Quote:
Originally Posted by ChiND
This area is very nice. The traditional downtowns of Dallas and Houston are really depressing, lifeless, and lame, but Uptown/McKinney and the area around the Galleria is Houston are both nice.
Dallas should give massive tax incentives for the construction of new residential buildings in the tradition downtown to give it a boost.
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If I could wave a wand and replace every empty lot inside the downtown loop with a basic 5-over-1 I would do it in a heartbeat. Progress has been occurring, but it's been so much slower than the growth up north that it feels paltry by comparison.
I will say though, one thing Dallas really lucked out on is that Uptown Dallas is just an extension of downtown rather than a distant part of the city. For as much as the CBD neighborhood of downtown Dallas might struggle at times, "Downtown Dallas" itself is a broader, cohesive urban area rapidly growing north and doing well for itself. As the density increases at the imaginary line that separates downtown from uptown, the distinction between the two has felt super arbitrary for years, and uptown being so close to downtown can only help downtown in the long run.
This is the downtown loop. All of the teal buildings below were completed in the past 15 years. There's been a lot of great low-rise residential development in the farmers market area (upper left), but all of the tower developments have been in that area which bridges the CBD with Uptown in the bottom right, the Arts District. Uptown's success has helped blur the distinction between the two areas.
And oh my gosh, I'm sorry ChiND, I'm using your post as just a jumping off point for completely unrelated, old man grievances, so pay these ramblings no mind as they're not directed at you or your post because I do indeed agree that the traditional downtown Dallas is lame and lifeless, but here I go.
Take this sweet looking development that LA is planning:
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-07-01/city-approves-downtown-la-mega-development
I don't think anyone would question that this development is part of downtown LA. Even though this is about a mile out from the main cluster of towers, everyone understands that downtown LA is a conglomeration of urban neighborhoods--Little Tokyo, Arts District, Financial District, the historic core, etc. They are all part of ~*Downtown Los Angeles*~.
For whatever reason, the term 'Downtown Dallas' remains stickily synonymous with the particular area in the loop above. But, like LA, downtown Dallas is also a conglomeration of urban neighborhoods. This includes the CBD, West End, Farmers Market, Arts District, and Deep Ellum, but it has grown over the past several decades to include the Uptown and Victory Park neighborhoods as they have built up. They weren't particularly urban 30 years ago, but they are now. The growth has been a natural progression of the urban core's northward expansion of density from the CBD to the Arts District to Uptown. It has all become one contiguous urban core expanding northward.
If you look at downtown LA, and if you imagine half of LA's towers were instead built on the other side of 110 and they built a park over the freeway, I don't think people would separate the two sides out with
one side being downtown LA and the other being some other completely different urban core just one block away. But that's how developments happening within the Dallas urban core seems to be treated by news media.
Ask someone unfamiliar with the city of Dallas to pinpoint in these photos where they think Downtown Dallas is and chances are they're gonna circle all of the tall buildings because well of course, what one sees is clearly one interconnected central urban core. It doesn't really make sense to draw a line between the two halves anymore.
If LA gets that development I linked above you won't see articles lamenting what a loss it is that downtown LA missed out on such a development. That would be silly. It's all downtown LA! If a company moves its HQ from the Financial District of downtown LA to this new development no one would say that they're leaving downtown LA. But any time a company in the Dallas CBD moves to Uptown, articles appear that would make you think they're moving their HQ out to the pastures of Prosper TX. That LA project is understandably just seen as downtown LA's density growing outwards. But in Dallas, there's an elevated concern about downtown Dallas because the Uptown neighborhood a mere few blocks away is doing better than the CBD neighborhood. That's silly. It's all downtown Dallas! The CBD neighborhood is just going to have to reinvent itself, but downtown Dallas as a whole is doing well and hasn't slowed down.
I shall put my soapbox away for now.
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