Dallas Fort Worth Urban Forum

tanzoak

Am I missing something here? What is the point of this line.. where would anyone go on this line if it were to built first?..legacy West/DFW? How long will that even take over an HR?! Might as well drive. I'm with you that highway ROWs aren't great. But.. 1. That corridor has the highest employment...

tanzoak

Here's the screening evaluation for the 9 rail corridors (North Central ext is for an upgraded bus route):

tanzoak

Luckily, DART appears to be aware of which ones are good and which ones are hot garbage.

LBJ-Inwood and West Dallas are Tier 1 (i.e. start to conduct alternatives analysis), while the three worst ones are Tier 3 (i.e. ignore them).

tanzoak

LBJ-Inwood is legit. West Dallas is also good. West Oak Cliff, Scyene, and Irving-Frisco are alright. The rest are varying degrees of useless.

tanzoak

The never-ending extensions are stupid. Also, the corridor planning is from 2016. If you want to check out more detailed descriptions of what they're thinking for each of those corridors, you can find it here: http://www.dart.org/ShareRoot/about/expansion/tsp/2040TSPCorridorFactSheets.pdf The presen...

tanzoak

It could always be worse. The new $6.4 billion Bay Bridge already has cracks in it and will quite possibly need to be rebuilt after the next major earthquake.

tanzoak

I'm not saying that there is no homophobia or discrimination in TX anymore. I'm saying that in the 80s, you lived in The Castro/Chelsea/Oak Lawn because that's where you could live/be yourself without getting your ass kicked for walking down the street. Now, thankfully, conditions have improved to t...

tanzoak

If Amazon is really serious about this health care initiative, that would actually be a huge point for Dallas, which hosts the HQ of 4 of the 25 largest hospital systems in the country, as well as a regional HQ of the largest. It also seems to have a very flexible market compared to other places: ht...

tanzoak

Gay enclaves formed as a protective response to some pretty horrific oppression and discrimination. The fact that people don’t feel the need to form/maintain those enclaves any more is a good thing. Is there something lost with the dissolution of these places? Sure. But we can’t have all of the thin...

tanzoak

joshua.dodd wrote:I'll be honest. I hate this building. It's so damn ugly. Especially the top.

It also has the density of a Dallas six-story mid-rise, which is lame.

Lower density than a lot of them, to be honest.

tanzoak

Guys, Amazon is not going to make a headquarters decision based on how much the CEO likes this particular president, who will only be around for 3 or max 7 more years. Stop wishcasting. Similarly, Amazon will not pick a location because it will make a Great American Story. It will not pick a locatio...

tanzoak

Only the top five "big boys" - Dallas, NYC, Chicago, Boston, and Washington DC - plus one wildcard city - Toronto - have a realistic chance of hosting Amazon's new headquarters just given the unprecedented tech hiring requirements for HQ2. Even with tech hiring phased in over several year...

tanzoak

I would hope that there are better uses of downtown than townhomes. If not, that’s.. concerning. Don’t get me wrong, I like the townhomes at the farmers market, but the fact that they’re there is a sign of the weakness, not strength, of the area.

tanzoak

but no matter how the building is designed it's going to be an eyesore in my mind because there is nothing even remotely close to that scale in that portion of downtown. It will look like the Cityplace Tower as an out of place lone high rise surrounded by low and mid rise buildings. Cities don’t gr...

tanzoak

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/retail/2018/01/24/unt-expands-retailing-degrees-major-consumer-experience-management UNT expands its retailing degrees with a major in consumer experience management Maria Halkias ...Managing the consumer experience in retail is complicated enough these days that...

tanzoak

These parking garages are very contradicting. The city and these developers are trying to make Dallas more like a real urban city with urban density. Yet they keep building these buildings with parking garage podiums. The developers are still pandering to that god awful suburban, car-oriented menta...

tanzoak

People won't ride the bus when the bus is an inferior option. I've never ridden a bus in Dallas, because why would I? There's little traffic, ample parking, and destinations are spread out. That means cars are the best option, except for some long-distance trips to a central location during high-tra...

tanzoak

Unless you mean WAY more than 150,000 (like twice that number), that's not an accurate statement. Tuition at Hockaday, Urselin, and similar private schools is around $40K a year, so after a $5,000 - $9,000 mortgage, a car payment or two, all the rest of a family's expenses, spending an extra, unnec...

tanzoak

Unless you mean WAY more than 150,000 (like twice that number), that's not an accurate statement. Tuition at Hockaday, Urselin, and similar private schools is around $40K a year, so after a $5,000 - $9,000 mortgage, a car payment or two, all the rest of a family's expenses, spending an extra, unnec...

tanzoak

Not sure if this is a dumb question or not, but does Amazon’s list capture the metro areas listed or is this a list of the proper cities? (eg. would it say North Texas if they were considering Irving, Frisco etc.) Considering that they listed Northern VA and Montgomery Co, MD separately from DC, th...

tanzoak

Dallas builds way more 3+ bedroom units than many other places, btw. All of those townhouse projects. Not to mention that the existing single-fam housing stock is also a much higher proportion in Dallas than many other cities. Dallas definitely does not suffer a lack of family-sized units.

tanzoak

LongonBigD wrote:Some concerns remain about the amount of one bedrooms (70-80%) in this project. I'm all for adding density, but would prefer less transient density.

lol what

tanzoak

I don't recall reading anywhere that the FTA has okayed any "New Starts" funds for either the D2 and Cotton Belt lines. Let's wait and see what they will grant a full funding (50%) agreement on. ;) Well sure lol. D2 is going for Core Capacity funds, btw, and the original scored a rating o...

tanzoak

I wouldn't go as far as to state projections on new ridership are suspicious - they were made using a calculation approved by the FTA and FRA. What's missing in the various arguments are that both D2 and the Cotton Belt have similar numbers in the projections - around 10,000 new riders per day (or ...

tanzoak

You have to have people in a place before you can have people walking around it. DD doesn't have very many people.

tanzoak

maconahey wrote:Deep Ellum is getting a high-rise with apartments and shopping

Is 7 stories all it takes for a "high rise" these days?

tanzoak

any projections of increased ridership are suspicious at best. This, on the other hand, is a true statement. Though I'd note just as applicable to Cotton Belt as it is to D2. Even moreso to Cotton Belt, really, as it's tougher to model a brand new line than access improvements to existing ones. At ...

tanzoak

^ Sorry, I don't have time to go looking for those numbers. I'm sure you can Google them. I don't know what ridership projections you are referring to, but since DART LRT ridership has gone down every single year except when they opened new lines, any projections of increased ridership are suspicio...

tanzoak

If it were a road or highway half of the folks on this forum would be screaming bloody murder about the city building a high-speed route through the neighborhood that only benefits the suburbanites passing through. :-) Because unlike a bike/ped trail, high-speed roads and highways are ugly, noisy, ...

tanzoak

^ Projections for new riders -- not cannibalized from the existing line -- on the D2 line are in the range of three to four dozen a day. So cost per new rider will be astronomical. Where are you getting that from? Original D2 had 9k projected net new LRT riders (with 19k using the new alignment, pl...

tanzoak

Using your criteria for unacceptable station usage, many of DART light rail stations should be shut down too. Latest figures I could find after a quick google search: https://www.dallasnews.com/news/transportation/2011/06/25/most-dart-rail-stations-serve-fewer-people-now-than-when-they-opened The t...

tanzoak

cowboyeagle05 wrote:What tool are you using to make the maps?

QGIS. And using the Longitudinal Tract Database (LTDB) from Brown for the census tract crosswalks between past and present.

tanzoak

Let me know what you're interested in, and I can make up some more. It's super easy. Changes in.. Homeownership rates, Home values, Percent multifamily, College degrees, Percent children, Percent in nieghborhood less than 10 years, Poverty rates, Percent foreign-born? I can also do changes from 1970...

tanzoak

How interesting that the South and West Dallas areas are losing density, even though those areas seem to be blowing up with new, dense residential projects. Is my perception of the growth/increased density in the Bishop Arts and Trinity Groves areas overstated, or is there some other factor contrib...

tanzoak

Here's changes in real household income over that time:

tanzoak

New census tract data was released recently, and I thought I'd make a little map showing what parts of Dallas are growing/shrinking. This compares full population counts from the 2000 Census vs estimates from the 2012-2016 ACS.

tanzoak

Lol, $80k+ per weekday rider is abjectly terrible. For comparison, the original street-level D2 was quite economical at around $33k. Not sure what the D2 subway will be, but guessing around $50k.

tanzoak

Also, I mostly bike everywhere (because bike facilities in Oakland are plentiful, safe, and convenient!), but so long as I own a car I will almost always use it when going grocery shopping. Lugging a bunch of groceries around sucks. Get a collapsible grocery cart. Plenty of people downtown use them...

tanzoak

Tivo_Kenevil wrote:Funny that you mention hunters point. I actually edited that out of my original post before I submitted it. So I yeah I have been there too.

Well damn that'll teach me lol

tanzoak

I've been to and stayed in the tenderloin hostels several times. It's "scary-ness" is so overrated. The bums there don't do anything. They're just your stereotypical bum, nothing more. It's no different then bums who OD on K2 in the West End here. I'm sorry, I just can't get scared when y...

tanzoak

Yeah, when I was in San Fran they literally sat outside of Neiman Marcus doors with a hand out silently and out of the way. And it was a similar experience all around Union Square Park where I was staying for a week. They were everywhere but so were lots of other people so it seemed less intimidati...

tanzoak

Yes, 100% cowboyeagle05. If streets are hostile and/or inconvenient to pedestrians and parking is plentiful, it doesn't matter how close/dense the activity site is.. people will mostly drive. It's not some "ugh Dallasites are dumb suburban people" thing, you see it everywhere in the countr...

tanzoak

I think it's great. Something this "out of scale" would never be allowed in the Bay Area, and that's a significant reason why our affordability crisis is so intense. I would kill for an 18-story building to be allowed outside of downtown San Francisco or Oakland. I certainly agree that it ...

tanzoak

Dallas finally had a good month of permitting last month, the highest in a little over a year. Unfortunately, the previous 10 months were so bad that that only staunched the bleeding somewhat. Permitting over the last 12 months was 6,879 units, compared to the cycle high of 13,525 (the year ending M...

tanzoak

Well victory isn't really dense right now a bunch of the apartments just opened or are about to open. Give it time. This, but it's also not really as dense as the buildings make it appear to be because so much of it is parking. And that parking also encourages people to drive to/from there, which f...

tanzoak

Arlington’s circumstances are without compare: No other city has tested microtransit-only service.

Uh, it's a subsidized jitney service. Jitneys got pretty much regulated out of existence in the US, but it's a widespread service in many parts of the world.

tanzoak

It's troubling that the Drever keeps selling off (monetizing) the tax and other grants they get. I don't know enough about how that stuff works, but I don't see how that would be better in the long term than simply holding on to the tax incentives and grants they receive. Color me skeptical, but I ...

tanzoak

That's not the rule though. Many urban areas in every major city in America have multiple places where two and three-story buildings exist on the street with retail/commercial space on the ground floor and just a few units of residential or commercial space above. In some places this scale of devel...

tanzoak

I'm sure Vickery Meadows is well over 15K Now. Back in 2004 they were listed as 14k/sqmi in that neighborhood. Uptown is probably up there too now. Regarding, retail Dallas' biggest issue is Form. Sometimes they won't allow mid rises to even be built. I remember Council woman Gates saying one time ...

tanzoak

I love the lower-rise buildings here, I just wish we had more retail on the ground floor. Can't support retail everywhere without density. You're only going to get that with midrise once you have midrise everywhere, not just a few here and there (which I would completely support). And even our high...

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