Downtown Dallas: What Can We Do To Make It Better?

Leah has committed to tracking more of what’s happening in downtown Dallas Real Estate this year, and that’s great because there is a lot to track!

I love downtown Dallas, I just don’t like getting there. And I’m no stranger to urban living. I have lived in three different urban environments: Chicago, New York and Boston. While I may be partial to Chicago (pizza and food), living in New York was a time I will never forget and, in fact, often want more of. It was the most intellectually stimulating period of my life, I met the most intelligent and unique personalities ever, and I loved the dynamic 24/7 energy — even the day I watched our groceries rolling down  Amsterdam Avenue because it had started to rain and we were carrying them in paper bags.

That’s why I’m not a huge fan of the new plastic bag ban.

I was in the best shape ever because I didn’t have a car. We walked everywhere. Of course, New York City has busses and the subway — I lived on public transportation. (Note: an earlier draft said “pubic” transportation — typo. Ha! There was lots of that, too!)   On the negative, NYC is cold, then hotter than Dallas in summer.  I got sloshed by a lot of busses and taxis, and cleaned my windowsills daily to keep out the city grime.

Two years ago I spent 10 consecutive days in the city when my son lived there, and I came home to Dallas and kissed my car.

I would live in downtown Dallas in a heartbeat if I could, and I would ditch my car if we had better public transportation. In Chicago, we all kept cars, just never took them out unless we were heading west to the ‘burbs to see parents.There are times in your life when you need a car less. College and young adult years are one of them, and some baby boomers are now eschewing the urban life and ditching cars after all those years of schlepping kids around to activities.  I once calculated that, during a busy sports and activities semester with both kids,  at least five hours of my day was spent in a car. On vacations, the only thing I wanted was to NOT be in a car.

But downtown Dallas is kind of squirrelly, I think. Very hard to walk in, and bicycle? Brave souls, those bikers. The streets are not a neat grid like Chicago’s — although Veletta Forsythe Lill once told me that Dallas didn’t have the advantage of a fire, as Chicago did. The one-way streets drive me crazy and create God-awful traffic during rush hours. There are way too may angles. In fact, the whole dang city is on an angle. There is very little convenient parking. I know I know, we are not supposed to have cars but let’s say you want to drive in, park the car and walk — where the hell do you park it?

While it’s all well and good to talk about tearing down highways that would bring more cars into downtown, and I actually think Real Estate development that would re-connect Deep Ellum to downtown would be a good thing, how can we overtax our current downtown streets with more traffic until we make them more functional?

Then, as Wylie Dallas pointed out — we are talking about building a highway along the Trinity instead of repairing street lamps, like this one. Or improving sidewalks so we can walk across town and not trip.

In fact, many parts of Dallas don’t even have sidewalks, a fact we want to also explore in 2015? Why does Hollywood Heights/Santa Monica have sidewalks while North Dallas doesn’t?

By the way, the Dallas Observer named Wylie H. Dallas number 27 on its annual list of the 100 most creative peeps in Dallas.

Isn’t it wonderful to be so creative when you don’t even exist?

Wylie is an anonymous Facebook persona and avid internet commenter who has become a huge civic watchdog, giving us inside information, blowing hypocrisies and bias, (hypocrisies being the thing that bugs me the most), and uncovering buried misinformation. Wylie created a Facebook identity that has morphed into one of the most famous fake accounts in town. In fact it’s so fake, he’s almost real. He blossomed during the fake comments chapter of Museum Tower, when Mike Snyder had the PR account and apparently was trying to sway public opinion with a bevy of fake commenters. Wylie is like a cyber Superman and all over social media. I think he is REALLY trying to make Dallas better.

Will Millenials make downtown Dallas better? At a recent Urban Land Institute presentation, we were told that the 18 hour city has come of age. The changing age game has caught the attention of labor markets, that’s for sure, but the jury is not yet out on how well Millennials will embrace urban living for the long haul.

Let’s put it this way: the older Millennials are hitting 30. Most are starting families later in life — my own children just started their families at 30 and 33. The reason they are starting later is they have less money — these are the kids saddled with gargantuan student loan debt. They also graduated during the throes of the recession so many have had a tough time finding jobs.

The question is, will these urban loving Millennials continue their love affair with urban life once  those babies come? Right now, the Urban Land Institute tells us it’s a 50/50 split — that is, half of Millennials want to live in urban environments, half in the suburbs. But we really need to wait to see what they do once those babies are walking. Even a ten percent swing one way or the other could affect markets significantly.

We will be here, watching. What do you think about downtown Dallas living? Do you like walking in downtown Dallas?