And last year, a new law made the program permanent and created “Opportunity Zones 2.0.” Instead of keeping the original 2018 zones forever, states will now select a new set every 10 years.

Texas just submitted its proposed tracts on September 4th. I have mapped them against the old tracts. You can browse that map here :

https://geopen.io/maps/texas-opportunity-zones.html

Dallas County goes from 18 to 60 tracts

Old Tracts (Orange) vs. New Tracts (Blue)

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Harris County goes from 105 to 51

Austin Area Changes

Which Counties have more or less this round

To be eligible, a tract must have a median family income (MFI) less than 70% of state/metro MFI; or poverty rate greater than or equal to 20% and MFI less than or equal to 125% of state/metro MFI.

In order to select the 605 (out of Texas’ 2,420 eligible tracts), the Texas Economic Development & Tourism Office reviewed more than 1,200 proposals from over 175 organizations across 114 counties, according to the RGV Business Journal.

And a reminder - these new Opportunity Zones still have to be certified, so they’re not final yet. The Treasury has 30 days to certify and the new Opportunity Zones will go into effect January 1st, 2027.

Here are a few official links just in case you don’t trust me:

https://gov.texas.gov/business/page/opportunity-zones

https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/tax-policy/data-transparency/qualified-opportunity-zones

As always, if you’d like this data or mapping file, email me at robert@themap.io

https://geopen.io/maps/fort-worth-permit-tracker.html

Fort Worth’s permit service currently has 3,496 records that were submitted in the past year. In a typical week, about 4,000 permits change status. Commercial buildings are in the system an average of 164 days and homes an average of 35.

Fort Worth has excellent technical infrastructure behind their permitting system and expose it all as open data and I built this tool to highlight that in the hopes that others follow suit.

If you have questions email me at robert@themap.io

The exact locations are often withheld by police departments, including by Dallas police, in response to inquiries or open records requests.

So volunteers have been building one - 16,613 cameras mapped across Texas — all by people mapping information the government will not give out.

Those observations go into OpenStreetMap (tagged surveillance:type=ALPR), the open geographic database that is a wikipedia-like open map. DeFlock is a viewer on top of it.

The Texas Flock Camera Map

https://geopen.io/maps/texas-alpr-cameras.html

I pulled the Texas camera locations directly from OpenStreetMap on September 1st. There are a lot of them.

And just to be clear - this is not an official, perfect source of truth. These are submissions by volunteers - and the count of cameras is growing by the day as more people get out and document their locations (especially as this story has blown up).

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You can even see which direction they point (if you keep zooming in):

According to Flock Safety’s transparency portal, Dallas has 684 of them. The City has now said they’re going to shut down 321 of them. Volunteers have mapped 920 within the limits of Dallas, which includes cameras owned by private businesses (Lowe’s and Home Depot are among the highest users).

In Dallas, there have been two votes for these cameras - both approved 15-0 by the City Council (one in 2022 and one in 2025).

Grants Map

The Texas Tribune found where this funding came from — in 2023 the legislature (unanimously) added $1 to every auto insurance policy in Texas to fight catalytic converter theft (SB 224). The fee has raised about $81 million. The Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority (a TxDMV agency) is giving out these grants. You can get a full list of the grantees at this url, or directly at this PDF.

I’ve mapped 148 of these 149 grants - and 39 of them mention cameras or plate readers.

https://geopen.io/maps/texas-mvcpa-grants.html

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The response to this information has been swift - Greg Abbott has paused funding from the state and several local municipalities have ended their contracts with Flock.

I believe it feels to many people that

the government wants to spy on the public, but the government wants to make it very hard for the public to spy on them

They don’t want to publish the locations of the cameras and many of these votes for these contracts are hidden in dark corners of government information systems in difficult to find PDFs. You can read SB 224 here. It never mentions cameras.

My hope out of this is that the public starts to understand we need to fund better tools for the public to spy on the government. Not literally - I mean trying to persuade the government invest in technical transparency tools - things like open voting records, digital council agendas, public grant register open databases, .csv and .geojson open formats and digital geometries for locations, not text addresses - I could go on and on.

That kind of open information and transparency can help keep government officials and the public on the same page. That way in the future we never have to be so surprised about where tax dollars are being spent.

GeoJSON file

If you want a mapping file of these locations, here it is:

https://geopen.io/data/texas_alpr.geojson

(That’s a static file I generated on September 1st - but the map is being updated each day by OpenStreetMap contributors walking around mapping these).

You can also contribute Flock Camera locations to DeFlock and OpenStreetMap yourself through an app (instructions here).

Email me at robert@themap.io

The largest out of state owner is Progress Residential, headquartered in Scottsdale (It owns 2,152 parcels).

Most of these parcels are owned by individuals (especially the California owned ones). A much larger share of those from Arizona and Georgia are rentals owned by institutional investors.

The US Government Accountability Office published a study in May of 2024 looking at institutional investing in the single family homes market. It found that institutional investors owned between 1 and 3% of all single family homes in 6 markets (including DFW), but 4 to 22% of rental homes.

It also found the sharpest growth ran from 2021 to 2023, and that 2024 turned down. Since then, the four largest single-family landlords in the country — Invitation Homes, Progress Residential, American Homes 4 Rent and FirstKey — have sold more homes than they bought for six straight quarters.

The study is here:

https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-24-106643.pdf

Interactive Map

Every parcel in my map link is clickable. Dallas, Collin and Denton parcels link straight through to their appraisal district record. All four counties link to the County Clerk’s deed index, tells you what a house is worth, a deed tells you who bought it, from whom, and when.

https://geopen.io/maps/dfw-out-of-state-land.html

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Email me for data or maps robert@themap.io

As a fan of The Farmers’ Almanac, I like to keep track of all the government data sets and tools that track these kinds of things.

I have created a large map that has all of these datasets on one map here (no phone):

https://geopen.io/maps/texas-fire-watch.html

Drought

Things are exceptionally dry in the panhandle, but just abnormally dry everywhere else. Don’t flick your cigarette into a hay bail for at least a month please.

This data is from the U.S. Drought Monitor (https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/) - a joint product of the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, the USDA, and NOAA.

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Burn Bans

We’ve currently got 177 out of 254 Texas Counties on a burn ban…67 of these have been created in just the past 2 weeks. If you need to destroy the painful memories of your ex-gf/bf, you can’t do it by slowly dropping photos into a burning fire.

This data is also from Texas A&M Forest Service — the bans themselves are issued by county commissioners courts, not by the Forest Service; TFS aggregates and publishes them. So a county is the authority and TFS is the record.

Texas A&M Forest Service supplies counties with the Keetch–Byram Drought Index — a 0–800 scale of how dry the soil and vegetation are. Counties typically adopt a threshold (often KBDI ~575) as the trigger.

https://tfsweb.tamu.edu/burn-bans/

Wildfire Perimeters

Things are not going well in eastern Oregon and Washington at the moment (not that all fires are bad or even unintentional). 3 million acres are burning in those 2 states across 153 fires with 14,391 people assigned to them. Most (50 of the 66 large fires) are over 80% contained.

The two fires that are currently the most out of control are both in Washington.

Little Giant - 142,218 Acres - 15% contained (2,338 crew)

Sinlahekin - 154,480 Acres - 47% contained (1,571 crew)

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And now 90,000 people are being asked to evacuate the Hawk Fire, which is about 15,000 acres and 0% contained:

Here’s a fuller look at Western United States in terms of size and location.

This data is from the National Interagency Fire Center (https://www.nifc.gov/) — incident locations and mapped perimeters, both through their open data portal (https://data-nifc.opendata.arcgis.com/), published as WFIGS (Wildland Fire Interagency Geospatial Services).

Wildfire Risk Explorer

The Texas A&M Forest Service creates this dataset - Texas Wildfire Risk Explorer (WRAP). Below are the current conditions.

https://wrap.texaswildfirerisk.com/Map/Public/#whats-your-risk

Texas Wildfires

Texas is NOT burning. We’ve had some horrible Augusts (2011 and 2023), but the national fire feed only shows 6 current fires in Texas 216 acres.

This is interesting because this August has the conditions for it, but we haven’t had anything catastrophic yet - still a week left.

Stay cool everyone.

As always, feel free to email me at robert@themap.io

Map Link

I’m already tired of the words data and center, but people are curious so I’ve worked out a way to create a map of new data center construction in Texas. This one requires quite a few caveats.

I’ve pulled data from the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, where any construction over $50,000 must be registered to comply with building accessibility requirements (these are buildings subject to Texas Accessibility Standards, i.e. commercial and public buildings, not houses). You can search those here:

https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/tabs/search

Each of these filings has a detail page like this:

https://www.tdlr.texas.gov/TABS/Search/Project/TABS2026006556

I then searched all of these projects by field (which as you can see above include Project Name, Scope of Work, Square Footage and Cost amongst others) for the right combination of phrases and variables to give a proxy for ‘New Data Center Construction’ - Searching project names for “data center” — the obvious way — finds 110 of the 663 filings. Operators file under code names: Project Pumpkin, Project Eagle, DA12-2, Sharka. I had to go deeper into the detail pages to find a better set.

SO….this is not a definitive list. It includes many alterations/additions of existing structures to be turned into data centers (you’ll have to click the interactive legend on the map to include these) - and many of those are honestly NOT full data centers in the sense that most of us understand. They are internal company data infrastructure (it’s impossible for me to filter all those out while keeping many that are large scale data centers).

It also will not include many of the newer projects you are hearing about on the news, because those haven’t gotten through zoning, etc. to get to a place where they need to file this TDLR form.

I would love to hear anyone’s input on how I can improve this. But I now have a nice database of all the TDLR projects, so if you need any information parsed from it, feel free to email me at robert@themap.io

https://geopen.io/maps/dfw-growth.html (no phone)

825 subdivisions over 150 years. 102,286 lots.

And you guessed it, 1984 was the biggest year of subdivision building in DFW history! I’d like to insert my George Orwell and Van Halen jokes here.

DFW subdivisions have doubled in size since the 60s— 102 lots vs. 201 in the 2020s.

email me: robert@themap.io

Sources:

Original source (NCTCOG) —

https://data-nctcoggis.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/276162221f2748c194c4e3639cd57638_4

Free download (geopen.io) — 26,537 subdivisions, GeoJSON

https://geopen.io/d/north-texas-residential-subdivisions-2023

Gif Link:

https://geopen.io/maps/dfw-growth.html

Static decade map:

https://themap.io/pmtiles/view/north-texas-subdivisions-by-decade

On Monday the City's Finance Committee went through eleven proposed changes to its own financial rulebook. Three of them are interesting: authorizing a new or replacement city building would drop from a supermajority vote to a simple majority, money from selling city property would go into a maintenance reserve up to $20 million per sale, and a rule requiring the city to publish a budget at the “no-new-revenue” tax rate would be deleted. Nothing was voted on. Full council discusses it August 19th and votes August 25th. Here’s an article from KERA discussing the changes.

It just so happens that in my way too many years of mapping, my most requested map has probably been….where does the City of Dallas own land? So I’ve decided to open it up to all of you fine readers.

Which local governments own what land?

Link to the map (no phone)

Dallas County has about 700,000 parcels. 10,381 of those are owned by our local governments. Summing to about 133 of the County’s 909 square miles. That’s 1 acre in 7 owned by the government.

The City of Dallas owns 54% of that land, worth $10.6 billion. DISD only owns 4% of it, but their land is worth $5.8 billion.

The City has done 204 land deals between 2021 and 2026. They’re mapped below:

https://themap.io/maps/view/9350eb10-9e7c-42f5-92db-b67467d182ec

Sources

• Dallas Central Appraisal District — 2026 certified roll. Who owns every parcel in the county, and what it’s appraised at.

• Review Financial Management Performance Criteria and Consider Potential Changes — the actual presentation staff gave the Finance Committee on August 3rd. Jack Ireland, Chief Financial Officer, and Janette Weedon, Director of Budget and Management Services.

• Dallas City Council calendar — agendas, video, and minutes for every meeting, including this one.

• KERA News — reported the proposed change before the meeting.

Want the data? Email me at robert@themap.io.

https://themap.io/tools/land-cover

Since 1992, the USGS has kept of record of US land divided into 30x30 meters and given it a unique land type…you can see all of those in the legend above. It is produced by the Multi-Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium, a group of federal agencies who split the work. It’s published for survey years only, roughly every two or three years, which is why the available maps run 2001, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2011, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021.

I hasn’t been updated since 2021 which is interesting.

email me a robert@themap.io if you want more information.

USGS NLCD (https://www.usgs.gov/centers/eros/science/national-land-cover-database) and MRLC (https://www.mrlc.gov/),

https://themap.io/maps/explore/fields-of-the-world

If you want to know where farmland is across the world, This is Fields of the World — a dataset released by Taylor Geospatial, Microsoft AI for Good, and Arizona State University that delineates every agricultural field boundary on earth in 241 countries.

This is an AI model. It was fed labeled satellite farm data. Then trained and run on every parcel on earth to generate an educated guess on where farmland is across the world. So it’s not literally farmland across the world, it’s an AI guess at where farmland is across the world.

It’s a fascinating dataset for food insecurity, farmers and supply chains.

Who Made This

• Taylor Geospatial Engine — funded the infrastructure and assembled the collaboration

• Dr. Hannah Kerner’s lab at ASU — built the original benchmark dataset

• Microsoft AI for Good — contributed AI/ML expertise (Caleb Robinson)

• Washington University in St. Louis — Nathan Jacobs’ computer vision lab

• Wherobots — scaled the model to production

Open Data, Open Tools

The entire dataset is hosted on Source Cooperative under CC-BY licensing. The model weights are on Hugging Face. The code is on GitHub. You can run your own inference on any Sentinel-2 scene using the ftw-tools Python package.

Amazing work that is completely open.

themap.io/maps/compare/satellite

themap.io/maps/compare/satellite

Send questions to robert@themap.io

The U.S. Census Bureau released its annual population estimates on March 26, 2026, covering every county and metro area in the country through July 2025. The headline nationally: America’s biggest counties are growing slowly. Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth added more people than any other metro in the country.

But zoom in on Texas and a sharper picture emerges. This is not a state that’s growing uniformly. It’s a state splitting in two: a suburban ring that can’t build fast enough, and an urban interior that’s quietly emptying out.

For instance, Dallas County lost 2,616 people last year while Kaufman gained 11,225.

Percentages are misleading, let use raw numbers:

Percentage Growth:

Texas added 2,471,926 people between 2020 and 2025. That’s an 8.5% increase — roughly the population of Houston appearing in five years. But 84 of Texas’s 254 counties — one third — lost population over the same period. The growth is not statewide. It’s concentrated in a handful of suburban counties ringing four metro areas.

Where 2.5 million people went

The top 10 counties by absolute growth tell the story:

These 10 counties — out of 254 — account for 1.56 million of the state’s 2.47 million new residents. That’s 63% of all Texas growth in just 4% of counties.

Every single one is in one of four metro areas: DFW, Houston, Austin, or San Antonio. No rural county, no mid-sized city, no border town makes the list.

See the full map: Texas Counties — Population Growth 2020-2025

The DFW explosion

See the map: DFW Counties — Population Growth 2020-2025

Dallas-Fort Worth added 810,000 people since 2020, pushing the metro past 8.47 million — the 4th largest in the country. But the growth isn’t happening in Dallas.

Dallas County grew 1.9%. That’s 50,595 people added to a county of 2.6 million. Meanwhile:

• Kaufman County: +42.2% — from 147K to 209K. The fastest-growing county in Texas.

• Rockwall County: +28.9% — now 141K, up from 109K.

• Ellis County: +24.0% — 241K, up from 194K.

• Collin County: +20.6% — crossed 1.29 million. Added 221,667 people — the second-largest absolute gain in the state after Harris.

• Denton County: +16.9% — passed a million, now 1.07 million.

Houston: still the biggest gainer

Houston-Pasadena-The Woodlands added 126,720 people in the last year alone — the #1 numeric gain of any metro area in the United States, edging out DFW’s 123,557.

Over 5 years, Houston’s metro added 735,343 people. Harris County alone gained 311K — the single largest county-level increase in Texas. But the percentage growth is again suburban:

• Montgomery County: +24.9% (+156K) — The Woodlands, Conroe, Willis corridor

• Liberty County: +31.2% (+29K) — fastest-growing in the Houston metro

• Chambers County: +22.6% (+11K) — east of Baytown

• Fort Bend County: +17.4% (+145K) — Sugar Land, Missouri City, Richmond

Harris County grew 6.6% — respectable for a county of 4.7 million, but outpaced by every suburban county around it.

See the map: Houston Metro — Population Growth 2020-2025

Austin: fastest rate, same suburban story

Austin-Round Rock-San Marcos is the fastest-growing major metro in Texas at +2.1% per year (1-year rate), and grew 14% over 5 years. But Travis County (Austin proper) grew just 7.2%.

The action is in the ring:

• Hays County: +24.8% (Kyle, San Marcos, Buda)

• Williamson County: +22.3% (Round Rock, Cedar Park, Georgetown)

• Bastrop County: +21.3% (Bastrop, Elgin)

• Caldwell County: +20.0% (Lockhart, Luling)

Austin’s metro now stands at 2.62 million — and it’s the only Texas metro where the suburban counties are growing faster in percentage terms than every other metro’s suburbs. The entire ring is 20%+.

See the map: Austin Metro — Population Growth 2020-2025

San Antonio: Comal and Kendall surge

San Antonio-New Braunfels added 244,368 people (+9.5%). Bexar County (San Antonio proper) added 145K at 7.2% — the steadiest core-county growth of any Texas metro.

• Comal County: +27.8% (New Braunfels, Bulverde) — the I-35 corridor between San Antonio and Austin

• Kendall County: +19.6% (Boerne)

See the map: San Antonio Metro — Population Growth 2020-2025

The other Texas: 84 counties shrinking

While the metros boom, a third of Texas is losing people. 84 counties lost population between 2020 and 2025, almost all of them rural.

See the map: Texas Shrinking Counties

The national picture: Texas vs. everyone

Nationally, the Census data shows a Sun Belt surge and a coastal decline:

Biggest metro gains (2024-2025):

1. Houston: +126,720

2. Dallas-Fort Worth: +123,557

3. Atlanta: +61,953

4. Phoenix: +59,065

5. Charlotte: +54,122

6. Austin: +53,796

Metros that shrank:

• Los Angeles: -62,454 — the single largest metro loss in America

• Miami: -8,909

• San Diego: -5,294

• Memphis: -4,217

Four of the top 6 gainers are in Texas. The state isn’t just growing — it’s the primary destination for domestic migration in the United States. Houston and DFW together added more people in one year (250,277) than the entire state of Vermont’s population.

Explore the maps

• Texas Counties — Population Growth 2020-2025 — all 254 counties, green = growing, red = shrinking

• DFW Counties — Growth by County — Kaufman +42%, Dallas +1.9%

• Houston Metro Growth — Harris +311K, Montgomery +25%

• Austin Metro Growth — Hays +25%, Williamson +22%

• San Antonio Metro Growth — Comal +28%

• Texas Shrinking Counties (84 of 254) — the rural decline

• Top 20 Fastest Growing Counties — Kaufman, Liberty, Rockwall lead

Data source: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 Population Estimates (released March 26, 2026). County-level estimates based on births, deaths, and migration. All maps are interactive on TheMap.io.

Built with TheMap — making public data actually public.

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026/2025-popest-metro-micro-counties.html#table-9

Map Link

It is incredibly cool that the NCTCOG created and host this geographic layer on their site. Love it.

Peter Simek wrote about this in 2019 far better than I could. Browse the map and read his article.

Email me with questions: robert@themap.io.

U.S. Geological Survey, Digital map of aquifer boundary for the High Plains aquifer in parts of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas and Wyoming — originally Cederstrand & Becker (1999), Open-File Report 99-267, republished 2009 as USGS Data Series 543. Public domain.

Map Link

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

In 2019, more than 4.4 million acre-feet were pumped out of the Ogallala — 67% of all the water Texas pumped from its major aquifers that year. No other aquifer in the state comes close.

It built up water over millions of years, but we (humans) started pumping from it seriously after WWII - at that point it held roughly 3.2 billion acre-feet of recoverable water.

We’ve taken about 9% of it over the past 75 years.

Rain refills it, but not at the pace that we’ve been taking it. Rainfall returns less than an inch a year across the plains — and in parts of the Texas panhandle, less than a millimeter. Across the aquifer as a whole, that recharge replaces only about 15% of what gets pumped out.

Even if every pump were shut off tomorrow, most estimates put full recovery of a depleted aquifer at 500 to 1,300 years — and some run to 6,000. (source: (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-ogallala-aquifer/)

Here’s a map of the aquifers in Texas.

Map Link

That’s all for this one….if you’re looking for a good book, Cadillac Desert is an amazing account of how water was brought to the west.

Sources:

1. Here are some great GIS maps from the state:

   1. https://www.twdb.texas.gov/mapping/gisdata.asp

2. U.S. Geological Survey, Water-level and recoverable water in storage changes, High Plains aquifer, predevelopment to 2019 (Scientific Investigations Report 2023–5143) — how much water is in the aquifer, how much has been taken, and how far it stretches.

3. Kansas State University, Ogallala Aquifer — how fast it refills, and how little of what we pump gets replaced.

4. USDA Climate Hubs, Impacts to the Ogallala Aquifer — when farmers started pumping it, and why it accelerated.

5. Texas Water Development Board, Ogallala Aquifer — what’s left under the Texas Panhandle.

6. The aquifer outline on the map comes from USGS Data Series 543, digitized from Cederstrand and Becker, Open-File Report 99-267. Public domain.

On Monday, the US Supreme Court ruled that this new Texas redistricting map would be allowed, meaning the boundaries of each of the US House Districts in Texas will be different for the rest of the decade. Governor Abbott called it The One Big Beautiful Map. So what changes were made?

Map - Old (left) vs. New (right) Boundaries

(apologies to Gen Z, these maps are best viewed on an actual computer):

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There are 435 total seats in the US House that can flip votes for America (again, TX now has 38 of the 435). Which means Texas now has 40 electoral votes for president (38 + 2 senators). We’re second only to California’s 54 (CA is down from 55 before 2020).

Below is the current Texas map (as of the last election) - 25 of the 38 seats are Republican. Still, Trump asked Texas to try and flip 5 additional seats to the GOP mid-decade to give Republicans an advantage in the US House. So expect it to be even more red after these latest boundary changes.

But now liberal states are responding and doing the exact same thing. So…like many things in politics, it may be a bunch of yapping and work that changes absolutely nothing. We’ll see.

Compare District Boundary Changes One at a Time:

I have made a map here where you can look at each district individually and see how the boundaries have changed. You can see the changes more clearly this way.

District 9

District 32

Here’s a good Dallas Morning News Article on the changes in District 32: Texas redistricting divides North Dallas neighborhood, leaves some residents wondering why

District 35

District 3

Which 5 Districts might flip from D→R?

Map Highlighting Changes in 7, 32, 33, 34, 35:

Demographics of Current Boundaries:

This is a map of the current boundaries with some demographic information for each. I can’t do the new boundaries because that census data hasn’t been released.

Map Link

2020 Census Changes - Change from 36 to 38 Districts:

Previous Change (from Pre-2020 to Post 2020):

Implications

My personal take - we’ve now created an arms race where every state is going to start doing this over and over again to counteract the other states that are doing it. And each state will become more homogenized in the US House, ie - there won’t be any conservative districts in California or any Democratic districts in Texas.

So each conservative state gets more conservative and each liberal state gets more liberal, further dividing an already divided country.

On May 2nd, Dallas voters decide on $6.2 billion across four propositions: A,B,C & D. (Building and renovation, technology, debt service and swimming pool upgrades).

Here’s a sample ballot so you can practice at home before getting nervous at the big screen.

The 2020 Bond has delivered fantastic results so I think it’s worth voting for.

Here’s what the data shows — in maps.

26 Schools being completely rebuilt:

The bond will fully rebuild 26 campuses. These aren’t cosmetic renovations — these are tear-down-and-start-over projects for buildings that have reached the end of their useful life.

The biggest single allocation: W.W. Samuell High School at $317 million for a complete rebuild.

From dallasnews.com:

Sanders noted that when the district has invested in its buildings in recent years, academic improvement has often followed. He pointed to Pinkston, Roosevelt and South Oak Cliff high schools, all of which have either been rebuilt or undergone major renovations within the past decade. All three moved from D or F to B ratings in the years after they reopened.

Map Link

10,000 students attend class in portables:

Right now, 79 campuses across the district have students attending class in portable buildings. That’s roughly 10,000 kids.

District 4 has the most with 13 schools using portables. District 6 has 12. These aren’t temporary solutions — some of these portables have been “temporary” for over a decade. This is a map of those schools. The portables will all be gone with the bond.

Map Link

How much does each of the 223 campuses get? ($0 to $317M)

This is every DISD campus, sized and colored by its bond allocation — from $0 to $317 million. You can see immediately where the money is going and where it isn’t.

The concentrations aren’t random. They follow building age, condition scores, and enrollment patterns.

Map Link

The Age Problem:

The oldest school in the district is Ben Milam Elementary, built in 1909 — 117 years old.

52 schools were built in the 1950s. 34 more in the 1960s. That’s 86 buildings DISD uses that were built in the 50s and 60s.

Map Link

Campus School Scores:

According to the TEA, A-rated Dallas ISD schools jumped from 30 in 2024 to 61 in 2025. B-rated schools rose from 72 to 107. F-rated schools dropped from 24 to just 2.

There is a lot more green on this map after the 2020 Bond:

Map Link

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What the FCI Actually Means for Your School:

Dallas ISD hired https://www.dlrgroup.com/ — a national architecture and engineering firm that specializes in K-12 school facilities — to assess every single campus in the district. They walked every building, evaluated roofs, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, structural integrity, and calculated what it would cost to fix everything that’s deferred over the next 10 years.

That number, divided by what it would cost to just build a new school, is the Facility Condition Index.

You can get this information for your school here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1tnrRCYaDh6rT86DGnMpvKbbLbwkGAAkB,

This data is fascinating. Each campus has a .pdf report. You can go and find your school and download it.

Explaining the map:

- Green (0-15%): Building is in good shape, normal wear

- Yellow (30%): Significant deferred maintenance — roofing, plumbing, mechanical systems need work

- Orange (45-60%): Major systems failing — approaching the point where renovation costs more than replacement

- Red (60%+): Replacement territory — cheaper to tear down and rebuild than to fix

Map Link

DISD District Trustees on the ballot this year:

Three DISD District Trustees are also on the ballot this year. Here are the locations of their districts (In District 8, Joe Carreón is running unopposed). So we have 2 competitive races. District 2 and 6.

Source of the GeoJSON.

Map Link

So Go Vote!

Early Voting Locations:

Early Voting Centers PDF.

Map Link

Election Day Locations:

Election Day Voting Locations PDF.

Map Link

Every map in this article is interactive. Click any school to see its name, allocation, age, condition score, and what the bond will fund. All of this data is public — I just mapped it for us visual people.

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