| Jacquielynn Floyd: Former farm town Frisco making hay 02/08/2001 By Jacquielynn Floyd / The Dallas Morning News FRISCO – Stand on Main Street for five minutes, and Frisco is still a farm burg, a little cork afloat in an ocean of open prairie.
When a firetruck goes by, people come out on the sidewalk to see what's burning. A roadside sign advertises the season's premier social event: the annual daddy-daughter dance over at the high school gym.
If you stand there another 15 minutes, you notice that the pickups lining the curb all have the names of roofers and bricklayers on their doors, and that the busiest city government office on the street is the one that issues building permits. You notice that the rail yard over by the grain elevator is stacked high with construction supplies.
Geography and the instinctive human yearning for suburban security have made Frisco the second-fastest-growing city in America, trailing only a suburb of growth-blitzed Las Vegas. The boom has barely started, but the post office is having trouble keeping up with the new addresses. This year's dance will have to be held in three shifts, and it's rumored that the only tickets left are being scalped.
Gold-rush suburbs
Despite much attention paid to urban renaissance and new inner-city residential development, it's the gold-rush suburbs – the Friscos and Flower Mounds and Southlakes – that pushed Texas' population ahead of New York state in the newest census counts.
City Manager George Purefoy, whose calm manner serves him well in these hectic times, worked for the southeast Texas town of Columbus before coming to Frisco in 1987.
"We probably issue more permits in an hour here than we did in the seven years I spent there," he said. "As crazy as it sounds, you get used to the pace."
Between 1990 and 1999, Frisco grew by nearly 400 percent, and the town is still four-fifths undeveloped. It has a new regional shopping mall, a new 6,000-seat church, and every county highway leads to new subdivisions.
There's a lot of land, but it fills in fast. In some places, houses are going up so rapidly that no one has gotten around to bulldozing the old farm buildings whose fields they now occupy.
That's a dramatic change, but there's a surprising absence of the infighting and hand-wringing that so often characterize sudden suburban development.
One reason, I was surprised to learn, is that Frisco wasn't exactly caught off guard. City officials have been waiting – sometimes impatiently – for years.
Looking to the south
True, this had been a pretty sleepy hamlet for the last 100 years or so. One of the few events of note for decades was a housewife's reported discovery in 1979 of large lumps of smoking slime in her front yard. Some alarmists excitedly identified the muck as extraterrestrial space blobs. The stuff turned out to be refuse from a nearby battery-reprocessing plant, having fallen off a passing truck.
But as far back as the late 1960s, Mr. Purefoy said, the town was looking impatiently to the south. City leaders saw where the tollway and Preston Road were headed, and they started annexing land and laying water lines. And they waited.
The real estate slump of the 1980s stunted Frisco's growth, but now, with a furious energy, it's here.
Frisco's leaders want to avoid the errors of other suburban cities swamped by explosive growth. They want to keep its sweet small-town charm. It remains to be seen whether that's a realistic goal in a city whose population may ultimately reach a third of a million.
I hope it's possible. More and more of us live in cities such as Frisco, and home should be more than a place where you eat dinner and fall asleep after a long drive from the office.
And Frisco's a nice place. I hope that somewhere, at the new city's heart, the little town will still be there.
Jacquielynn Floyd can be reached at jfloyd.
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