Quote:
Originally Posted by Owlhorn
This is not just a skyscraper site. One of the biggest topics on this sight is urbanity. Dallas has worked hard on its zoning and creating a masterplan to add urban parks, rail transportation, better linkages to neighborhoods and more human scale building requirements, and it is paying off. We'd love to have lots of tall towers, but they need to be done right. Right now, in the Uptown area alone, there are 20 large projects at various stages of construction. And this is a small area and doesn't even include Oak Lawn or East Dallas, which have many more projects going on right now that is of the type that Dallasites have been clamoring for, for years. I would not trade that for taller buildings unless they were Vancouver style towers with more human scale at the sidewalk level. I get that they aren't as exciting but look at the great cities of the world. Lots of human scale at street level. So yes, in the case of my city, if you could fill every block with 5-10 story buildings like 3700 McKinney or the Gables Whole Foods projects, I would take that every time.
And no, one cannot compare what is going on in the Cityplace are to the Galleria area in Houston. The Cityplace area is far more urban and includes the future ACS project, and West Village project as part of the Cityplace TIF in northern Uptown. The buildings and projects going up in this area are all mixed use and are connected to the rest of the city by a subway station and a streetcar system that has a turnaround platform. The buildings are all zoned for wide sidewalks, very little surface parking, and certain amount of mixed usage per acre. Even the shopping centers that were suburban before cannot be rebuilt in the same manner and are pretty much goners. The Galleria Area in Houston is more like a bigger version of the Galleria Dallas area. Lots of individual towers, some mixed uses, but mostly not of what I'd rate as great urbanity at the street level. But even in that area of Dallas, the zoning has been changed, and future projects have to follow a similar model adopted by the inner city areas of Dallas. I'm not saying that I hate Houston or something. Its pretty much my second work home, and I have many friends there. There are some great projects there too. But I LOVE what Dallas is deliberately trying to do. The results are not always perfect, but there is a real effort to make Dallas into a real city, and its paying off at the street level.
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The Galleria area of Houston (Uptown) is truly mixed use with our largest concentration of hotels, over ten million sq ft of office space, and thousands of residences within it's boundary.
As far as the impact, time will time because currently there's not much difference between the two cities in terms of density (Dallas has a denser immediate area around DT, but Houston's core is overall denser) or walkability or any other measure.
Personally I think Houston having it's largest and densest employment centers (Uptown, DT, and Texas Medical Center) within 5 miles of each gives it the slight edge in terms of future urbanity. DFW's employment is even more spread out than Houston's which makes it harder to connect residences to jobs.
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