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Old Posted Feb 4, 2010, 8:18 PM
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alexjon alexjon is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Downtown/First Hill, Seattle, WA
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tgannaway89, your flogging of the central city is odd.

First, the reason the AT&T Center never developed too strongly was because:
a) It's not zoned properly
b) The Stock Show and Rodeo steering committee has a strong stake in the entire area and refused to allow them to release more of the grounds for purposes other than parking, precluding building an "entertainment area" like a lot of arenas. This is also the reason for the untraditional small footprint
c) Willow Creek Golf Course, a petroleum establishment and heritage residential areas abut the property
Similarly, UTSA Downtown has the following issues:
a) Not zoned properly
b) Abuts city, state and university property
c) Would require rehabilitating former industrial areas

Secondly, the reason those suburban areas are more desirable are not the residents in the inner-city, the tourist slant of the central city or anything like that-- it's the price and availability of the land. To developers, the area outside of 1604 is the Cherry Street of development areas. Homes are priced accordingly. They can shop around for the right size and shape because all the prices are low. Of course, the low price comes with the eventual sickness of being detached from the central city, but for the immediate foreseeable future, it's worth the risk. So they roll down their windows and wave their fingers and, ta-da, they have all the land they need for a campus.

Finally, when you point to the areas outside of 410 and 1604 and make a light assertion that the real money in the region is going there, you're kinda wrong. Were there space, they'd otherwise be living in Olmos Park or Terrell Hills. Or, god forbid, the 09 or Tobin Hill. When my friend is showing homes, most folks want to see OP and Terrell Hills first, but since those are priced higher per square foot and there's limited options ("a lot of them ask if there's something other than an art deco or hacienda style home"), they go, again, to the Cherry Street of real estate.

For someone who claims to be well-versed in economics and similar ordered sciences, you seem to back-fill your arguments with fallacies instead of realistic statistical proof. The truth is this: there is no contiguous land left in the central city to support large-scale developments. There is plenty outside the loops. The companies you cite require contiguous existing or potential space, something not offered in the central city for various reasons.

AT&T and Tesoro both required lots of space, which is not offered properly in the central city, nor is it particularly attainable with current regulations.

USAA is a particularly special case in that its built HQ had to accommodate a central location and options to expand. They moved to a parcel that outstrips any other non-military single-occupant parcel in the entire central texas area and their primary office building is 4,000,000 square feet. To put that into perspective, the World Trade Center was 4.3m square feet. Noting that the WTC had footprints larger than the average legally allowed footprint in San Antonio, USAA would need at least 200 stories and over 3,000 foot of building. This ignores, too, that they've outgrown that area and are leasing at least another 1mil+ square feet elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the maximum floor area you can build nowadays in the central city is about 600,000 square feet, which fails to meet the needs of companies like AT&T, Tesoro or USAA.

None of these, not a single one, are evidence that the suburbs are more desirable for any social, cultural or mental reason. Those are all red herrings. They are simply evidence that previous Mayors were not good at promoting the central city with the proper incentives that make an area affordable, which is the only reason the suburbs are currently desirable (because as anyone with a lick of sense could tell you, anyone who wants to move to the suburbs to escape the city already has).

The central city is only kept down by draconian laws regarding conservation, none of which actually have any bearing on the aesthetic qualities of the city. This is why, unlike most major cities, classic buildings are surrounded by parking lots in San Antonio.

To illustrate all of this, from eyeballing empty lots, I see that you could fit at least 10 500' Fourth and Madison-style buildings within the west end of the central loop with a more reasonable set of development laws while still keeping down below the height of the Tower of the Americas, adding 8.5mil square feet and accommodating thousands more office workers. On the east end and just outside the central loop, where Vidorra and such are being built, you can plug in at least a dozen 400' Vancouver-style condo towers and add thousands of residents in the central city.

It all depends on how Castro moves.

Of course, there is River North, which will add thousands of residents when it gets going without upzoning, but a bit of upzoning couldn't hurt.
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