Dallas Fort Worth Urban Forum

Dallas skyscrapers don’t stack up to the booming Houston and Austin skylines
By Steve Brown
7:52 AM on May 23, 2023 CDT

https://www.dallasnews.com/business/rea ... -skylines/

Dallas is losing Texas’ tall building race.

Both Houston and Austin now top Big D in terms of skyscrapers, according to a new report by Texas Real Estate Source.

Houston’s high-rises total 30,498 feet tall when combined. In Austin, tall buildings add up to almost 24,000 feet in height.

Dallas stacks up to only about 22,000 combined feet of skyscrapers.

Most of Dallas’ skyscrapers were constructed back in the 1980s. The tallest recent additions to the skyline have been apartments, not offices. The Amli Fountain Place high-rise downtown is 45 floors. The new 40-story Victor tower is in Victory Park. The Atelier apartment tower in the Arts District is 41 stories.

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I call B.S. on this article, in particular Austin > Dallas. What are we measuring as a “high-rise” and from when?

The reason it's no good (and you're right) is that by his criterion a building floorplan the size of a shipping container and one the size of a city block are the same, in fact indistinguishable ... as long as they stack the same number of levels. Obviously that's no proxy for skyline momentum or financing, prosperity or rarity.

A condo tower -- which is 90+% of the current difference between downtown ATX and downtown Tulsa or Corpus Christi* -- is much more quickly and more commonly built than a hospital tower or office tower and looms much smaller on a skyline, because its floorplates are much narrower (not to mention cheaper).

It's really not so different from comparing the Vehicle Assembly Building (716 feet by 518 feet by a height of 526 feet)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle ... y_Building
and the SLC-6 at Vandenberg,
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=vandenberg+sl ... iax=images
the engine static test towers in Mississippi,
https://www.nasa.gov/stennis/engineerin ... -facility/
or the S-1C test stand in Alabama,

to a 662' flagpole and saying that the flagpole looms much larger than the rest, period.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Flagpole

*Austin's 6XGuadalupe tower is now built, I will give them that, but you can see the sun shine right through it because Meta didn't occupy their space.