According to a New York Times opinion piece, “Everyone’s Moving to Texas. Here’s Why.” Garland has the best of the best of what is drawing people to Texas.
The piece connects to an interactive study of 16,847 American cities with a population of more than 10,000. It uses 30 metrics including school quality, crime rates and affordability. Anyone who uses the nytimes.com website can plug in their criteria in order or importance to learn about places that might work for them.
The authors narrowed their search to places with low unemployment and high median incomes. They then filtered down to places with lower climate risks, racial diversity and finally, affordability.
And that search named Garland as a city that best checked all the boxes. In another mixing of the variable criteria, Garland was again in the top five.
“For the many hypothetical scenarios I ran through our quiz, the suburbs around Dallas … came up a lot,” the piece states, singling out Garland and a few others by name.
“If you’re looking for an affordable, economically vibrant city that is less likely to be damaged by climate change than many other American cities, our data shows why Texas is a new land of plenty.”