Downtown Dallas

[jg6544]

Saw a series of aerial pictures of downtown Dallas taken between 1925 and 2015. Does anyone know why high rise construction downtown virtually stopped after 1990 and why the area north of downtown became such a hotbed of mid-rise construction?

[mhays]

The lending environment changed completely around then. Suddenly building on speculation was much more difficult. That's also why fewer big office towers go up these days outside of certain cities that are generally higher-priced.

As for the area to the north (northwest?), urban housing is popular these days. I don't know why so little has happened in/around Downtown proper. Land is too expensive maybe? But the other area has always had a lot of vacant land too. Dallas gets midrises because with land not very expensive, they're cost-effective to develop including the big parking podiums. They're not taller because that costs more per square foot, and parking economics/geometries can be a limiting factor.

[jg6544]

Thanks. That's interesting.

[Steely Dan]

the commercial real estate crash of the early '90s was a real bitch. most US cities massively overbuilt their stock of office space in the late '80s and then the bubble burst and it all came crashing down like a house of cards. lots of shirts were lost. spec office development essentially disappeared overnight as all of the funding wells dried up.

look at these stats:

from 1985 - 1992, US cities combined to build 120 new office towers that stood 500' or taller.

from 1993 - 2000, US cities combined to build only 4 new office towers that stood 500' or taller. 1 in NYC, 1 in detroit, 1 in nashville, & 1 in louisville (and the latter 3 were really just late-arriving echoes of the boom years.)


so it wasn't just a dallas issue, it was a nationwide problem. skyline development came to a screeching halt during the '90s in US cities from coast to coast.

[Crawford]

Originally Posted by Steely Dan

so it wasn't just a dallas issue, it was a nationwide problem.

Even in NYC, the 1990's were the decade of very minimal development, of all typologies. It was the decade of least highrise development in modern times.

Very few highrises were built, especially in the middle part of the decade (the beginning of the decade had some 80's overflow, and the late 90's booming economy brought some development).

[austlar1]

After Dallas lost most of it's local banking in the aftermath of the energy bust in the mid 1980s, there was little demand for large new office projects downtown. Most of the major corporations with HQs in the DFW area are located outside of downtown. Downtown was/is about banking, insurance, law firms, accounting firms, advertising agencies. Unlike downtown Houston, downtown Dallas was never HQ for major oil companies, at least not in recent times. Demand seems to have picked up downtown in the past decade or so. ATT relocated HQ downtown after moving from San Antonio. The successor banks in downtown (Bank of America, Chase/JPM, Wells Fargo, and others including a relocated from Detroit HQ for Comerica) have all solidified regional operations downtown and make good use of the giant towers built for local banks in the 1980s prior to the meltdown. Law firms, accounting/business services firms, and other downtown tenants have picked up activity. There is demand for high quality space now that so many outdated buildings are converting to residential. It is not likely that new office buildings downtown will be giants, but there has been some new development and more is likely to follow, mostly in the uptown mode of 20 floors or so.

[SLO]

The midtown area just north of downtown was spurred by the American Airlines Center, coupled with the boom in urban housing there has been a lot of condo development and hotels.