Advancing Economic Opportunity in Dallas

The 2018 Dallas Assets & Opportunity Profile provides an updated financial snapshot of the city of Dallas, Dallas County and North Texas, examining trends in the financial security of residents over the past six years.

This report builds on and updates The 2012 Assets & Opportunity Profile for Dallas, which provided a snapshot of the financial security of Dallas residents in the wake of the Great Recession.

The 2018 report, published by Communities Foundation of Texas, the Thomson Family Foundation and Prosperity Now (formerly CFED) showed a community marked by widespread financial insecurity, high levels of asset poverty and subprime credit, and huge disparities in the economic conditions among Dallas households of color.
 

Read the 2018 Profile

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Since the initial report in 2012, the population of Dallas has grown and financial security has improved in many ways for Dallas residents:

• Unemployment has been cut in half (down from 9.8% to 4.7%).
• Access to health insurance has increased widely across the region, with improvements particularly for low-income residents.
• There are higher rates of adults with post-secondary degrees. The percentage of consumers with subprime credit has fallen sharply.

Despite this progress, many households are still struggling to make ends meet — particularly in saving for emergencies and building wealth.

• Nearly half of Dallas households still don’t have enough in savings to make ends meet at the poverty level for three months in the event of a financial emergency.
• Homeownership has not recovered since the recession, and overall homeownership rates have continued to fall since 2012.
• Disparities in income and asset attainment by race and ethnicity remains a significant issue in Dallas, where 71% of the population are people of color.

In a Prosperity Now analysis of the financial health of the 64 largest cities in America, Dallas ranked 53rd, the lowest rank of any major city in Texas, including Austin (17th), Arlington (19th), Fort Worth (25th), El Paso (36th) and Houston (50th).