I met Plano Mayor Harry LaRosiliere at a beautiful dinner party last Thursday evening, and I am besmitten. Not only do we share the same city route to life in Dallas — via New York City — he is one of the most dedicated young politicos I have ever met. The fact that he is The One guiding Plano through its super growth spurt fascinated me. Who is this interesting man running the show in what was once a sleepy farm bedroom community of Dallas, a suburb the Dallas elite very much disdained in the 1990s? Get a load of this quote from a story written about Plano housing in 1998:
Jeff Witt, the long-range planner for the city of Frisco who held the same job in Plano for 2/2 years, fears a manufactured slum. “1 was always concerned with the housing stock in Piano,” he says. “You have people who don*l want to invest in their houses. Ultimately, you have a very expensive deteriorating structure.” Witt says that the irony of the looming problem of shoddy Piano (sic, I think they mean Plano) housing is that it is a direct result of the city’s incredible growth and success. Perhaps the biggest reason the city has been able to attract some of the best companies in America is the affordable housing. Developers who erected hundreds of homes a year and kept unit costs down could sell for cheap and still maintain a solid profit margin, and employees transferred from Los Angeles or Phoenix or Boston were amazed to find 3.000 square feet for $250,000. The waves of migratory rich moved to North Texas, and, in a state where unions have always been weak, the work of laying bricks or installing carpentry-jobs traditionally performed by trained, unionized craftsmen-was done by workers with no specialized training. Although cheap labor almost always equals cheap workmanship, all the elements necessary for an unparalleled building boom were there: an abundance of low-wage immigrant workers, low interest rates, and great schools. The race was on.
Well then, cheap houses and all —
But the halcyon present is every day inching its way toward a precarious future. Jeff Witt, for one, is worried about that. “Plano is perceived as a very affluent town,” he says. “It’s a nice ZIP code to have. But that perception can change very quickly.”
Really? Now Plano is a near world-class city competing for, and snagging, some of the top businesses in the U.S.A. And where the hell is Jeff Witt?
And Plano has Harry!
Harry LaRosiliere was born in Haiti, but raised at 125th Street and Broadway, just up the road from Columbia. For non-New Yorkers, that’s Harlem. His parents were hard-working blue-collar workers who insisted on a good education for both of their children. Harry attended Corpus Christi Catholic School, Cardinal Hayes High School and graduated from the City College of New York in 1985 with a Bachelor of Science in Geology. His “real job,” when he’s not “mayoring,” is investing with UBS.
Harry told me he was inspired to go into Politics when David Dinkins was mayor of New York City, back when he was living in the Big Apple. He was particularly moved by an incident under Dinkin’s term in 1991 — the deaths of Gavin and Angela Cato. The two black children were tragically killed when a car in a funeral motorcade carrying the deceased spiritual leader of the Lubavitcher Hasidic community, Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, hit another car and careened onto the sidewalk. The ambulance that arrived was said to administer aid to the Hasidics first, not the children, which sparked a series of riots in Crown Heights in 1991. Harry says he didn’t like the way Mayor Dinkins handled the aftermath: he chose to let the neighborhoods “fight it out” rather than emerge as a leader and create peace. Riots and looting usually end up hurting the hardest-working tier of society, store and small business owners, he said. He didn’t think that was right.
So Harry moved to Texas in 1994, and became a financial advisor. He served two terms on the Plano City Council from 2005 to 2011, and was the former planning and zoning commissioner. He ran against Fred Moses, the Collin County Republican Party Chairman. And he won, becoming the first black Mayor of Plano, in 2013. He and his wife and two daughters live in Shoal Creek, Phase IV.
Couple things we learned about Plano from Harry: It is the ninth largest city in the state of Texas and growing. Toyota is bringing in 6,000 new jobs, not 4,000 as we thought. Each one of those jobs will lead to more jobs. The impact of Toyota is going to be tremendous. The average Toyota employee’s salary will be about $100,000 a year.
Plano is also increasingly diverse. 53 percent of Plano is Caucasian, and Asians/Indians comprise the next largest ethnic population. Harry likes to refer to his new city’s growth as stages 1.0, 2.0, and 3.o:
“It takes three things to make a city great,” says Harry: “Safety, great schools, and a sense of community.” Indeed, Plano has all three. The city has grown so quickly, little land is left to re-develop:
Only 7 percent of Plano’s land is available, and we will be smart and prudent about our future. Thirty years ago we planned for today, and look what we accomplished. In 1980, we were what I refer to as Plano 1.0, a small bedroom community. In the 1990s and early 2000s we were Plano 2.0, a large suburb. Today, we are Plano 3.0, a world-class city that comfortably competes for any business or resident on the global stage.
To that end, he promoted The Plano Tomorrow Plan, which encourages growth, development and re-development of the city. It was approved by the Plano City Council last month. But Harry still gets flack from some about the plan, complaining it is bringing too many apartments to the area (read: high density, lower income residents) or so they argue.
Anyhow, we are going to meet up at his house. I guess I have to meet his wife, Tracy: she’s an MBA who actually brought Harry to Texas, so… maybe I’ll be wild about her, too!
