https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/ A running notebook on population growth, job growth, and migration data in the markets Dissonant Capital is watching, published as we see it, not dressed up after the fact. en-us Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0400 https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/fort-worths-6-7-billion-year-was-bigger-in-dollars-than-in-jobs/ https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/fort-worths-6-7-billion-year-was-bigger-in-dollars-than-in-jobs/ Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0400 Fort Worth booked $6.7 billion in new investment and close to 7,000 jobs in fiscal 2025, about $957,000 of capital for every job, led by data center builds. https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/idaho-falls-added-population-and-lost-jobs-in-the-same-year/ https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/idaho-falls-added-population-and-lost-jobs-in-the-same-year/ Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0400 Idaho Falls grew 1.44% and shed jobs in the same twelve months, right as a $40 million federal nuclear tech hub grant landed on its largest employer. https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/liberty-missouri-lands-one-of-the-years-largest-ai-data-centers/ https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/liberty-missouri-lands-one-of-the-years-largest-ai-data-centers/ Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0400 A $1.4 billion, 568,800 square foot AI data center just landed in a Missouri town of 31,000. Here's what that does, and doesn't, tell us about housing demand. https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/rogers-arkansas-bets-on-400000-square-feet-of-office-space/ https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/rogers-arkansas-bets-on-400000-square-feet-of-office-space/ Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0400 Hunt Ventures just opened a 400,000 square foot Class A office building in Rogers, with Nestlé and Anheuser-Busch signed as anchors. What that does and doesn't confirm about the metro. https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/myrtle-beach-cleared-every-screen-we-run/ https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/myrtle-beach-cleared-every-screen-we-run/ Sun, 06 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0400 Myrtle Beach cleared all four of our screens this year, population, jobs, supply, and the perception gap. That's usually when we get more careful, not less. https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/what-a-bankruptcy-auction-actually-tells-you/ https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/what-a-bankruptcy-auction-actually-tells-you/ Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0400 Entitlements de-risk the land, a track record de-risks the build, and conflating the two is how shovel ready gets mistaken for done. When Cadence Fund I acquired its land portfolio across four markets, the entitlements were only half of what we bought, the other half was a development platform with a track record of its own. https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/why-we-still-do-site-visits/ https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/why-we-still-do-site-visits/ Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400 A spreadsheet can't tell you that the "retail corridor" on a submarket report is half boarded up, or that a competing project broke ground behind a billboard nobody photographed. Every market that clears our data screen still gets walked before we underwrite it. https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/capex-before-rooftops/ https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/capex-before-rooftops/ Wed, 01 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400 A new distribution center or manufacturing plant shows up in employer capital-expenditure filings months before the hiring does, and the hiring shows up before the housing permits do. We'd rather be watching the first signal than the last one. https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/the-problem-with-average-rent-growth/ https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/the-problem-with-average-rent-growth/ Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400 A metro-wide rent growth number can hide a submarket that's flat and one that's accelerating, averaged into something forgettable. We screen at a finer grain than the headline metro figure, on purpose. https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/reputation-is-a-lagging-indicator/ https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/reputation-is-a-lagging-indicator/ Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 -0400 A market's reputation is built on what it used to be, not on what its permit filings and payroll data say it's becoming. The gap between the two is where we spend most of our time. https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/migration-data-lags-moving-trucks/ https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/migration-data-lags-moving-trucks/ Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:00:00 -0400 By the time official migration estimates confirm a trend, the people who noticed it a year earlier have already bought. We weight faster-moving signals, utility hookups, school enrollment, employer announcements, more heavily than the annual releases everyone else is reading. https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/the-metros-the-coverage-skipped/ https://dissonantcapital.com/field-notes/the-metros-the-coverage-skipped/ Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 -0400 Some of the strongest job- and population-growth stories of the last few years happened in metros that never made a national headline. That's not an accident, reporters follow drama, not spreadsheets.