Houston's Medical Center May Outgrow Downtown Dallas

Hey, but they have a really big scoreboard at their football stadium.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=apwN0oE_bLS0

Houston’s Texas Medical Center May Outgrow Downtown Dallas
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By David Wethe

Aug. 21 (Bloomberg) -- Houston, the fourth-largest U.S. city, has been buoyed by construction in the Texas Medical Center, an area with 3,000 job openings that is likely to become larger than Dallas’s downtown, said Jeff Moseley, chief executive officer of the Greater Houston Partnership.

As a result of the medical center’s expansion, Houston may emerge from the economic decline quicker than the rest of the nation, Moseley said today in an interview. His group serves as a chamber of commerce and economic-development agency for the area.

“The construction cranes that are in this region are all down at Texas Medical Center,” Moseley said. “We’re kind of one of the last ones coming into this national cooling off, and because we’re very bullish on the fundamentals of our economic foundation, we argue we’re going to be some of the first ones coming out of it.”

The Houston region’s unemployment rate rose in July to 8.4 percent from 8 percent in June, according to Texas Workforce Commission data, which isn’t adjusted to the seasonality of jobs. The national unemployment rate held at 9.7 percent on a non-seasonally adjusted basis.

Houston, which is known as the energy capital of the world, sees about 40 percent of its economy still coming from oil, natural-gas and renewable energy industries. Many of the 3,000 energy-related establishments based in Houston, including Apache Corp. and Schlumberger Ltd., have contributed to the loss of thousands of oil and gas jobs since December in the state.

‘Nothing Like It’

The Texas Medical Center, located less than 4 miles (6.4 kilometers) from downtown Houston, continues to gain in size. Expansion plans over the next five to six years have the cluster of hospitals, medical schools and doctor offices outgrowing the current size of downtown Dallas, Moseley said. It’s already larger than the combined downtown districts of Texas cities Fort Worth, San Antonio and El Paso, he said.

“There’s nothing like it on the face of the globe, nothing even close,” he said. “It has been a tremendous help to this economy.”

The Texas Medical Center, which is made up of 47 institutions, has 72,600 workers, according to its Web site. The area occupies more than 1,000 acres and has 5.1 million patient visits a year. The center has $7.1 billion in approved building and infrastructure investments.

The Greater Houston Partnership is watching the national debates on health care and energy and is working on a position regarding both issues. The group then plans to lobby Washington later this year, Moseley said.

“We really have two dramatic economic engines that are tied to this national discussion,” Moseley said.