cowboyeagle05 wrote:we all know its not the premier office market for the region. We know that's Legacy/Frisco and Cypress Waters...
I insist that that's not a dealbreaker if what you want is to attract a broad wedge of the community to feel welcome to make a neighborhood their own and get involved in living in it. Right now downtown is not any more rife with opportunity in that regard than pristine-minded suburban Legacy is. People need to be able to personally do things in and for Dallas -- with personal initiative, something more creative than being labor for someone's volunteer slot -- to be able to care about it more than a certain amount.
Right now Dallas can't even fathom giving someone the kind of tactical urbanist chance that a DFWU member would like to take and run with, right? And for sure not the sphere of longer-term responsibility that a Patrick Kennedy style visionary citizen would like to grow. I'm speaking openendedly here because the specifics aren't really the point until people even have an avenue to express their passion for the place. There may be avenues but is there a young professionals-style induction orientation to introduce regular citizens to the avenues unknown to them? Right now I don't know of it in Dallas. Not unless the person lands a job with urbanist-adjacent responsibility, or unless they want to buy a private property downtown and apply to improve it. Few can get excited about either route.
cowboyeagle05 wrote:
...until more neighborhoods surrounding the CBD are moving up and leasing you wont see the CBD boat float too well. The CBD is the historical center but once Deep Ellum, Uptown, South Side/Cedars, River Front Blvd, Design District are all bumping then you will see the Downtown come alive properly. You just have way too many big 80's buildings and disjointed urban repair projects to float successfully at once. You need the hip areas around the CBD to put some kick in the giddy up. The CBD needs the equivalent of the bedroom communities to add rooftops.
At least we now have the AT&T Discovery District and the East Quarter/Farmers Market plus the various parks that being built are having a positive impact.
As far as that goes, then, there's clearly a lot more to success in consumer activity than being the premier office address. And for a similar case study of a smaller Sunbelt peer city, Downtown Atlanta still isn't their premier office address, but their endless northward sprawl of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s in Atlanta has lost a lot of its former prestige in comparison to lifestyle patterns like the old city's Beltline (hey good name-- they must have come to Dallas) hike and bike trail etc., and large amounts of south downtown (lying in the opposite direction than their Uptown Dallas equivalent, which is Midtown Atlanta) space are in play for adaptive reuse and redevelopment now.
I feel like Dallas County (2,650,000) already has demand for 1% or 26,000 "consumers" to move downtown even now if the monthly price per square foot were
competitively low. There's a chicken and egg problem with not enough supply for the market to provide good price determination. As long as it remains relatively soft (risky) vs the region, large central landowners like Headington will sit out to let someone less risk-sensitive prove up the demand better for them. That land removes a significant fraction of the potential sites for downtown to have a robust housing supply. And so on.
We on this forum saw it take from the 1980s until 2010 for the 1950s space downtown to get repositioned. Houston didn't have the 1950s downtown office boom that we did, but it had a bigger one in the 1970s than we did, and that space has now struggled in obsolescence for a decade there. It could take us into the 2030s at this rate for our obsolete 1980s office wave to get demolished or adaptively reused, but...
In 2012, Houston decided the citywide multiplier effect of downtown housing was large enough to justify a $15,000/unit tax rebate subsidy carrot for the first 2,500 new housing units anybody built within certain downtown boundaries. First come first served, AFAIK if you had chosen to build 2,500 units there, you could have claimed the whole $37.5 million yourself (after certain stipulations like sidewalk-friendly ground floor uses were met in order to qualify). However, there was a four year window time limit to apply.
https://www.chron.com/business/article/ ... 791742.php
I don't know all the fine print but here it is if anyone wants it:
http://www.downtowntirz.com/program/completed-program/
I believe it was successful enough in its response that they ended up offering it for up to the first 5,000 units ($75 million) and it has made a visible difference.
A similar TIRZ incentive with boundaries at Riverfront, Ross, N/S Ervay, and Corinth St, for example, might lead to a lot of good and not many regrets. It might also be more cost-effective than us trying to manage demand-attraction by converting more and more developable blocks to parks.