6 November 21-27, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Growing Pains Northern Collin County is booming. What happens when a town can’t keep up? BY EMMA RUBY T he annual Onion Festival in Princeton, Texas, is the event of the year. Started in 2004, the festival offers a 5k run, arts and crafts booths, athletic competitions and musical showcases put on by the local schools, all in honor of the pungent vegetable. It was on- ions, after all, that put Princeton — and Col- lin County, for that matter — on the map. In the 1940s, when the population was only 500, Princeton’s farmers were sending thou- sands of pounds of onions across the coun- try every year. That was the first time they realized they needed more bodies in town. In the center of town a migratory camp was built. Seventy-six cabins, each equipped with two beds and an oven, were erected for several hundred migrants who flocked to Collin County during the onion and cotton seasons. In 1945, the humble dwellings be- came home to German prisoners of war who, for eight months, were paid $2 a day for their labor. Months after the war ended, they were sent home. Eventually the camp became the J.M. Caldwell Sr. Community Park — one of four parks in Princeton. A plaque commemorates the land’s history, and a rusted water tower still looms over the park’s baseball fields and picnic areas. It was water that initiated Princeton’s second population trickle. In the ‘50s, con- struction of the Lake Lavon reservoir helped attract people to Princeton, and by 2000 the town was home to 3,477 people. (For com- parison, Friday Night Lights’ small-town Odessa, Texas, had a population of 91,000 in the same year.) Onions were no longer the pulse of Princeton; instead, the burgeoning city of Plano, about 20 miles away, had be- come the business center of Collin County. In 2020, the U.S. census found just over 17,000 residents called Princeton home. Es- timates from 2023 show that number had jumped 64%, to 28,000. Census data shows that Princeton is now the third-fastest- growing municipality in the entire country. Three other Collin County towns, Prosper, Anna and Celina, also make the list. The once sleepy town has woken up, but the growing pains have been frustrating for residents and leaders alike. “No one was prepared for the mass growth that we had,” Princeton’s mayor, Bri- anna Chacón, said in an interview with the Texas Standard earlier this year. “And it is too much. It is too quick, and no one was ad- equately prepared for this.” Traffic is a major pain point with Prince- ton’s residents; as families have moved in, roads are deteriorating and the city hasn’t been able to keep up with needed mainte- nance. The town’s backroads and housing de- velopments surround four-lane U.S. Highway 380. Two lanes travel east, two lanes travel west. All four are congested through much of the day, and unnavigable during rush hours. Most residents commute out of Prince- ton to work, and Chacón said that most resi- dents are spending “a good majority of their day” sitting on Highway 380 instead of “be- ing at home with their families.” The Texas Department of Transportation has proposed turning the four-lane highway into an eight-lane freeway, but funding has yet to be identified. Princeton’s most recently approved city budget allocates $17 million for the streets that are city-managed. (The town’s $112.7 million budget for the upcoming fiscal year is a 59% increase from last year’s.) The police force is short 30 officers, and the local school district is expected to grow by 10,000 students in the next decade, forc- ing district leaders to evaluate where, ex- actly, those children are supposed to go and who is supposed to teach them. And water is an issue. Tommy Mapp, Princeton’s director of public works, said an assessment of the city’s water connection supply had once found that the city had five years before it would be tapped out. That number is now closer to three years. “We’re looking for a little bit of breathing room, some time to reevaluate how we’re growing,” Mapp told the City Council in September, as the seven representatives and the mayor talked over what to do about Princeton’s “unsustainable” growth. In a unanimous vote, the council agreed a pause was in order. A 120-day moratorium on residential property permits was issued in an attempt to buy the city’s police, utility and infrastructure departments some time to figure out what to do. That moratorium expires at the end of January and could be extended, if needed, Chacón said. The Exurban Flight T here is something to be said for how devoted Dallasites are to their neigh- borhoods. Local shops in Bishop Arts, Deep Ellum, Lake Highlands and Oak Lawn sell hats and stickers that advertise Dallas’ trendiest pockets; and, whether you want to admit it or not, there is a sect of Dal- lasites that proudly wears those hats and slaps the stickers onto water bottles like their neighborhood is some club. And Dallasites like to stay in their neigh- borhoods. Legacy West in Plano makes for the exciting occasional day trip, but any- thing north of that may as well be Okla- homa. Lake Highlands has a Top Golf and a Target — what more could they want? Oak Cliff has run clubs and craft breweries — what more could they want? It would have been easy for Dallas to go on, oblivious to what happens up north, if not for the results of the census released ear- lier this year. For the first time, North Texas’ impressive growth was not spearheaded by Dallas County but by the suburbs and those northern Collin County towns we had, for so long, ignored. In 2023, more people left Dallas County than moved here. Dallas ranked 8th in the country for negative net domestic migration, losing 34,000 residents seeking something Big D, evidently, doesn’t offer. The modest population growth that did occur was thanks to more Dallas County babies being born than Dallas County residents dying. The latest census data points to a trend happening across Texas’ most populated cit- ies, says David Garcia, policy director with the housing policy group Up For Growth. The organization publishes an annual report on housing availability, and this year’s study found that Dallas-Fort Worth ranked as one of the worst metro areas in the country for housing underproduction. With affordable housing lagging behind demand, in Dallas- Fort Worth and the cities’ suburbs, residents are now fleeing to the exurbs in search of af- fordable housing, Garcia said. “I think there’s a perception that a lot more home building happens in Texas, and that the rules and regulations there are a lot more per- missive to home building. I think that’s gener- ally true, but what we’re also seeing is that there’s tremendous demand in Texas for hous- ing fueled mostly by domestic migration,” Gar- cia said. “What we found in most Texas cities was that most of the growth was happening on the suburban and exurban fringes.” For Dallas, that growth has crawled north thanks, in part, to the Dallas North Tollway. The tollway is managed by the North Texas Tollway Authority, and property values sur- rounding NTTA roadways have doubled since the start of the century,The Dallas Morning News reported earlier this year. While Dallas’ northern suburbs have been growing for decades, real estate agent Lacey Brutschy noticed a shift in the north-of-Dal- las development in 2017, when Legacy West was opened in Plano. The live-shop-eat-stroll development was, and is, cool, and has | UNFAIR PARK | Mike Brooks From 2020 to 2023, Princeton grew by roughly 11,00 residents. >> p8
