We had the bright idea of not just chronicling these important moments, but getting the people who made the moments happen to write about them. This proved to be a Herculean task, but our efforts paid off. What other city magazine in America could get no fewer than seven billionaires to contribute to such an undertaking?
11
AllianceTexas Reshapes the West
By Ross Perot Jr.
The AllianceTexas program is halfway through its 40-year plan, and is only 40 percent developed. But its impact has already been felt: 220 companies, 31 million square feet of commercial real estate, 28,000 jobs, 7,100 single-family homes, one new highway (Texas Highway 170, which connects Alliance to DFW Airport), and on and on. Expect all those numbers to keep rising during the coming years.
This is why the rich get richer: they constantly see opportunity where others see only obstacles. Ross Perot Jr. didn’t have AllianceTexas in his mind when he began buying land north of Fort Worth in 1983. He knew only that it was cheaper to buy there than it was in Dallas at the time. Or maybe he just doesn’t have a strong sense of smell.
Part of the reason the land north of Fort Worth was so readily available was that in the past the prevailing winds from the south brought the smell of the stockyards north and made living in that area extremely unpleasant. Although by the early 1980s the stockyards had been closed for years, that general perception still remained.
In the mid-1980s, the Federal Aviation Administration was looking for reliever airports around DFW Airport. When they approached us about putting one of these airports on our property north of Fort Worth, we decided to talk to some of the local aerospace companies about their future needs and any suggestions as to what type of airport should be built. The response we received was that the area needed a full-size airport that could accommodate any size jet. It would be one designed primarily for aerospace manufacturing and air cargo uses. We shared the idea with the FAA and the city of Fort Worth, which both saw the value of creating an airport-anchored project that would have more of an economic impact on the area than a small reliever airport.
Ironically, the first deal that was done at Alliance was rail related. While the runways were under construction, we were approached by Santa Fe Railroad, now BNSF Railway, about purchasing land to build a facility to offload automobiles from trains, adjacent to its mainline on the west side of the development. This led to the realization of the importance of rail, along with the airport and Interstate 35W, in creating a multimodal inland port logistics hub.
The intermodal concept became even more refined when the Hillwood team worked with BNSF to build one of the country’s largest intermodal facilities, where containers filled with goods from Asia arrive by train via the West Coast ports. Those goods then are transferred from train to truck and transported to a nearby distribution center and eventually to other regions of the United States.
Alliance is now the prototype for the inland port logistics hubs, which became more prevalent as manufacturing moved overseas. The development is the busiest Foreign-Trade Zone in the country, admitting $7.46 billion in foreign products, which is almost twice as much as the next busiest U.S. Foreign-Trade Zone.
Ross Perot Jr. is chairman of Hillwood Development Company. He is also a founder and former president and CEO of Perot Systems, where he served as chairman until its purchase by Dell last year.