The conference room next to Ross Perot Jr.’s office has a floor-to-ceiling map of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area. The map is in black and white, with pools of orange and blue shading representing the various warehouses, office buildings and housing developments that one of Perot’s companies, Hillwood, has splayed across the region since the late 1980s.
Perot, whose father made billions in the computer business and used that wealth to fund the outsider presidential campaigns that made him a household name, has amassed his own fortune by becoming one of the largest real estate developers in the country. When I met him in the conference room on a recent morning, Perot stood on the toes of his wingtips and stretched his arm overhead to point to the exurbs north of Dallas, where Hillwood has seven projects in development. There, under his fingers, lay one of the fastest-growing areas in the country.
A Hillwood executive took me on a helicopter tour to see the map in real life, promising that a view from 1,500 feet was the only way to understand just how fast the city is growing. The helicopter made a dusty landing about 40 miles from downtown Dallas, in an area where builders were laying down new traffic circles next to pastures grazed by herds of longhorn cattle.
Hillwood is a land developer that creates planned communities, building infrastructure and dividing up lots that major homebuilders like D.R. Horton and Pulte Homes then fill with houses. The executive took me around one of the firm’s projects, quaintly named Pecan Square, which has a faux downtown complete with parks and pickleball courts; a co-working space on the square has been built with exposed ductwork, to give it an industrial vibe. Once finished, Pecan Square will have 3,100 homes, starting around $415,000 for a three-bedroom.
Perot, who is now 66, plans to spend the rest of his life building such communities. The Dallas area has grown by about three million people over the past two decades, and, he predicted, it would continue to push outward for many decades more — 40 miles from downtown, then 50, until the metroplex bulges across the state line into Oklahoma, surpassing the population of the Chicago region and continuing to expand from there. “I told my kids, ‘All you got to do is fill in this map, and you’ll have a pretty good business,’” Perot said.
Perot’s vision of Dallas as an endlessly expanding suburb has for decades been regarded by planners and environmentalists as a nightmare that needs to be slowed or stopped. The epithet is “sprawl,” a word that is used to deride edge city development, evoking lollipop cul-de-sacs lined with homes so similar they can be distinguished only by the cars parked in front. Since the mid-20th century, critics have blamed sprawl for many of the country’s deepest and most lasting problems, accusing it of chewing up farmland, spewing out greenhouse gases and carving American cities into rings of monotonous neighborhoods whose lonely and isolated residents are imprisoned by two-hour supercommutes. Environmental groups, a number of which were founded specifically to stop outward growth, have gone so far as to call sprawl a “curse” and a “cancer.”