City Hall and what the Big Developers Want

  

 *All opinions stated are those only of the author, Adam Lamont, and don't represent Dallas Neighbors for Housing or YIMBYAction as a whole*

I typically like to keep my energy focused on housing issues in Dallas since I don't have a ton of bandwidth these days. However, the whole craziness around tearing down Dallas City Hall is so bold in its transparency of chicanery that I can't help but weigh in a little bit. I'm not going to rehash what others who know more about the state of City Hall have already said. My viewpoint is basically that of Cannon Brown on Facebook, I think we should keep City Hall, not necessarily because it has architectural significance but because it's a bad deal that could cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars that we frankly don't have to lose. That this is all happening just weeks after the Mavs once again made noise about how they need land to build a new arena is a math problem even my weakest students from when I was a teacher could have solved. 

Basketball is my favorite sport, and going to a couple of Mavs games a year was one of my favorite things about living in Dallas. However, the Adelsons and Nico Harrison have managed to run the franchise into the ground faster than anyone could imagine. It's been less than 18 months since the Mavs were entering the Finals with an ascendant Luka. Now, despite the promise of Cooper Flagg, the Mavs are as bad a team as any in the NBA. Nico Harrison might get fired while I'm writing this. This all begs the question: why would Dallas City Council even consider giving any sort of sweetheart deal to some out-of-town owners who have done nothing but turn the fanbase against them since they bought the team from Mark Cuban? I haven't even brought up the fact that the Adelsons are huge supporters of the GOP and Trump in a city that voted for Kamala by about a 2-1 margin. 

The Adelsons couldn't pull this kind of heist of downtown land off by themselves. The idea of selling City Hall is (rather transparently) being pushed by the big downtown developers as a way to "revitalize" that part of downtown in conjunction with the Convention Center redo. These developers, the likes of the Hunts, Crows, Craig Hall, Jack Matthews, and Mike Hoque, are looking at the land where City Hall sits and thinking about they can build there. 

The issue I have is that these developers are not city planners. And while I myself am also not a city-planner, I can't help but think about how these big developers are stuck in the 20th century with these ideas about how a signature project, like the Convention Center or a new arena, is the key to making an area hot for development. This view is the same one that Jane Jacobs critiqued way back in the early 1960s in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Back then, Jacobs was fighting against the wholesale bulldozing of mixed-use neighborhoods for freeways or downtown malls that only accelerated the collapse of downtowns. 

Yet, still today, most of the big Dallas developers cling to a top-down approach. One of the first times I fully grasped this was in this 2023 article about the Hunts plans for the Reunion area of downtown. The quote below is the current CEO totally misunderstanding that being at the intersection of 30 and 35 is a disadvantage, not an advantage. Research backs this up, and it makes intuitive sense that while highways can drive development in the suburbs (think Legacy West), they often have the opposite effect downtown. Anyway, the point isn't about highways so much as the way that the big developers think: they are car-centric and stuck in the thinking of the 1950s. 

The Hunts plan for Reunion also eschews the idea of having more smaller development lots in favor of one big centralized development. These big developments often look great in renderings, but in practice they end up lacking the vibrancy you get when you have multiple smaller landowners and businesses. Think about the difference between the West Village, a very nice but somewhat soulless area, vs. Bishop Arts. Or Preston Hollow Village at 75 and Walnut vs. Lower Greenville. The big, centralized development that Dallas developers love to build end up at best being just fine. To be clear: I'm not anti-development at all. I'm probably one of the biggest YIMBYs in the city. For example, I 100% of the time want Pepper Square to be redeveloped into a mixed-use area. I just acknowledge that even when fully built out, the area will lack the vitality of other areas of Dallas. Now, our City Hall in Dallas is already one that goes against the principles of what makes an area vibrant, and I won't pretend that City Hall Plaza isn't one of the biggest missed opportunities in the city. 

However, I am pretty skeptical that even the best-case scenario of an entertainment district anchored by a new Mavs arena will end up doing enough to come close to justifying getting rid of City Hall. First of all, the AAC is a perfectly good, I would even argue great, arena. It is the exception that proves the rule about how a big project can bring massive development to an area. The AAC works because it's not just the Mavs arena but also the Stars. Not to mention the concerts and other events that make the AAC one of the busiest arenas in the country. That consistency of events (over 250 each year) will be impossible to replicate at a new Mavs arena without the Stars. Also lost in the hubbub around the Mavs is the fact that Dallas is ALREADY renovating the existing auditorium by the Convention Center in order to make it suitable to sit 10,000 people and host the Dallas Wings starting in 2027. It is madness that the city could have 3 arenas with 10,000 or more in capacity within a 2 mile radius of each other. Is it too late to just have the Wings also play in the AAC? Womens Basketball is continuing to grow in popularity, and Paige Bueckers is the real deal. 

Let me pause here and launch into a personal aside. In my opinion, in Dallas, there are two main loci of power: 1. the big developers with the money and 2. the older homeowners (about 8% of the population) who vote. I personally fall into a smaller third group that we can loosely call "urbanists". During the Forward Dallas fight, City Planning staff for the first time in a long time put forward the idea of allowing more change to happen within existing single-family neighborhoods across the city by incorporating more plexes and townhomes into those areas. This is something that I and other urbanists believe very strongly in. Older homeowners of course hate the idea, and they always got mad at us, insisting that we were "shills for big developers" who were going to bulldoze every single house in Dallas and build an 8-plex there instead. Here's the thing: big developers like the Hunts care way less about the being able to build some duplex in Lake Highlands than about getting the City to spend hundreds of millions, nay billions, of dollars to raise the value of their land downtown. If the big developers in Dallas really cared about duplexes and missing middle housing, we would already have passed zoning that allows those things by right. Instead, Dallas is way behind other cities (that have way less developer power) that have made those changes in the past few years. All that to say that the push for more missing middle housing and zoning reform in Dallas is a genuine one, not some concoction of the Hunts and Crows. 

At the end of the day, the math for selling City Hall doesn't add up. The out of nowhere skyrocketing costs to "repair" City Hall make no sense. Big Dallas developers have had decades to build on their land in downtown. We should not give up City Hall just because they promise that this time is different and they will actually build something this time. Many of the biggest single-family neighborhood NIMBYs in Dallas are the same ones pushing us to keep City Hall. And I agree with them.