Plenty of bad news has poured out about downtown Dallas in recent months, but a few things bear saying about the city’s core and its future.
Let’s count just a few: There is progress on the new convention center, the new Dallas ISD Nolan Estes campus on Ervay Street is being topped, Morgan Stanley plans to office (for now) at Fountain Place, Texas Woman’s University plans a campus downtown, and work is underway on designing the new Dallas College campus in the center of downtown.
It’s time to stop lamenting poor choices of the past and start to look toward the future. Downtown Dallas Inc.’s presentation last week of a downtown vision for 2036 is a good place to start.
It includes ongoing work to convert downtown from an office center into one where more residents have places to live. Downtown already has 16,000 residents. (It wasn’t so long ago that 10,000 seemed a stretch.) There are great opportunities for new development and redevelopment that could double that number.
That includes essential work to ensure downtown’s skyscrapers qualify for historic tax credits. There has been talk of pulling those buildings down as the most economically feasible path forward. We don’t want to see that happen. Dallas’ skyline is an iconic part of this region’s identity. Helping bridge the financing gap with state and federal historic tax credits would help promote redevelopment.
We were also pleased to see a focus on connecting different downtown districts and transforming DART’s unsafe and unsightly stop at Griffin Street and Pacific Avenue. A proposed Thruline pedestrian corridor along Young and Houston streets would encourage safer and cleaner paths around downtown. A plan to create better pedestrian pathways along Lamar, Akard and Harwood streets would be a major improvement to the north/south walking experience.
No one denies downtown has been in a tough down cycle. We’ve seen well-financed, experienced developers have projects go under. We can also say that the huge improvements businessmen like Shawn Todd and Jonas Woods made to properties they took on have positioned those buildings to continue to contribute to a better downtown.
It would be foolish to believe an urban core as valuable as downtown Dallas will just wilt away. There has been too much important and lasting investment. That includes a beautifully designed and huge parks system conceived and cared for through the wisdom and vision of this newspaper’s former leader, Robert Decherd. It includes billions of dollars in public investment that will bring people of every age into the core. And it includes capital improvements to buildings in every district of downtown.
We are bullish on downtown’s future. The time to invest may be now.