In this week’s episode of Retire in Texas, Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of PAX Financial Group, takes a deep look into the booming economic landscape of Texas. Darryl explores the key factors driving Texas’ rapid growth, from its business-friendly environment to the ongoing migration of companies and people from other states. With a focus on the Texas Triangle (Dallas, Houston, San Antonio), he discusses the unique ecosystem forming between these cities and how it’s shaping the future of commerce.
Darryl also shares his personal journey through various Texas towns, offering listeners insight into the diverse subcultures of the state and the bond that unites Texans. From the challenges of traffic and infrastructure to the expansion of high-paying job opportunities, Darryl breaks down why Texas remains a smart bet for businesses and families alike.
Key show highlights include:
- The population boom in Texas and its impact on the economy.
- A closer look at the Texas Triangle and its role in attracting major companies like Tesla, Oracle, and Apple.
- How industries like oil, natural gas, technology, and alternative energy are shaping Texas’ future.
- Darryl’s personal experiences growing up in Texas and how the state’s unique culture plays into its success.
- Insights into infrastructure projects like the I-35 Capital Express and how they aim to accommodate the state’s rapid growth.
Transcript:
Hey, this is Darryl Lyons, CEO and Co-Founder of Pax Financial Group. And you’re listening to Retire in Texas. This information is general in nature. It’s not intended to provide specific investment, tax, or legal advice. Visit www.Paxfinancialgroup.com for more information.
Also visit Paxfinancialgroup.com, click on the connect with us now connect with us button. It might be connect with us now, but I think it’s connect with us, and visit with financial advisor – 15 minute, no obligation. They have the hearts of a teacher, and we’ll just find out if it’s a good fit. You can just tell them your situation, see if they can point you in the right direction.
I’ve never had a complaint about that experience, and I’ve always had, good feedback, so hopefully you do too. You have a good experience. And then if you find out that we’re a good fit, we can take the next steps. So, I want to zero in on Texas this particular episode. And, for those that aren’t from Texas, I think you want to check it out because there’s some interesting things happening in Texas.
I do this every now and again. I’ll zero in on Texas, namely because it’s the Retire in Texas podcast. And also, I do it kind of in light of some consortiums that come around, in which there’s, a lot of economic thought leadership that do conferences in the area and, I’ll either go to those conferences or read the executive summaries.
And usually that inspires me to discuss this topic. So, let’s talk about Texas for just a second. And I think for those that are living here that are coming here, it’s important for you to think about it this way. I mean, you frankly, this is of course, an opinion, but I’m an expert of my own opinion. And you live in the best place in the best country and the best time in the history of the world, and so there’s an obligation to not only, stop and smell the bluebonnets, but also to do something great or leave the world better than you found it.
Just because we’ve been so blessed to be in this great state of Texas, in 2000, in the year 2000. We had, 20.9 million people in Texas. If you compare that to California, they had 33.9. Okay. 20 years later, Texas goes from 20.9 million to 29 million. California goes from 33.9 to 39.5. So, then 2020 happened. And what happened in 2020?
Covid right? Well, then that was the first time ever that California began to actually lose people each year. So now in 2023, California has about 39 million people, and Texas has about 31 million people. So that the time in which Texas will eclipse California in terms of population will be about 2040. And California, of course, is nervous about this because you give up congressional seats.
And so they’ve actually started to fine, I don’t know if they’ve actually talked about this or doing it. I haven’t looked this up. Fine people and businesses for leaving California. That’s their solution. It’s obviously the regulatory environments are horrible. And if you look in any small business survey, certainly taxes are at the top of the list. But nearly number one every year is for small business owners.
Is the regulatory burden, and Texas just looks at business differently? It also helps that we’re very smart about how we deal with the southern border and the trade between Texas and Mexico and the ports. Very important. We’re about 30 years into NAFTA now, believe it or not. So very business friendly climate. So that’s Texas. But what I’d like to do.
Maybe what I’d like to do is maybe take a zoom in a little bit more. And I want to look at this thing called the Texas Triangle. Now, this is from Dallas to Houston to San Antonio. So that Texas triangle. I’m going to go into that Texas trial, but I want to I want to tell you a little bit about my journey personally for just take this exit ramp with me, just for a second.
So, I was born in Dallas, and then we moved to a small town outside of Dallas. I haven’t been there in years called Canton. Canton, Texas. We had a little small, I think. I don’t remember, I was just a kid, but I remember we had a pig. I had a cow. I do remember that, from Canton.
We moved down to Somerset. So just south of San Antonio. I lived in Somerset. Then we moved to San Antonio, right off in the medical center. Now I’m in second grade. We moved to Boerne. So now I’m living in Boerne. Before Boerne became Big Boerne, it was small town, Boerne.
It was the type of small town where if, as I understand it, if you were drinking and driving, the Sheriff would follow you home, you wouldn’t go to jail. Just different times, as the 80s. From Bernie, we moved down to Harlingen in the valley, which was absolutely a complete culture shock to me. And then in my senior year, we moved back up north, where I graduated from Medina Valley in Castroville.
Now, from there, I went to Saint Mary’s University in San Antonio, Texas, got married. We lived in Alamo Heights, then we moved to San Antonio. Then we moved to Hollywood Park, where we lived for many years. And then now our address is in New Braunfels, just in between Garden Ridge in New Braunfels. So, to say that I’m a native Texan would be an understatement.
And I also want to say that I recognize that there’s a lot of subcultures in Texas, and I’ve been exposed to a lot of those subcultures now. Maybe not. I mean, I’ve only tasted a little bit of these subcultures. You still have East and West Texas and the Panhandle, totally different. And I think that’s the unique thing about PAX in general is we understand we understand the uniqueness and also the thing that bonds us together.
I mean, the fact that we’ve been such a military type of, state, there’s a respect and honor that exist. And, and also our faith is very important to us. And then that unites us, and then we express that uniquely in these different subcultures. So, I say that because, I’m going to talk about the Texas triangle, and it’s kind of this unique ecosystem that’s taken all of these unique personalities in creating commerce between them.
And again, that’s the Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Austin, Texas triangle. This is an interesting area because it’s only about 25% of the land in Texas. But three out of four Texans live in this Texas triangle. And in, since Covid, since 2020, 140 companies from around the country, including from California, moved to this Texas triangle that includes Oracle, Tesla, Hewlett-Packard, Caterpillar, Charles Schwab.
In fact, Apple has created its second largest corporate office space in the world. Here in this Texas triangle, Goldman Sachs also has its second largest office space, with 5000 people in Dallas. The only bigger office space that Goldman Sachs has now is in New York. It’s the second biggest in Dallas, and Apple has their second biggest office space in Austin.
It certainly helps specifically with Dallas that you’ve got this centralized, location. So that can do business in the East Coast and West Coast and, down in South America. So, air travel is very important. And that’s one of the competitive advantages of this Texas triangle specifically for the DFW. But you also have just a lot of good business.
You’ve got the financial business is way understated. They’re starting a New York Stock Exchange equivalent in Dallas. Technology is booming. We know that in Austin. And of course, oil has been a staple for a long time. In fact, it was really we know oil was big. And we for those that were navigated in, Texas through the 80s, we had a bust in oil.
You hear of oil booms, there was a bust in the 80s, but really the wonder happened in 1998 when petroleum engineers and geologists learned about something called fracking, where they could harvest oil and natural gas in the shale rocks beneath the surface. Many of you guys know about that, especially if you’re listening from Kennedy and Carson City. We have a lot of clients and friends in Eagle Ford that listen.
So that happened in 98. That really opened the floodgates for oil and natural gas and Permian, Eagle Ford, Barnett Shale. All of these may not exactly be in the Texas Triangle, but they’re right. They’re really darn close. And they do a lot of business. And there’s a lot of, trade between the, you know, San Antonio Eagle Ford is not that far.
But you also so not only do you have this, you know, natural gas and oil, but then you think about alternatives. And if you look at wind patterns in the country, you look at this wind pattern that goes right straight down, through Central United States. And it’s like God blowing his breath. And so, you just see this wind pattern go through the United States, and that makes windmills very productive.
As much as we get annoyed by these big windmills, but it’s very productive. There are 150 wind farms now in Texas, and it actually supplies about 16% of our electricity. So that stuff’s working. And then of course, you’ve got the, the something that we always get mad at in July and August and that’s the heat. But the sun, namely in the western part of Texas, provides a lot of solar energy.
So really just kind of the perfect place to do business. And it’s quite amazing. And so if I’m anyone that’s thinking about moving here, betting in Texas, betting on Texas, practically speaking, where there’s good jobs and good people is a very educated bet for the lack of a better way to phrase that. Let’s zoom in a little bit more if we can.
And I’m going to zoom into an area that I just know. I mean, we could zoom in on Houston and the Galveston area, which I think has a lot of cool things happening, Dallas Fort Worth, even West Texas, we could go all the way to El Paso. We could even creep down to Laredo and Harlingen. Lots to talk about there.
Some of those areas I know better than others, but I’m going to talk about one right now that I know. And that’s namely the San Antonio Austin corridor, where San Antonio has 1.4 million people. In the main area, not the peripheral areas. Austin has 961,000, New Braunfels has 90,000 and San Marcus has 67,000.
So, this I-35 corridor is absolutely blowing up the housing market is very good. Austin is still the most expensive if you look at the numbers, still the most expensive place to live in Texas, but it’s still only half of what it is in California. The one thing that we all complain about on this I-35 corridor is what, is the traffic, of course.
And so, they’ve created this this consortium of, ideas and, and strategy to, to fix this. And they call it the I-35 Capital Express, central I-35 CapEx. And of course, they’re going to add HOV lanes. They’re going to create a tunnel through downtown Austin, drainage ditches. Tex DOTS has thousands of pages of documents. I’ll put a link in the show notes here, 10,000 pages alone, just on public feedback.
One area that I found interesting, and I think it’s taking an exit ramp. Yes, that’s a little bit of a joke, but the freeway lanes on the I-35 CapEx central project would be narrow, at least what they’re considering now. The main lanes would be 11ft wide instead of their current 12ft. The idea is, is that by doing so, they won’t have to take as much land from people.
Now, research has shown that narrower lanes tend to make people drive more slowly. But high-volume, high-speed freeways with lots of semis usually have 12ft wide lanes. And so that’s certainly something that they have to wrestle with. But it looks like they’re going to do 11ft that a Texas A&M University study on highways in Dallas, San Antonio and Houston found that people drove about two miles per hour slower in 11ft wide lanes than 12ft wide lanes.
But as you would suspect, these narrow lanes do result in more crashes. So, something to be on the lookout for. And if you want to dig in, like I said, I’ll put the show notes in there. So, the traffic is one issue. The state flower is that little orange cone. But people’s companies are still coming here.
And the San Antonio Austin corridor is a big one. They did launch this regional economic development strategy in 2021 to try to work with Austin, San Antonio and Austin. They call it the SATX and Opportunity Austin Strategy that, you know, you’ve got to work with, the legislative branches in Texas and the federal government to think about how this is going to look long term.
So, that’s working together. So, it’s not just like these independent municipalities, not coordinating between each other. So just so you know, that developed in 2021. And, you know, I just don’t see a slowdown of growth. And in fact, in June, a company called JCB, they’re a UK based company, they broke ground on a $500 million factory in south San Antonio, about 1500 jobs.
They do heavy equipment. They build, they manufacture heavy equipment, forklifts and like even like if you look at them, they’re really cool. Electric excavators, no engines. Pretty interesting. The DoD, the Department of Defense, committed 840 million in Austin, through UT for semiconductor research and fabrication at two of the Austin campuses. And for those that don’t know, we’ve talked about this before, but semiconductors refers to this, like silicon type material that can conduct electricity much better than an insulator like glass.
But not quite as well as copper and aluminum. But they’re typically made from slices of silicon with very complex components laid out with specific patterns. And these patterns control the flow of, of a current using electrical switches called transistors. And it’s just kind of like flipping on the lights circuit of your home. The difference is, is that these semiconductor switches are entirely electrical.
There are no mechanical components to flip. And here’s the key I don’t know how they do it, but these chips contain tens of billions of switches in an area not much larger than the size of a fingernail. Fascinating to me. So, lots of research is being done in Austin about that. We do know that Texas landed in Bastrop, specifically the X headquarters.
Tesla is going to be in Austin, the X headquarters in Bastrop. So, again, fast growing, we didn’t talk much about Seguin, but a fast-growing little town landed Mariucci, Stainless Tube, 125,000 square foot facility, automotive, hydrogen gas, even semiconductors. A Canada based company, ABC technology, they decided to go to Kyle. They do, automobile parts, interior, exterior, HVAC, reservoir assemblies, coolant reservoirs, battery trays.
In fact, Buda landed a company called future Futronic, a South Korean company. They do auto parts, as you can imagine, doing business with Tesla. So, you get this kind of cluster of Tesla suppliers. But they’re typically and this one specifically will be the largest employer in Buda, providing about 350 high paying jobs. And so, it’s just like success begets success.
And those are companies that are coming in. Well, like then you create your own environment to like live, work, play. So as an example, Pearl Brewery in that area just really is a beautiful place to just enjoy a nice dinner and get away. Well, they’re doing something similar, in New Braunfels called the Rivermill. Mixed use development will be retail and residential, office, apartments, hotel.
So, you not only bring these companies in, but you want to make it a great place to live and work and travel. Of course you’re going to have challenges. We talked about traffic, but you’ve got utilities and water. So those would be all the things that we cuss and fuss over. But they’re very good problems to have, frankly.
And so, I mean, with the population forecasting in Texas and the trends that are taking place in less unless something material happens, you know, this is still a very, very good place to bet on. And like I said, if you’re in a position to do business in Texas, be very thankful and grateful. Stop and smell the flowers and do your very best to leave this state better than you found it. And as always, you think different when you think long term. Have a great day.
Tune in to explore why betting on Texas is a smart decision for anyone considering a move or investment in the Lone Star State. For more resources, visit http://www.paxfinancialgroup.com. If you enjoyed today’s episode, don’t forget to share it with a friend!
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Resources:
- Narrower Traffic Lanes in Cities Could Help Lower Risk of Traffic-Related Collisions
- http://onlinemanuals.txdot.
gov/TxDOTOnlineManuals/ TxDOTManuals/rdw/freeways.htm - https://store.transportation.
org/item/collectiondetail/180 - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/
07/14/briefing/semiconductor- bill-congress-biden.html - IBM Created a Chip the Size of a Fingernail That Holds 30 Billion Transistors
- Why Texas is Becoming America’s Most Powerful State – YouTube
- Your ultimate guide to the I-35 expansion through Central Austin | KUT Radio, Austin’s NPR Station
- i-35-capex-central-feis-
public-comments-only.pdf (brightspotcdn.com) - Why San Antonio is teaming with Austin to attract business to Texas (sanantonioreport.org)
- Will River Mill be Casey Development’s legacy project? – San Antonio Business Journal (bizjournals.com)
- Economic Development Programs (texas.gov)
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