This story is published in partnership with The Dallas Morning News

Food service jobs in the Dallas area are on the rise, but painful commutes and high rents are making this fertile job field off limits to many Texas workers

How the wealth gap between restaurant goers and those serving them is​ widening

Andrea Gillette lined up the bottles of fruit-flavored cocktails behind the bar. The guy who leans a ladder against the big chalkboard to write out the day’s fresh fish selection had just about wrapped up.

Floors were swept, sliced lemons were crammed into a plastic bin, the trendy garage-door-style windows facing the shaded patio thrown open. Corey Ahrens brewed coffee.

Chip Kasper, the general manager, called out to the weekday crew at Fish City Grill, a bright, modern seafood restaurant at CityLine, a massive, $1.5bn development 20 miles north of downtown Dallas. Anchored by an almost 10,000-worker State Farm campus, CityLine also features a crop of buzzy fast-casual spots, a Whole Foods Market and a salon offering eyelash extension packages for upwards of $300.



It’s one of a handful of projects that have shifted the economic center of gravity of the nation’s fourth largest metro area; as a result, the northern suburbs of Dallas are some of the fastest-growing cities in the country.

“Got nine minutes to pre-shift!”

A little over a year ago, Fish City’s owner was worried this wasn’t going to happen.

In the roughly two decades since Bill Bayne and a partner opened Half Shells – the seed of what would become a chain of 20 restaurants – Bayne said he and his wife, who now own the Fish City company, have made a point to remember the names of workers at every level.

He takes pride in his ability to retain workers in an industry that sees high turnover. Still, as he prepared to open the chain’s outpost at CityLine he encountered an unanticipated hurdle.

He couldn’t find workers.

Bayne recalled sending his longtime kitchen manager, Frankie Argote, to “ride the rails” in search of people who looked like they might be cooks and to restaurants, where he asked managers whether they had employees who might be able to pick up more shifts. Argote recalled coming back and asking his boss, “Do we want to be cooking or serving?” Because he was struggling to find enough people to do both.

“This [location] has been probably the most challenging,” Bayne said.

As major corporate employers have swarmed places such as CityLine and the areas that surround them, a corresponding explosion of restaurants and bars has left business owners such as Bayne tapping into an almost-dry well of talent. Over the last five years, the number of jobs in food services and drinking places in the Dallas-Plano-Irving metropolitan division increased by 30.4%, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That’s almost twice as fast as growth in those jobs nationally, which was 17.9% for the same time period.

But thanks to a range of factors, the fertile job-hunting fields north of Dallas are essentially off limits to many prospective workers.

And the people who do fill those jobs are increasingly taking on painful commutes or crashing with family.

For the executives taking their kids to dinner or colleagues grabbing happy hour drinks at local bars, experts say, that will translate to longer waits and bigger bills.



• • •

Economists have said that service work – and food service work in particular, which can come with irregular hours and few benefits – is replacing manufacturing in the American economy.

In the Dallas-Fort Worth Metro area, as in many cities, the wealth gap between the people eating at restaurants and those serving them is widening.

The average leisure and hospitality worker in Collin County, the heart of the region’s corporate boom, made roughly $22,400 last year, federal data shows. That worker can comfortably afford a maximum rent of $560, according to commonly used limits, which say that no more than 30% of income should go to housing costs.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sarah Kinerd, left, visits with her granddaughter, Andrea Gillette, 35, in Garland, Texas. Andrea lives with her grandmother while she works and goes to college. Photograph: David Woo/Dallas Morning News

Though servers or bartenders likely make more than that average, housing prices have skyrocketed faster than wages have kept up, experts have said.

Median rent in Dallas County was $907 in 2015, an increase of 9% from 2010, according to the most recent US Census Bureau data. In Collin County, median rent was $1,119 in 2015, up by 15.6%

That makes it all but impossible for restaurant employees to live anywhere near their work. And what advocates have long described as the region’s poorly planned transit system is of little help.

Christie Myers, a transit advocate who helps lead a southern Dallas neighborhood nonprofit, said the region’s public transportation agencies lack a clear vision of the populations they’re trying to serve.

“There’s no policy that dictates what your transit time can be in comparison to your drive time – in other cities, they have policies that say your transit time can’t exceed two times what your drive would be,” she said. “We have just created this system that is predominantly for our transit-dependent people, but we’ve also said, you’re transit-dependent people so you don’t deserve the most efficient mode of transportation.”

Steve DeShazo, director of El Centro College’s Food and Hospitality Institute in downtown Dallas, said that while his roughly 400 students come from across the metroplex, most share one thing: nearly all of them live in lower-income neighborhoods, many of which aren’t transit-friendly.

“They can’t afford to pay $1,000 to $1,200 for rent,” he said.

Many of the establishments hitting him up for students? They’re in cities such as Plano, Richardson, Frisco and McKinney, where some residents have opposed building affordable housing.

“The finest restaurants are in the nicest neighborhoods,” DeShazo said. “Who do they think is going to work in all the hospitality businesses?”

• • •

Jobs report: US unemployment hits 16-year low despite slower hiring Read more

State and regional leaders have used CityLine and similar developments as a key part of their pitch to big corporations who they hope will make North Texas their new homes.

That pitch has worked: companies such as insurance giant State Farm and Toyota, which recently opened its new North American headquarters in Plano, have flocked to the area.

Such employers have become the base of a churning economy because they bring high paying jobs by the thousands. Their workers become taxpayers, whose money funds good schools and pays for police forces that keep their streets safe.

All of that makes such communities more attractive to still more companies, especially ones that prioritize the lifestyle demands of prospective employees over more traditional relocation considerations, such as cheap office space.

And because companies don’t want to drag employees kicking and screaming to a new metro area, those lifestyle demands are fueling dozens of new restaurants, bars and hotels all looking to hire crews of lower paid workers to keep them well-staffed.

• • •

Ahrens, a 37-year-old shift manager, server and bartender at Fish City, considers himself lucky.

His commute – about 45 minutes door-to-door – from the East Plano home where he lives with his mom and stepdad isn’t so bad when it’s not the dead of summer.

A roughly 20-minute walk takes him out of the maze of cul-de-sacs lined with houses whose values have risen well into the $200,000s and are expected to climb by another 6.2% next year. From there, he passes through a small park and heads along a busy suburban thoroughfare, past a 7-Eleven with litter-strewn curbs, toward the Parker Road Dallas Area Rapid Transit station.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Corey Ahrens, 37, leaves his home in Plano where he lives with his mother and stepfather and walks 20 minutes to a DART station. After a five-minute train ride, he walks another 20-minutes to the restaurant. Photograph: David Woo/Dallas Morning News

Then, it’s two quick stops on the train to the CityLine station, a glittering paean to a walkable urban lifestyle on the edge of the development. And finally, it’s another 15-minute walk to the restaurant.

Without traffic, it would be a nine-minute drive.

Ahrens started working in food service jobs at 16. He kept at it until a third drunken driving conviction landed him in prison; he said he didn’t expect to find a job so soon after he got out.

“I figured I would struggle a little bit,” he said.“When I went in for the interview, I was really honest and I told them I’d just gotten out and what it was for – they hired me on the spot.”

But since he isn’t allowed to drive until December, he’s relied on public transportation. Despite enjoying the fresh air, he says it’s made life more difficult and limited his job-hunting options.

Still, he and his girlfriend, who also lives with her parents, are hoping to buy a house next year. He’s taking classes in the El Centro culinary program.

“I try not to worry about things that aren’t in my control,” he said. “Finding a job and being blessed with sobriety, I have a little more faith.”

Ahrens’s co-worker, Gillette, has a shorter drive much of the time. But the 11-year employee of Bayne’s restaurant chain sometimes works shifts at one of their locations in Dallas. That’s a longer haul.

After living with an uncle in Plano, she recently moved in with her grandmother. They live in a two-bedroom condo in an older neighborhood in Garland, a city northeast of Dallas that hasn’t attracted the same level of glitzy development as some of its neighbors.

Still, Gillette’s grandmother, Sarah Kinerd, likes to check online from time to time: her house, she estimated, has increased in value by more than a third since she bought it about three years ago, from $95,000 to about $130,000.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andrea Gillette, 35, smiles to customers at Fish City Grill in Richardson on Wednesday, May 31, 2017. (David Woo/The Dallas Morning News) Photograph: David Woo/Dallas Morning News

Before she heads to work, Gillette, 35, has a cigarette in the courtyard oasis she and her “grannie” have built. Kinerd basks in the sunshine, sitting among the windchimes and lawn figurines.

“She smokes – I don’t,” Kinerd, 79, said on a recent morning, grinning at her granddaughter. “She’s staying here, helping me – I’ve always enjoyed her.”

Gillette has been scaling back her hours at Fish City, though, for school. Previously, she’d been a full time manager. Now she’s down to part-time. And soon she’ll have to cut down even more as her classes ramp up.

She’s studying at a local community college to do ultrasounds.

“I’ve always wanted to make a difference in the world somehow,” she said. “I feel like being a part of helping someone stay healthy, that would be one of life’s greatest honors.”

• • •

Mike Davis, an economist and lecturer at Southern Methodist University, said there’s no cure-all for a broad labor shortage that has not only sent restaurant operators scrambling but has hammered the Dallas-Fort Worth construction industry.

“When you have the unemployment rate that we have now … we’re going to see labor shortages,” Davis said. The metro area’s jobless rate has hovered around 4% – a rate that economists say is essentially full employment.

Immigration reform would help a lot, Davis said, because construction and hospitality tend to employ lots of immigrants, especially in border states.

But that is widely seen as a nonstarter under Donald Trump, whose rise to power has been fueled by anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Instead, the most likely solution isn’t particularly surprising: restaurant owners, like the companies vying for accountants or tech workers, will have to compensate employees better.

“Wage growth has been starting to trend up,” he said. “That’s been my hope – that’s been everybody’s hope.”

Beyond just pay, Davis said that restaurant workers often don’t get health insurance or other benefits. That might have to change.

“Will service sector employers have to start treating their employees more like employees in manufacturing?” he said. “You’ve got 40 hours a week, two week vacation, a retirement plan – that might be a real cultural change.”

Davis said: “It’ll be a lot more expensive to eat, but that may be what it comes to.”

If restaurants can’t stay afloat with higher prices, there will be fewer around to choose from, especially in sprawling suburbs.

“If you live up in Frisco, you want the same things up there that we take for granted (in the city of Dallas),” he said. “If you have to drive 25 minutes to get to a restaurant, then wait an hour for lunch? Who wants that?”

• • •

Back at Fish City, general manager Kasper was done rattling off the ingredients in new menu items and quizzing servers about the relative merits of Copper River sockeye salmon.

“Let’s have a wonderful day,” he said. “And don’t forget your table outside!”

At 11am, someone unlocked the front door, and the lunch crowd of State Farm and Raytheon office workers as well as retirees who live in the new luxury apartments across the street began streaming in.

By 11:37am, nearly every table, booth and bar stool was taken. Diners were told there was a 10- to 15-minute wait, if they didn’t mind sticking around.

This story is published in partnership with The Dallas Morning News, a Texas media organization dedicated to serving readers in one of the largest and fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the United States.