Economy of Dallas

District. By 1925 Texas churned out more than ⅓ of the nation's cotton crop, with 31% of Texas cotton produced within a 100-mile (160 km) radius of Dallas. In the 1930s petroleum was discovered east of Dallas near Kilgore, Texas. Dallas' proximity to the discovery put it immediately at the center of the nation's petroleum market. Petroleum discoveries in the Permian Basin, the Panhandle, the Gulf Coast, and Oklahoma in the following years further solidified Dallas' position as the hub of the market.

The end of World War II left Dallas seeded with a nexus of communications, engineering, and production talent by companies such as Collins Radio Corporation. Decades later, the telecommunications and information revolutions still drive a large portion of the local economy. The city is sometimes referred to as the heart of "Silicon Prairie" because of a high concentration of telecommunications companies in the region, the epicenter of which lies along the Telecom Corridor located in Richardson, a northern suburb of Dallas. The Corridor is home to more than 5,700 companies including Texas Instruments (headquartered in Dallas), Nortel Networks, Alcatel Lucent, AT&T, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Nokia, Rockwell Collins, Cisco Systems, Sprint, Verizon Communications, XO Communications and until recently CompUSA (which is now headquartered in Miami,FL).

In the 1980s Dallas was a real estate hotbed, with the increasing metropolitan population bringing with it a demand for new housing and office space. Several of Downtown Dallas' largest buildings are the fruit of this boom, but over-speculation and the savings and loan crisis prevented any further additions to Dallas' skyline. Between the late 1980s and the early 2000s, central Dallas went through a slow period of growth and has only recently recovered. Since 2000, the real estate market