Quote:
Originally Posted by Tom In Chicago
My unsolicited $0.02 - I would love to see a transformative era like the 1970s and 80s where Houston or Dallas build an entirely new skyline of shiny new office buildings, but am not terribly optimistic. . . perhaps there's so much pent up demand and capital has loosened up, but the basic demographics point to immigrants who want to live in new clean neighborhoods with McMansions with a manicured yard and not necessarily high rises. . . land is too cheap and the Texas donut is an urban style useful to fill the apartment/condo needs of younger folk who have yet to start a family. . .
Also I don't see much future for office buildings. . . seems to me - from a real estate point of view - warehouses are where it's at. . . but what do I know? 
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The thing about the Houston and Dallas skyscraper boom of the 70s/80s is the towers they built barely made sense at the time. These were not thoughtfully designed pieces of an urban tapestry built in a land-constrained city center that could justify their height; they were vanity towers plopped into a bunch of empty space. It was the building equivalent of going from 0 to 100, but density doesn't naturally progress like that, so it was not going to take much to knock that house of cards down and we all know how that played out in the late 80s/90s. The old Houston and Dallas skylines were too far ahead of the urban reality of those cities and the past several decades have been a slow, steady catching up.
Speaking from a Dallas perspective because it's what I'm more familiar with, Dallas
has been building an entirely new skyline of shiny office buildings, but they've been highrises and not skyscrapers, so the growth flies under the radar because it feels dwarfed by the CBD towers next door to it. But a fun little trivia fact I like to share is that
if you just looked at the Oak Lawn/"Uptown" area of Dallas north of Klyde Warren Park--as in if you pretend all of the old downtown Dallas and all of its massive towers within its freeway loop doesn't exist--Uptown Dallas as its own city would rank at 27th in
the list of U.S. cities with the most towers over 300ft. Dallas has essentially built in the past few decades the equivalent of an entire Phoenix skyline next door to its old downtown, and, of course, the Phoenix skyline isn't much to write home about
but that's nonetheless impressive for an urban core that I think most people believe has not grown much at all.
This is urban growth from the 1990s to 2025:
And below is from 2001 to 2021:
This before photo really emphasizes what I mean by 0 to 100. Those old downtown towers were just plopped in the middle of nothingness. They didn't make sense then, and are only gradually going to make sense as the urban core grows and builds out. I think the destiny of these two cities will be filler towers for the foreseeable future and nothing truly tall enough to be skyline redefining. I do wish all of the building development in the Galleria area of Houston could be plopped into the midtown neighborhood though.
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