Last year, when I found out that Plano West’s economically disadvantaged student population was 25%, a
+500% increase over what it was less than twenty years prior when I graduated, I freaked out.
I assumed, erroneously, that Plano West was an outlier in what used to be a largely homogeneously affluent Collin County. Upon further examination, it became apparent that every single high school school in Collin County — which has somehow remained the richest county in Texas by per capita income for more than two decades — has seen a significant increase in economically disadvantaged students in that timeframe.
In DFW, an observable pattern between apartment developments, low income students, “white flight”, and eventual decline in cities has been clearly established, as detailed in this article by Leftist-leaning
The Dallas Observer:
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/...r-ends-8265092
Per the article, written in 2016 and already out of date as far as DFW’s fast-evolving demographic changes are concerned:
“
In 1997, DeSoto and Cedar Hill were majority white…
DeSoto is now 3 percent white, having lost 91 percent of its white population. The number of low-income students, meanwhile, has quadrupled”
Think it’s just the southern suburbs where this trend has occurred? Think again.
The article states,
“
Carrollton-Farmers Branch, Garland, Mesquite, and Richardson were majority white in 1997 with fewer than a third of their students classified as low income.
Mesquite had the highest share of white students at 70.6 percent and also saw the largest decline of the four. By 2015, the number of white students had dropped by 68 percent while its low-income population had surged by 266 percent.”
As poor, “disenfranchised” people move into and a community (mostly apartment dwellers or renters), slowly but surely, white people (middle class and upper middle class) move out. Schools decline as do property values.
Any measures to remediate the mistake Collin County city governments made by allowing multitudes of high density housing projects to be developed are too little, too late at this point. For Collin County communities like McKinney, Plano, Frisco, and Allen, the momentous and continued growth of high density multi family housing developments within their city limits have already sealed their fates.
I predict that these communities will unfortunately continue to decline over time. There is no going back to the way things were.
That being said, these communities should not fall into complete disarray as the aforementioned DeSoto, Mesquite, and Garland, because Collin County is and will
continue to be a major economic powerhouse and center of corporate jobs.
While that reality should prop up certain desirable neighborhoods (Willow Bend, Starwood, etc), Collin County schools will continue to enroll more and more low income students until a breaking point, when those schools will invariably show signs of declining performance.
For daring to discuss these very valid concerns in a thread last year discussing Plano schools, I was attacked, vilified, and excoriated, while implicitly deemed racist and classist, of which I am neither. I am in fact a
realist.
Data doesn’t lie and neither do trends. Taken at a macro level, the trends in Collin County aren’t good, and portend that like the formerly-thriving communities before it, Collin County cities are going to experience sustained deleterious demographic changes over the next decade, whose effects are yet unknown.
I resent articles like the one I referenced for sensationalizing this phenomena through the lens of “racism” and “white flight”. Certainly racism could be and probably is a factor in many instances of “white flight” and decaying communities, but it belies the fact that if people are moving away from low income families (who are disproportionately black and Hispanic), perhaps it’s because of the undeniably negative impact that these people have on a community in terms of crime, schools, property values, and quality of life in general.
Those of us who wish not to live around these people should not be vilified by acknowledging these realities and wanting our communities to remain uniformly affluent.