Tarrant County Desk · Community

Arlington

Tarrant's second-largest city — the sports capital that built itself in the gap between Fort Worth and Dallas.

Population
≈398,000
Incorporated
1884
Area
99 sq mi
Public transit
On-demand rideshare only (no fixed-route bus)
Major venues
AT&T Stadium, Globe Life Field, Six Flags, Choctaw Stadium, Esports Stadium

The city that picked its lane on purpose

Arlington started as a railroad watering stop in the early 1870s — Tarrant County's pitch for the Texas & Pacific line that eventually went to Fort Worth instead. The town that grew up around the depot took its name from Robert E. Lee's Virginia estate (a renaming choice that has been the subject of repeated, and so far unsuccessful, local debate). It incorporated in 1884 with a population under 500.

For most of the 20th century Arlington's identity was tied to General Motors. The GM Arlington Assembly plant on Abram Street opened in 1954 and has built, in succession: Chevrolet passenger cars, the Chevy Caprice, and — since 1996 — GM's full-sized SUV line (Tahoe, Suburban, Yukon, Escalade). The plant employs roughly 5,500 hourly workers and is the city's largest private employer. Its 70-year run is one of the longest continuously-operating auto assembly facilities in North America.

The other thing Arlington did, beginning in the late 1950s, was decide it would not be a bedroom community for either Dallas or Fort Worth. The city courted Six Flags Over Texas, which opened in 1961 as the original Six Flags park. It courted the Washington Senators baseball team, which moved in 1972 and became the Texas Rangers. When the Dallas Cowboys outgrew Texas Stadium in Irving, Arlington passed a 2004 sales-tax bond to build what is now AT&T Stadium. When the Rangers wanted a new ballpark with a retractable roof, Arlington passed another sales-tax bond in 2016 to build Globe Life Field. The result, by 2025, is a contiguous 1.5-square-mile sports and entertainment district that draws roughly 17 million visitors a year — more than the city's resident population by a factor of 40.

The transit story

Arlington is the largest U.S. city without a fixed-route public bus system. Voters rejected DART membership in 1980 and again in the 2000s. The city instead contracts on-demand rideshare (Via) for subsidized point-to-point trips and runs an autonomous-shuttle pilot in the entertainment district. This is a policy choice the city renews each election cycle. Whether it stays that way for the next twenty years is one of the live municipal questions worth covering.

Modern Arlington, by the numbers

The 2020 census put Arlington at 394,266, making it the seventh-largest city in Texas and the 50th-largest in the United States. The 2024 estimate is about 398,000 — slower growth than Fort Worth, faster than Dallas. The University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) enrolls roughly 41,000 students, making it the second-largest UT system school after UT Austin and the largest source of nursing graduates in Texas.

Arlington ISD covers the entire city and a small slice into Grand Prairie and Pantego, with about 55,000 students across 80 campuses. The southern edge of the city, including parts of the AT&T Stadium area, is covered by Mansfield ISD — a quirk of school district boundaries that predates the sports district by decades.

The economic base sits on three legs: the auto plant, the sports/tourism cluster, and UT Arlington's research enterprise. Healthcare (Texas Health Arlington Memorial, Medical City Arlington) and a growing logistics operation along Interstate 20 round out the top employers.

What's coming

  • The Arlington Entertainment District master plan. The city is in the middle of an extended look at what happens between game days. Year-round events programming, hotel additions (the Loews Arlington Hotel opened in 2024), and a still-discussed third major venue all sit in the pipeline.
  • National Medal of Honor Museum. Opened March 2025 next to AT&T Stadium, the first museum in the country dedicated to Medal of Honor recipients. Federally chartered, privately funded, designed by Rafael Viñoly.
  • UTA's research expansion. Multiple new engineering and nursing buildings funded through the 88th and 89th Legislative sessions.
  • The autonomous-shuttle pilot. Arlington has been the national test bed for on-demand and autonomous transit. Whether the city moves toward a permanent program or sunsets the pilot is a 2026–27 decision.

How the city fits into the county

Arlington sits in the southeast corner of Tarrant County. The city's commercial heart (downtown, UTA, the sports district) is east of Cooper Street; the residential growth has pushed south past Interstate 20 toward the Johnson County line. The Tarrant County Subcourthouse on Abram Street handles county business for residents of the southeast precinct.

Editorially: Tarrant County Desk covers Arlington in full. The city's size, its visibility, and its uniquely Arlington-shaped policy questions (the transit decision, the sports-bond model, the GM plant's future as the industry electrifies) all deserve sustained local reporting. The metro dailies parachute in for game days. We're here on Tuesdays for council meetings.

Connect

  • Arlington city government: arlingtontx.gov
  • Arlington ISD: aisd.net
  • UT Arlington: uta.edu
  • City Council: 2nd and 4th Tuesdays, 6:30 PM, 101 W Abram Street
  • Arlington Subcourthouse: 700 E Abram Street