I wish we could have an "Oklahoma City huge scale urban planning thread"
Because central OKC, due to years of special ballot and funding measures, has been sort of rearranged to a giant new street pattern with parks and a ton of empty lots just sitting there waiting for anything to grow in them that isn't a dandelion.
This giant tower is dumb, but I'm really curious if there will ever be any progress is building out the land around Scissortail Park and the new I-40 alignment. There's just so much room, and if that was entirely developed it would be on the scale of something like Portland's Pearl District. Which to be fair, took about 30 years.
This reminds me of those news reports from last decade where some smaller city nobody's ever heard of in China would build a huge skyscraper just because they could.
Call me a naysayer, but I don't see this tower ever coming to fruition. Just because a majority of the city council approved the project doesn't mean it's going to be moving dirt. Also, which company or entity is going to occupy the tower is the question? I haven't heard of one company or entity that's going to move to OKC and occupy the finished tower, in which it's not going to be built!
Call me a naysayer, but I don't see this tower ever coming to fruition. Just because a majority of the city council approved the project doesn't mean it's going to be moving dirt. Also, which company or entity is going to occupy the tower is the question? I haven't heard of one company or entity that's going to move to OKC and occupy the finished tower, in which it's not going to be built!
At most they have a tentative deal that's contingent the developer hitting dates, quality standards, some proposed business terms, etc.
My guess is it's not even that. Most hotels are franchises. This might be as simple as the developer paying a little earnest money for franchise rights and the Hyatt design standards. I don't know what those deals look like but it seems like a low bar.
It's surprising that there would be enough demand for this in a city with so few really tall buildings and so much available space downtown. I wouldn't expect to see this in a place with so many under-developed downtown lots.
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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw Don't ask people not to debate a topic. Just stop making debatable assertions. Problem solved.
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