Carrollton, Texas is one of the biggest and best Korean communities in the United States

If you're moving to Dallas and want to live near a real Korean community, then you need to check out Carrollton. The city is 3.6% Korean, the highest concentration of any city in Texas, and typical rent there is $1,656 a month.

Carrollton rents are below Plano, Frisco, Allen and McKinney, so the suburb with the deepest Korean roots isn't charging a premium for it.

What is actually in Carrollton

The center of it is Old Denton Road, the stretch locals call Koreatown. H Mart anchors it with a 70,000-square-foot store at 2625 Old Denton Road that opened in a former Mervyn's building in 2008.

Around the H mart, sits the rest of a thriving Korean community: Korean barbecue restaurants, bakeries, and roughly two dozen Korean-language churches clustered in and near Carrollton across Baptist, Methodist and Presbyterian congregations. The success of the corridor has pulled in newer mixed-use development along the same road.

Dallas also has an older Koreatown along Royal Lane, which predates the Carrollton corridor and still operates, but the Koreatown has clearly moved north and it started in 2008 with the arrival of H Mart. You saw a similar pattern in the metro Atlanta area, where the old Koreatown was originally in Doraville but shifted north toward Duluth and Suwanee with better schools and the arrival of a Super H Mart in the early 2000s. I remember when Carrollton didn't have many of the Korean restaurants I would see in Duluth like a Gukbap restaurant or Soondae Guk restaurant, but now Carrollton has it. Carrollton is what I consider the second best Koreatown area in the entire south outside of Duluth/Suwanee in metro Atlanta. Another attractive reason to move to Carrollton if you're from out of state is the fact that Texas has no state taxes. I knew someone who moved from Atlanta to Houston, for the sole reason they were making around $2 million a year with an online business and didn't want to pay $100,000 every year to the state of Georgia on state taxes.

Lewisville is the cheaper version

Directly northwest, Lewisville holds the second-largest Korean share in the metro at 2.84% and the lowest rent in this group. Its one-bedroom runs $1,695, eighteen dollars under Carrollton's, and it sits close enough to Old Denton Road that the Koreatown amenities stay within reach.

For renters choosing on cost alone, Lewisville and Carrollton are the answer, because there's a huge gap in rent prices with the nearby fashionable suburbs. Flower Mound has a solid Korean population at 2.00% but costs $2,431 a month to rent, which is $775 more than Carrollton for a typical unit and $862 more on a one-bedroom.

What the pricier suburbs are selling

Frisco, Allen and Plano all carry meaningful Korean populations and higher rents, and what you're paying for there is mostly better schools and newer housing stock, not proximity to the community. Frisco's one-bedroom at $2,233 costs $520 more than Carrollton's for the same size unit.

Plano also stands out, since it has 3,067 Korean residents, an H Mart, and rent of $1,722 that has actually went down 0.1% over the past year. It's the compromise between Carrollton's density of Korean businesses and Frisco's newer suburbs.

A trend to note if you're renting in Carrollton is that rent there rose 7.1% over the past year, among the highest increases in the Dallas metro, while Plano and Richardson slipped slightly. The affordability advantage is real today but it's also narrowing.

For the wider metro picture, see our northern Dallas suburbs breakdown, and check any of these cities month to month on its own page.

Sources

• US Census Bureau, American Community Survey, table B02015, Asian Alone by Selected Groups, for Korean population by city

• Axios Dallas, How Carrollton got a Koreatown, for the development of the Old Denton Road corridor

• The Dallas Morning News, for H Mart store details and locations

• RentDataNow rent data by bedroom size, anchored to the Zillow Observed Rent Index, June 2026