier. They put together a business plan, lined up some financial backers and secured a lease in what had been a sleepy corner of a sagging downtown. They opened Oil Horse Brewing — the first and, to this point only, Longview brewery — in May 2016. Demand was so strong, the men said, they were constantly running out of beer. They have since increased their production.
Many of their customers had never consumed craft beer before and come in asking for the closest thing to Miller Lite or Michelob Ultra.
“People are just terrified of hop bitterness,” Buttram said.
Oglesbee said “it’s going to be extremely difficult” to attract a wave of craft-loving, young professionals to town.
“Longview was, and probably will be for a long time, extremely blue-collar,” he said. “We are going to need to grow our industry that’s white collar. I don’t know if Longview is there.”
Culture clash
There is a worry among some business leaders in Longview that the whitecollar workers now live in cities that don’t share their values.
“Their whole culture is different,” said Vicki Jones, an entrepreneur here who runs a boutique for women undergoing cancer treatment. She returned to Longview after college in Las Vegas and also runs a store in Dallas. “Their economy is different, their beliefs are different.”
Jones’ and others’ hope is that Longview can sell a particular type of young worker on a mix of the values they grew up with, with just enough of the big-city amenities to make a smaller town attractive. At Oil Horse, they host monthly theological debates, over beer.
Sometimes the appeal succeeds. Josh Black was just the sort of young talent that Longview has grown accustomed to losing. He grew up here, went to college at Baylor, in Waco, and finished law school in 2009. He married a woman who grew up outside Dallas. His friends were all settling there or in Austin or Houston. But he had a job offer in Longview, and nine years ago, he persuaded his wife, Libby, to return to the city of his childhood.
He and his wife still miss the restaurants of Dallas, and they would love to get something like a Whole Foods in town. But when they visit the big city, Black said, they’re always glad to come back home.