Dallas, TX
Dallas ranks among wealthiest cities in the world as millionaire count grows
Dallas is the 22nd most wealthy city in the world as its number of millionaire residents has grown by 75% in the past decade.
The city is home to 68,600 millionaires amid a period of booming economic growth, according to a report from London-based private investment migration consultancy firm Henley & Partners. It’s the sixth wealthiest city in the United States sitting behind fierce competition like New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago.
It’s not the only Texas city to make the list. Houston ranks above Dallas as the fifth wealthiest U.S. city with 90,900 millionaires and Austin is tenth in the U.S. with a millionaire count of 32,700.
It’s not just millionaires contributing to the wealth. Centimillionaires, individuals with a net worth over $100 million, are prominent in Dallas as well with 125 of them residing in the city. There’s also 15 billionaires living in the city like oilman Ray Hunt, philanthropist Margot Perot, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and Dallas Mavericks minority owner Mark Cuban.
Dallas also plays host to 11 Fortune 500 companies like telecommunications titan AT&T, Southwest Airlines and pipeline transportation giant Energy Transfer.
Those companies are part of Dallas’ special sauce which attracts individuals with deep pockets, said Ray Perryman, CEO of the Waco-based research firm, The Perryman Group.
“Dallas has long been the economic center of the Sun Belt in terms of trade, transportation, finance and other sectors,” he said. “It has also become a major center for technology in recent decades. It also has a substantial concentration of Fortune 500 headquarters and, although not a production area, has traditionally attracted a large segment on the ownership of Texas’ vast oil and gas reserves.”
Beyond the region’s traditional companies, the city has caught the eyes of private equity firms from neighboring states and beyond.
But the job isn’t finished yet. The city recently passed its bond package, including Proposition G. It’s a $72.3 million package that is aimed at boosting economic development through incentives and grants. It was a key portion of the city’s bond package and gives lawmakers an additional tool to entice companies to look to Dallas as a potential new home for its headquarters.
The package also guarantees that $36.6 million of that will go to mixed-income housing, a crucial piece in getting companies to make Dallas a national competitor as the fight for company relocations continues, said Paul Ridley, District 14 city council representative.
“That will have a long-term effect of increasing the supply of affordable housing in Dallas,” he said. “That by itself can attract companies here. They want to perceive that the housing market is less expensive from where they’re relocating from and that there are places for their employees at all income levels to find housing.”
Strong companies along with the city’s dynamic culture means its long-term wealth trajectory is still headed in the right direction, Perryman said.
“It is only natural that the leaders in these sectors would tend to live in the area, often spanning generations of family members,” he said. “In addition, the area offers outstanding cultural, entertainment, sports and other opportunities that make it an attractive place to live. All of these factors combine to make Dallas a natural landing place for successful individuals and families.”
Dallas, TX
Top Dallas leaders Jon Fortune, Genesis Gavino to leave for Austin to work for former boss
An exodus of Dallas City leaders who served under former City Manager T.C. Broadnax continued this week with the announcement that a deputy city manager and a chief of staff would be leaving the city in the next several weeks.
Deputy City Manager Jon Fortune and Chief of Staff to the City Manager Genesis D. Gavino will both leave the city within three weeks, according to a memo interim City Manager Kim Bizor Tolbert sent out to council members Monday.
Both will join Broadnax in Austin, according to a memo sent to Austin City Council on Monday.
Fortune will leave June 7 and will join Austin as the deputy city manager. Gavino’s last day will be May 31 and she will become a special assistant to the city manager there.
Fortune was involved in negotiations that affect law enforcement pay structures for police and firefighters and the city’s shelter program in the wake of hurricane Harvey. Fortune also oversaw the city’s COVID-19 testing and vaccinations centers. Among the departments he oversees are the Dallas Police Department, Dallas Fire-Rescue, the Dallas Marshal’s Office, Dallas Municipal Courts, the Office of Emergency Management and the Office of Integrated Public Safety Solutions.
When former city manager T.C. Broadnax announced his departure earlier this year, Jeff Patterson, President of the Dallas Fire Fighters Association told The Dallas Morning News the association had asked Fortune if he would consider stepping into Broadnax’s shoes. But Fortune declined, Patterson said.
Gavino led the launch of the city’s first Digital Navigators Program that/ was designed to bring internet connectivityto underserved communities. Gavino also worked with local school districts to sift through matching grants to get COVID-19 federal dollars. In 2020, Gavino was also the Resilience Officer in the Office of Equity and Inclusion.
Both joined the city hall in 2017.
Fortune and Gavino’s departures come days after Assistant City Manager Robert Perez was picked as the city manager in Topeka, Kansas. Majed Al-Ghafry, another official in the city’s top brass, is set to become DeSoto’s city manager after the DeSoto City Council votes on an agenda item to approve his employment agreement Tuesday.
Interim City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert recently dissuaded potential employers from making a play for police Chief Eddie García after reports surfaced that García was being courted by Houston and Austin. Last week, Garcia said he would be staying in Dallas at least until May 2027. City officials amended Garcia’s contract to give him a retention bonus of $10,000 every six months.
Dallas, TX
Dallas’ poverty-fighting CitySquare out of funding and will close at year’s end
Dallas nonprofit CitySquare — for decades a leader in the battle against poverty and homelessness — has run out of money to do its work and will go out of business at year’s end.
In an interview Friday with its leaders, I learned CitySquare will devote the rest of 2024 to transferring its many programs, which serve 27,000 people annually, to other neighborhood providers.
CitySquare also expects to turn over its Opportunity Center campus, across Interstate 30 from downtown, to another operator as a hub for poverty-fighting organizations.
“We didn’t have the time we needed to really right the ship,” said CEO Annam Manthiram, who arrived in late August in hopes of creating a new identity for CitySquare. “We kept thinking fundraising would come back early this year and thought the brand was stronger than it was.”
CitySquare’s long-time visionary was Larry James, a champion of the poor who in 1994 became head of the fledgling Central Dallas Ministries, as the nonprofit was originally known.
James grew the operation into a powerhouse responsible for many good works in Dallas — permanent and temporary housing, food resources, health care and job creation. He also educated policymakers and led anti-poverty efforts at the behest of elected officials.
CitySquare was synonymous with James, perhaps too much so. Once he moved from his CEO job to a board seat in 2021, community members who long supported his work also began to move on.
Ongoing cuts in operating costs, staff and programming in the last year or so haven’t kept up with the “millions of dollars decline” in giving, said board chair Lewis Weinger.
Weinger and Manthiram told me CitySquare’s prospects were further hurt by a lack of financial transparency to the board and donors after James’ retirement and by “culture-workplace issues.” They said they could not provide details of those issues because of HR considerations.
This month, the leadership team and board decided the best outcome for the neighbors who rely on CitySquare’s services was to go public with plans to cease operations and enlist partners to take over the work at year’s end.
CitySquare’s main campus, on Malcolm X Boulevard just south of Interstate 30, provides services such as a food pantry, workforce training and a community resource center. Also on the site are 50 cottages that shelter a fraction of the 500 neighbors in its housing programs.
The best news in this grim moment is that local philanthropic foundations have CitySquare’s back and will provide funds to carry the nonprofit and its programs through the year.
Wayne White, president and CEO of the Communities Foundation of Texas, told me Friday he and others have met with CitySquare leaders to determine how best to ensure neighbors don’t lose services. He said his team “is committed to working with funders and nonprofits to address the gap that will exist once CitySquare winds down their work.”
When I profiled Manthiram in February, she had a sense of the financial problems, but she believed she would have three years to turn things around. “I didn’t anticipate as big of a budget shortfall as actually existed,” Manthiram said, “and the board didn’t know the budget deficit was as large as it was.”
For example, the board had been told the shortfall in CitySquare’s $39 million budget for 2022 was $1.6 million. Manthiram discovered the deficit was $3.2 million. Despite her cost-cutting after arriving in the last quarter of 2023, the nonprofit expects final numbers to show it finished last year with a $2 million deficit.
The previous CEO, John Siburt, took the job in January 2021 after serving as CitySquare president for five years. He left in December 2022 and is now president of Timberview Farmstead in Fort Worth. CitySquare’s chief financial officer and chief development officer at the time, both of whom had been on staff for only a couple of years, also left in 2022.
“There was no intentional hiding of the financial situation,” Siburt told me Saturday. He did not comment on the workplace-culture issues beyond saying “the need to change the CitySquare model created tension at times.”
In separate interviews, Siburt and James said CitySquare’s aggressive attempts to keep people housed during the pandemic triggered an unsustainable financial picture. “I took responsibility for overextending us during COVID,” Siburt said. He later chose to leave the organization “out of a belief that both CitySquare and I could benefit from a fresh start.”
James said the nonprofit many times tried to do too much. “We would see the need and we were sure filling that gap was the right thing to do.”
For example, with struggling residents further crippled by COVID, CitySquare paid the rents and mortgages of hundreds of people and operated 1,000 apartments as permanent supportive housing. Once pandemic-related funding dried up, the nonprofit continued the program with the misguided belief fundraising would catch up.
Weinger described it like this: “Larry could pick up the phone to a few very generous donors and say, ‘This is the check I need each of you to write.’ We didn’t have that path forward any more.”
After James’ departure, Weinger said, a lack of faith and mistrust developed. “It became sort of a Catch-22 that, once Annam was on board, didn’t give her the time to show what we could do.”
Manthiram didn’t uproot her two school-age sons and leave a good job running an Albuquerque homeless services agency to be part of closing down a venerable nonprofit in Dallas.
But with no other apparent choice, she is determined CitySquare’s programs stay in place and its 85-member staff continues its work — eventually under other nonprofits. “My goal now is putting together a transition team to figure out which community-based groups are the best for the neighbors,” Manthiram said. ”Perhaps community partners will even more effectively lift neighbors out of poverty and homelessness than we’ve been able to do in the last few years.”
The Opportunity Center property likely will become even more valuable once the proposed redesign and expansion of I-30 is complete. CitySquare leadership is adamant any new owner maintain the programming without gentrifying the neighborhood.
CitySquare could have sold the building and land to provide funding to get through this year, Weinger said. “But then what about next year?”
Manthiram is heartened that this transition will put neighbors first and avoid gaps in services. “A favorite verse of mine is ‘With God all things are possible,’” she said. “Right now this feels like the right decision.”
Dallas, TX
Dallas Mavericks Set to Play the Minnesota Timberwolves in Western Conference Finals
The Dallas Mavericks beat the Oklahoma City Thunder 117-116 on Saturday night to advance to the Western Conference Finals but had to wait until Sunday night to know their opponent. With a 98-90 win in Game 7 over the reigning champion Denver Nuggets, the Mavericks will be playing the Minnesota Timberwolves next round with a trip to the NBA Finals on the line. The Timberwolves made the largest halftime comeback in Game 7 history to advance.
This is a matchup of two of the younger superstars in the NBA, as Luka Doncic will face off against phenom Anthony Edwards. The Timberwolves have a stifling defense, having the NBA’s best defensive rating throughout the regular season, though the Mavericks had the best defensive rating over the last 20 games of the season.
READ MORE: Dallas Mavericks Rally To Advance to Western Conference Finals: 3 Game-Changing Plays
It’s only the second-ever matchup between these two franchises, a Dallas Mavericks’ sweep in three games in 2002 as Dirk Nowitzki established himself as a better number-one option over Kevin Garnett. This is only Minnesota’s second-ever appearance in the Western Conference Finals as a franchise, matching Luka Doncic’s career, with their other appearance coming in 2003.
Minnesota won the season series 3-1, though all of those games came before February and Dallas made their trades to bring in Daniel Gafford and P.J. Washington. Because of that, it’s not certain how Dallas will matchup, but I’d imagine Daniel Gafford will guard Rudy Gobert, P.J. Washington will guard Karl-Anthony Towns, Derrick Jones Jr. will guard Anthony Edwards, Luka Doncic will guard Jaden McDaniels, and Kyrie Irving will start on Mike Conley. Doncic will have to deal with a pesky defender once again, as he’s likely to draw the McDaniels assignment.
Anthony Edwards has been impressive these playoffs, averaging around 30 PPG. His ascension along the steady-handedness of the veteran Mike Conley has been electric to watch. Derrick Jones Jr. will have his hands full with this matchup.
The Mavericks will need their bigs to show up in this series. They were able to dominate a smaller Oklahoma City Thunder team on the glass but it’ll be much harder to do that against a massive Minnesota frontline, featuring Gobert, Towns, and Sixth Man of the Year winner Naz Reid. If Dallas could get Maxi Kleber back from his shoulder sprain in this series, it could go a long way, just to give them more versatility and match up with Towns’ skillset.
Game 1 will start at 7:30 p.m. CST from the Target Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
READ MORE: Dallas Mavericks’ Luka Doncic and Kyrie Irving Tandem Instrumental in Deep Playoff Run
Stick with MavericksGameday for more coverage of the Dallas Mavericks throughout the NBA Playoffs
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