Reporter
Brave New 'Burbs
Maybe you've been wondering what happened to the old, ultraconservative Dallas. Look north.
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Frisco is also a model of urban development—a place that welcomes growth but insists that it be done right. Through a mixture of smart planning and an ingenious use of tax-incentive schemes, Frisco is both liquid and blessed with low taxes. And everywhere you look, there is evidence of large-scale, high-speed growth. In addition to the Stonebriar Centre, Frisco has a shiny new baseball stadium for its newly acquired minor league baseball team, the Frisco RoughRiders. Soon there will be another new stadium for the Dallas Burn professional soccer team, training facilities for the Dallas Stars hockey team, more retail and condo developments, and a hotel and convention center. Frisco is also reviving its sleepy downtown. A planned development will restore the town's historic Main Street, add four million square feet of office and residential space designed, in an architectural style reminiscent of the twenties, by one of the state's most prominent architects, David Schwarz (the Ballpark in Arlington, American Airlines Center in Dallas), and throw in new municipal buildings for good measure. High-tech companies such as EADS Telecom have begun to move to the city's Hall Office Park, where Dallas developer Craig Hall has created an instant landmark using parkland, water, and sleek corporate architecture.
The willingness of Friscans to pitch in and help with some of the heavy lifting is also rapidly becoming a community trademark. The Bush push for volunteerism may have been swallowed by war and recession at the level of national policy, but in Frisco, citizens are practicing what the president has been preaching. The city has a taxpayer-supported volunteer coordinator whose work is viewed as being every bit as important as that of the economic-development office. The Frisco Family Services Center, which provides food and other essentials to the needy, is entirely funded by local donations and relies heavily on volunteers, and has proved especially valuable during the present recession in the tech sector, which has tripled the unemployment rate in many parts of Collin County. Each spring, thousands of residents turn out to clean up litter in the city.
And then there is the sheer, unbridled optimism. Everywhere I went in Frisco, people said they felt lucky that they'd found this place. Unlike many booming suburbs, its traffic is not yet chaotic, and a morning spent riding with a police patrol yielded no problem greater than the officer's occasional inability to figure out where the dispatcher was directing him. There is a particular lift to the gait of denizens here that is reminiscent of the president's jauntiness when he takes a stage, a certain body language that seems to say, "Ain't no big deal." Even through the tech recession, few folks here have bailed out and discarded Frisco for the next more affordable boomtown up the line. As Emily Mitchell, the president of the local Republican Women's Club says, "This is a happy town. People really like the way things are going. If we have any problem, it's that not enough of them turn out to vote."
Aaron and Rebecca Hensell are among the satisfied customers. They didn't consider leaving Frisco when he got laid off from his high-paying job at Nortel in early 2001. They just cut back from two expensive cars to one, scaled down the vacations, and concentrated their efforts on expanding a Web-site business that they'd been developing on the side.
"We had networked a lot in Frisco," says Aaron, 35, "because it's the sort of place where you can do that. We liked that. So we just grew our Web-site business, beginning with contacts we'd made here." The couple's DellaMark Web-site development company, which they started in their spare bedroom, has become one of many entrepreneurial success stories to emerge in the New World north of Dallas. They also run the popular Frisco-Online.com, a combination gossip forum and guide to local events and services.
It took a lot longer for their friend Mike Eveland to find steady work. After being laid off twice in a year and a half and sending out four thousand résumés, he finally found work in August as a salesman at CompUSA.
"We love it here so much, I'd really have hated to leave," he told me. "We're dug in. I went to church and I talked to my pastor. I just knew there was a job there for me. I had that faith."
A LOT OF OTHER PEOPLE IN COLLIN COUNTY have that faith too. Like California's Orange County, if Collin County is a place founded on big shopping centers, big office parks, big freeways, and big demographics, it is also a place founded on big churches. Frisco hasn't been booming long enough to grow a megachurch yet (though the Stonebriar Community Church, with 2,200 members, is emerging), so many of its faithful still flock to the biggest of them all—the huge Prestonwood Baptist Church.
This 21,000-member church, which rises improbably out of the prairie near the Denton-Collin county line in north Plano like a recently landed spacecraft, is as resonant a symbol of the power shift from city to suburbs as one could hope to find. Prestonwood used to reside in North Dallas, but in the mid-nineties its leadership and congregation decided to move farther north because, like the developers of Stonebriar Centre, they saw that north was the future.
It is a different, more casual sort of religion that is practiced out here, but there is no questioning the enthusiasm for it. On entering the foyer of Prestonwood—which reminded me very much of entering the American Airlines Center for a Mavericks playoff game—I was immediately accosted by one of the greeters, who squealed, "We just found out! Right over there, on that side of the building, we're going to have Starbucks!"
Inside the seven-thousand-seat theater, my wife and I listened to an eight-piece, eight-voice ensemble grind out a couple of rap-metered hymns. Pastor Jack Graham then celebrated his fourteenth year as head of the operation with a preachment on "Discerning Your Culture." It was obvious that Graham and his staff were trying hard to be hip. The contemporary music and choreography, the big screens on each side of the dais, the casual, vernacular tone of Graham's sermon—soon, a caffè latte afterward!—all seemed calculated to give this church service an ambience basically indistinguishable from that of the average well-behaved rock concert.
Graham's message tracked the sort of practical and populist Christianity that Bush has referred to when speaking of his faith. It was a plainspoken rumination on "Judge not lest ye be judged," in which the pastor—who, with his deep tan, white teeth, and short-sleeved shirt looked like an assistant golf pro from the nearby Stonebriar Country Club—warned his congregants to not ever believe that they "have the gift of criticism" and to leave the big judgments to God.
His church is astoundingly successful. Its huge membership continues to grow. It raises about half a million a week just from passing the plate. If you peruse the length and breadth of its counseling and outreach programs, you discover an assortment of faith-based initiatives, including post-abortion recovery groups called "Forgiven and Set Free." There are "City Missions," wherein these suburbanites venture into the city of Dallas to help and, if possible, convert the lost and destitute, as well as the usual vacation Bible schools and summer sports camps.
George W. Bush may be in some trouble in certain parts of the country and the world, but here in this Republican enclave, he's wildly popular. Just a few minutes into his lengthy sermon, Graham invoked the Bush name—as if invoking Luke or John—and commented on how impressive it was that the president regularly read Scripture for "focus." As he finished this statement, I happened to glance back at the pew behind us and noted that a young man in his twenties, with ragged facial hair, frayed shorts, and flip-flops—the sort of fellow who might be expected to vote the Nader-LaDuke ticket—was nodding vigorously as he thumbed through his Bible to the next passage.
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