Texas has long lured Easterners searching for greener economic pastures, and a new report from the Partnership for New York City shows that the Big Apple has lost thousands of financial services jobs to places where it’s cheaper to do business. Cities like Dallas and San Antonio top the list.
So could Wall Street someday turn into “Y’all Street?” That’s the question posed by Jill Cowan, an economy reporter for the Dallas Morning News.
“There are definitely questions about whether New York can hang onto its status as kind of the unparalleled or unrivaled capital of the financial world,” Cowan says. “I think more than all of those jobs coming to Texas, more than that they’re just sort of spreading out in major metro areas that maybe aren’t quite so big and so expensive as New York.”
Cowan says that since the report was released by the Partnership for New York City, it’s worth noting that they seem to be aware of this “threat” from other places.
“Certainly, in north Texas, we’ve gotten a lot of major regional headquarters or operation centers,” she says. “I’m thinking in particular about northern suburbs like Plano, Frisco and Richardson. Plano has Liberty Mutual and Richardson just got a major State Farm campus.”
With all these companies spreading out outside of New York, the ripple effect of higher salaries is attracting Texans to hop on board.
“I’ve talked to a lot of economic development people, and not just about financial services jobs but these upper-middle class, high-paying white collar jobs,” she says. “The Plano economic development director told me that financial service jobs, for instance, pay on average $90,000 a year.”
Listen to the full interview in the player above.
Post by Allyson Michele.
