The old Texas map may show where growth goes next

For generations, people have tried to forecast Texas’s growth using highway maps, demographic models, employment projections and subdivision starts. All of that is helpful data. But there may be a simpler way to see where Texas is headed next. Look at where Texas started Texas did not develop as a single, continuous suburban blanket spreading outward from Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Austin and San Antonio. Instead, it grew as a collection of solar systems. In North Texas, Dallas and Fort Worth became the suns. Around them sat a first ring of real towns, many of them county seats, with courthouses, schools, churches, merchants, banks and downtowns that predated any master-planned community with a monument sign. Then came the smaller towns orbiting those county seats. For more than a century, that arrangement worked because it had to. A county seat was the local hub for government, commerce, medicine, education and social life. Roads led to it. Farmers traded there. Lawyers argued there. Bankers lent there. And on Friday nights, everyone knew where the lights were on. Today, the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan economy has grown large enough to reconnect those old dots. That may be on...