Quote:
Originally Posted by eburress
It's partly that there's a lack of office demand and partly that most of downtown Dallas has height restrictions, thanks to Love Field airport.
Edit → if you look at that aerial photo, there's only one lot that is zoned up to 100 stories, which is owned by a developer who's not great at developing high rises. (it's just below center, across the street from that huge parking lot)
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Yes, this seems to be the 20-30 story elephant in the room. Even developments not in the flight path seem to stay in that range. I always assume DFW developers just got used to such projects because of the massive boom in Uptown. In the new office nodes up in Plano, Frisco, and Richardson that's were they are topping out, same with the older centers in Las Colinas, Galleria, Preston ect. That is one of the reasons the Knox MSD development is great, finally getting some more noticable height well outside of downtown that is not City Place.
Also, as someone who is from DFW and who has lived in Austin off and on for two decades, aside from the growth of the downtowns, I don't think Dallas and Austin are very comparable as cities or metros. The building boom in downtown Austin has been outright entertaining to watch. That being said, DFW is just on a scope or scale that so much bigger, more diverse, and has a plethora of urban nodes that allow for explosive growth, but also spread out the concentration of everything. It's so much more complicated as well because you have a zillion municipalities. Comparing the Houston and DFW metros are more productive, since they are about the same size in demography and geography.
For example, my home suburb of Carrollton is far from ideal, but I can take the train to Denton, Dallas, Plano, the airports, or Fort Worth. Same suburb has a Koreatown in a former Mervyns shopping center with the old Dallas Koreatown just down the road. I live in central South Austin, 10-15 minutes to downtown, and won't have train service anytime soon, if ever. We love it because of the parks and green space which is what Austin really excels at. Dallas proper does actually has some absurdly large forests and trails that so far have been underutilized (getting to the Great Trinity Forest used to be, um, interesting).
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