So, do you think Mayor Tom Leppert cares about the citizens of Dallas or not? Councilman Mitchell Rasansky tells the Observer Leppert doesn't care — "doesn’t give a darn about the citizens of Dallas". Rasansky goes on to mention that Leppert was on the board of directors of Washington Mutual even as that financial institution bit the dust, saying Leppert's comments about WaMu's financial health a few weeks prior to its bailout — “the feeling is that there's sufficient capital and good things ahead" — is indicative of Leppert's go-for-broke actions with the convention center hotel, regardless of a possible pending referendum on the project and a disintegration of the bond market. It's worth clicking on the post, written by Sam Merten, because it has a whole list of interesting information and story links. As for me, I tend to think that it's not that Leppert doesn't care about the rest of us. I think he just believes he knows better than everyone else what's good for us. Come to think of it, that was the prevailing attitude on Wall Street for a few years, too, and look what happened to those guys...
I usually try to catch "The Simpsons" and/or "Family Guy" Sunday nights on Fox (no doubt we all needed a little laughter after watching our football team's wheels fall off yesterday).
"King of the Hill", for whatever reason, is not usually on my radar. But last night I managed to catch an episode that turned out to be worth a watch. It caught my attention because it delved into a subject we get really hot about around here — McMansions (or as Hank Hill most-colorfully describes them, “Jackass McMansions”).
When a developer tries to build a big castle on a tiny lot, Hank and his buddies get pretty agitated and end up trying to fight it at city hall. The “speculation home” has no yard, is made from cheap materials, and it blocks sunlight out of the neighborhood. Then a rain storm nearly tears it apart before a mob of angry neighbors finish the job … and that’s just the beginning. I guess they have teardown-McMansion issues in Garland, I mean Arlen, too.
You can watch the entire "King of the Hill" episode, Square-footed Monster, here.
Not long ago, the DMN published a series of stories titled "Partial Victory", which was a rather ingenious way of highlighting the big, new "Times Square for Dallas" surrounding the American Airlines Center downtown. The good news, according to the story: Ross Perot Jr. says that Victory is farther along, development-wise, than he thought it would be at this time. The bad news: Apparently, if you don't live there (and not many people do), you don't know what's happening at Victory and you aren't participating in terms of spending money.
As it stands now, about 10 years into what Hillwood describes as a 25-year process, there are about 13 restaurants, a dozen retailers, more than 750 residential units and quite a bit of office space, including WFAA-TV's Times Square-like station on a corner near the AAC. But the place has become more upscale, to the exclusion of everything else, than the developers apparently planned, so while it's easy to find a $1,500 hotel room and a $400 dress, you can't find an inexpensive lunch, a drugstore or a grocery store, according to the News.
Interestingly enough, that's the same complaint that the people living and working downtown — and I mean the original downtown — have, too. And it's interesting to remember that one of the sales pitches we were given when the developers floated the $230 million arena bond in 1998 was that Victory was an important step in downtown's revitalization. As we can see now, that hasn't been the case — the distance between Main Street and Victory is too far for the average person to make the walk, and whatever good is happening at Victory isn't trickling over to downtown.
Continue reading "Victory after 10 years: Iconic but not helping downtown" »
Yes, things don’t seem as bad here as in the rest of the country –- check out this headline from southern California -– but that doesn’t mean we don’t have some concerns. Specifically, what’s going to happen to all of the residential, retail, and mixed used developments that have been announced in this neighborhood over the past 18 months?
Pick one: The Town Center, Northwest Highway/Timbercreek, or any of several others. Will developers be able to finance these projects, or any of the others that they want to build? So I talked to Misty Willcox, an attorney with Thompson & Knight in Dallas who handles real estate deals. We talked generically, and didn’t discuss any specific projects. Her take: If someone doesn’t have the money now, they may have a very difficult time getting it later. “The number of term sheets we’ve received recently has dropped dramatically,” she says.
Continue reading "The credit crunch, the economy and neighborhood development" »
You have to hand it to the Go Hotel people — they're not going to let anything like a potential public smackdown stop them from fulfilling their promise to bring a taxpayer-owned convention center hotel to downtown Dallas. Sam Merten with the Observer points out that Thursday's unveiling of a model of the hotel shows that, public backing or not, they're going to start building a hotel.
Merten's story makes a couple of interesting points. One, the people at Matthews Southwest — the builder "we" have selected for this project — are being realistic about what's going on. Jack Matthews told Merten that by the time a May referendum on the project comes around, at most about $10 million will have been spent readying the site, working up plans and demolishing a parking structure already there (I used to park in that two-story structure when going to Mavs games at Reunion Arena). So for all of the bluster about "pushing forward" with the hotel, no matter what happens with the referendum, Matthews' comment shows this is a pretty empty statement. Leaving another $10 million on the table, assuming the referendum passes, is a drop in the bucket for this $550 million-plus deal.
Second, the pictures of the model itself, along with the computer renderings published in the Observer, are pretty anti-climactic. For a monstrous hotel that Mayor Tom Leppert bragged would and should be iconic, this one seems pretty straight-forward. No stunning visual architecture (like nearby City Hall, for example). No cutting-edge futuristic design. No throw-back to anything else downtown, either. It's just a big, tall glass-sheathed building. (If you really want to see something iconic, check out this link on Matthews' website; it's a picture of a 58-story project the company is building in Canada.)
I guess to a builder like Leppert, who was merely paid to build things in his past career rather than actually designing them, this thing is iconic. I just don't see it, though. For $550 million, I expected something blow-away cool, and this just isn't it. Maybe we need to bring Calatrava in on this deal, too...
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