Here in Richardson, we love our pets! Asked to rank priorities for new parks in their growing community, residents of Richardson put spaces for their dogs ahead of additional picnic shelters, swimming pools, basketball courts, baseball and softball fields, and tennis courts in a 2018 planning document.
In less than 100 years, the Dallas suburb has grown from a town of about 600 with one schoolhouse to a high-tech hub that’s home to more than 120,000 residents. Richardson, an inner suburb of the nation’s ninth-largest city, is less than 20 miles from Downtown Dallas. It’s part of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area of North Texas.
Richardson is no sleepy bedroom community, though. Since Collins Radio (now Collins Aerospace) came to town in 1951, the city became home to a number of technology and telecommunications companies. Richardson is now home to the Telecom Corridor, an 11-square-mile area with more than 500 companies, 70,000 jobs and 25 million square feet of office space.
Big employers in Richardson include AT&T, Verizon, Ericsson, Cisco Systems, Samsung Wireless, MetroPCS and Honeywell. State Farm Insurance is the biggest local employer, with about 8,000 people in its local operations center.
The first community in the area that’s now Richardson was named Breckinridge, which flourished until the 1870s when it was bypassed by the Houston and Texas Central Railroad. Richardson was established along the tracks and named for either a railroad official or a contractor who built the line.
The city was incorporated in 1925 but didn’t have more than 1,000 residents until the 1940s. The arrival of the Collins Radio plant in 1951 and Texas Instruments just outside town soon after caused Richardson’s population to explode to nearly 17,000 by 1960.
Growth this decade has topped 20 percent, and the presence of high-tech and global companies has helped the population grow diverse. Almost a quarter of Richardson’s residents were born outside the United States. About 16 percent of the population is Asian, and 18 percent is Hispanic.
Richardson, like the rest of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, is in a humid subtropical climate zone, which means its temperatures are above average and its precipitation comes throughout the year. The average high in August tops 95 degrees, and highs from June through September are 90 or hotter. Even December and January highs are above 55, and winter lows rarely dip below freezing. Richardson gets about 40 inches of rain yearly, slightly more than the U.S. average.