Book says Texas Triangle — its big cities — state’s future

Most of us are aware of the Texas Triangle, whose three points are the teeming blobs of Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston and Austin-San Antonio.

As a brand, the Triangle’s origin story starts with attorney Herb Kelleher and investment banker Rollin King, a pilot, meeting over drinks in the bar of the St. Anthony Hotel in downtown San Antonio in 1966.

They were tossing around ideas for a business when King noted that in-state airfares between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio were outrageous. It was often cheaper for Texas executives to shuttle between the cities in chartered planes.

King drew a triangle on a cocktail napkin to represent the thenimaginary links between the three cities, and the Texas Triangle concept was born. So was Southwest Airlines, that most Texan of corporations — entrepreneurial, eager and cheap.

The napkin doodle was a necessary touch. A great origin story glides on details like that. But it’s fictitious — King didn’t actually draw it.

“The Texas Triangle: An Emerging Power in the Global Economy,” a new book co-authored by former HUD Secretary and San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros, starts with that bar scene — and debunks the napkin myth.

‘An economic Godzilla’

Cisneros wrote the 335-page book with former Express-News business columnist David Hendricks, J.H. Cullum Clark of the Bush Institute-Southern Methodist University Economic Growth

Initiative and William Fulton of Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.

The point they drive at is that the state’s largest cities and their metro areas, taken together, are a very big deal among the nation’s eight pre-eminent mega-regions. Those include Northern and Southern California, the Pacific Northwest and South Florida.

The authors demonstrate that the Triangle is an economic Godzilla, with strong business ties between its big cities and a nation-leading export trade.

And it has important advantages over the other mega-regions: relatively cheap housing, low taxes, light-touch regulations, lower costs of doing business and a decent highway system. The result: huge population growth. Outsiders are pouring into Texas from across the country, most notably California, and almost all of them are landing in the 35 counties that make up the Texas Triangle, as geographically defined by Cisneros and company.

The educational attainment of its people is one of the Triangle’s weak spots. But these newcomers are better educated than the average Texan, so they’re boosting our stats.

“More than other U.S. megaregions, the Texas Triangle has been ‘importing’ the highly educated workforce that has been powering its economic growth from other parts of the United States and abroad,” the authors write.

Which is easier than spending all that money to properly educate Texas children and young adults.

It all goes back to state leaders’ historic small-government credo: Keep a lid on taxes and regulation, keep services at a minimum and build highways, and businesses will come running.

The Texas Miracle.

The miracle’s dark side is that Texas has the highest rate of uninsured residents in the country, in addition to lagging educational results and median incomes.

But there’s no arguing with the state’s triumph in the business world.

Excuse me — the triumph.

Bridging ‘vastness of Texas’

The Dallas area alone is home to 20 of the country’s Fortune 500 companies.

With a gross domestic product of $1.3 trillion, the Texas Triangle is the fifth largest of the world’s 19 leading mega-regions, according to the authors’ analysis.

The Northeast Corridor (which includes the New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., metro areas) tops the list with a GDP of $3.7 trillion. The Urban Midwest (anchored by Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh) is No. 3 with $1.9 trillion, and Southern California is fourth with $1.5 trillion.

Early in the book — which was released Tuesday by Texas A&M University Press — the authors make their case for the Triangle’s

Illustration by Jeremiah Teutsch /

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