A recurring theme of this blog, maybe the one overarching theme of all of it, is a question I keep coming back to: What do we owe each other, living in the same city? I have asked some version of this question over and over again this year, always giving new and partial answers. We owe each other honesty about tradeoffs and what our choices really cost. We owe everyone a voice, but owe no one a veto. We owe this city as an inheritance to the people who will come after us, just like the people who came before us left us something too. The next partial answer of the week is one of the less popular and less satisfying ones.

We owe each other a willingness to lose.

We owe it especially after we have made our case, organized our neighbors, attended the meetings, spoken at the microphone, remained completely convinced that we are right, and still lose anyways. Saying you were willing to lose when you’ve won is only lip service. In this regard, we owe each other the most, exactly at the moment it is hardest to feel particularly charitable to your neighbors or the democratic process.

However, losing is not a bug in the system. Democracy is not an “I get what I want” machine, where if you insert enough quarters and put up enough yard signs, you always get the outcome you want. The more important and defining part of democracy is arguably losing elections, not winning them. When we enter a voting booth, there’s a promise implicit in the whole arrangement, where we’re willing to play along with the notion of voting because we expect the other side will accept the result if we win. Otherwise, why even bother?

Democracy only works when we all first agree on this bedrock principle, and representation, or republican forms of government, requires us to add a second one.

We need a government to do the things none of us could do on our own, or would be done worse if we tried to. We form governments because we have to live together, and living together means making decisions that cannot satisfy everyone. The same dollar bill cannot be used to pave a street, and staff a library, and stay in a taxpayer’s pocket. While city council members are only voting yes or no on an issue, they are never doing that in a vacuum. Every benefit has a cost, every cost has a benefit. Someone has to be responsible for weighing all those claims against each other, including the claims of residents who never attended a city council meeting in matching t-shirts, and even future generations of residents unborn or not living here yet.

When we elect people to make decisions on our behalf, they owe us their best judgment, but not their obedience. As soon as you ask your representative for their obedience, you invite the question, “obey whom?” You can’t obey everyone, when everyone doesn’t agree. Asking our elected officials to “obey us” not only fails in its being impossible, but it betrays the promise of representative government. We elect people who are accountable to the voters for the collective weight of all of their decisions, not just whether one dimension of one vote on one day aggrieved one party. Their decisions will sometimes be imperfect or short-sighted, but the defining feature of our democracy is that we get to tell them that regularly, through elections.

We seem to be actively forgetting both of these two principles in Dallas.

Currently, organized campaigns are seeking to force recall elections of two sitting city council members, District 1’s Chad West and District 13’s Gay Donnell Willis. The organizers of those recalls cite disputes involving recent zoning cases, all of which involve new housing or density, the question of what to do with our current City Hall, but most consistently, a failure to “listen” to constituents. RecallChadWest.com, paid for by the political action committee Dallas Civic Accountability PAC, says he has “become fundamentally disconnected” from his district, and that their mission is to “return power to District 1 voters.” RecallGayDWillis.com, paid for by the Neighborhoods First PAC, leads with the claim that “our families deserve a voice,” and that the councilwoman “consistently ignores concerned constituents.”

Here’s the problem. District 1 voters have power, and District 13’s families have a voice. They have voted to send Chad West to the horseshoe four times and Gay Willis now three. Those terms they are elected for will end, as we speak, in only twelve months.

If a council member heard from neighbors, considered what they asked for, and decided that other concerns mattered more, with everything else we require city council members to think about, a budget and the roads and the parks and the cops, would that not still count as listening? Presumably not, since that is more or less the exact sequence of events that has led to their attempted removals.

They are not asking to be listened to. They are asking to be agreed with. They are asking not to lose. What they are asking for is obedience, and their charge against their council members is that he or she thought they were owed something else: judgment.

Neither recall website lists the name of a single individual as an organizer, endorser of the petition, treasurer of the PAC, or any neighborhood leaders or organizers in any capacity. We are being told that there are people who are not being listened to, yet these political action committees are not apparently ready to specify whom. Exactly at the moment when democracy and the will of the people is most invoked, the names of the people doing the invoking are conspicuously absent.

I don’t think you have to perfectly agree with either council member’s votes on zoning cases or any other issue to find this objectionable. You can think they have exercised poor judgment, or prefer someone else, or help that person run against them in the next election. However, the claim here is actually far narrower. Disagreeing with me makes you unfit to finish the term you were elected to serve. The burden of proof is on the recall organizers to explain to all of us why their disagreement should carry more weight than the thousands of votes that put these council members in office in the first place. Those people, those voters, were constituents and neighbors too, even if they have not formed a political action committee and raised money to remind everyone.

The Willis recall organizers, for example, have publicly announced a $50,000 fundraising goal to pay professionals to collect petition signatures and to get their message out. If that sounds like a lot of money, it is. That is roughly double what was spent by Willis’s most recent opponent, Diane Benjamin, in the 2025 city council election, according to campaign finance records. The recall organizers also specifically have asked for individual donors willing to give $5,000 to their PAC, which is five times the donation limit allowed to candidates in a normal Dallas city council election, though to be clear, that limit wouldn’t apply to PACs in any case.

There is nothing inherently wrong with raising money to persuade voters. I would be walking a very narrow line by defending elections while objecting to people paying for the mailers, signs, or campaigning that elections tend to involve. However, it is worth asking what this money is actually intended to purchase. The organizers are raising money to force everyone else to revisit a choice we all already thought we made, before the next occasion on which we all thought we agreed to reconsider it.

City wide, the Save Dallas City Hall Coalition is pursuing something that looks different, but I think is much closer to the recalls than its supporters would care to admit. Currently, they are collecting signatures on a petition that if successful, would mean voters will see a city charter amendment on their ballot on an upcoming election day in 2027. That charter amendment, in its own words, would require the “city-owned municipal building at 1500 Marilla Street designed by I. M. Pei & Partners” would be used as the “permanent official city hall and seat of municipal government of the City of Dallas.”

The proposed charter amendment would require, among other things, that relocating or demolishing or leasing the building would require another charter amendment and election. But further, under Article 11, Section 5 of the Texas Constitution, no city charter may be “altered, amended or repealed” more often than every two years. So, if passed by the voters, the measure would also freeze the current City Council from taking any steps to relocate for another two years after this election. And, for that matter, would freeze any charter reform on anything at all, including reform to 2024’s Prop U, or Strong Mayor-oriented reforms.

Regular readers know where I stand on the building. I have argued for relocation, and when a suitable plan emerges, demolition and redevelopment. You are free to see my enthusiasm for others’ accepting of defeat, at a moment my own opinion has a 9-6 majority on council, as suspiciously convenient. I digress.

Our elected officials have decided, repeatedly, that they think the city should continue to take steps that would allow for an eventual relocation from City Hall. The Save City Hall petition organizers are free to not like that decision. However, their ballot proposition, attempting to wrest away control on this issue from a council the rest of us all voted into office, has the exact same effect as the recalls. What connects both is an impulse that their disagreement should undo an arrangement the rest of us agreed to. Like the recall organizers, they want to revoke the right to use judgment we gave our elected representatives, because they cannot accept how those representatives used it.

What bothers me even more about the petition is how little of what we are actually voting for would appear on the ballot. We elect the city council to consider the cost of repairing the building, the cost of moving, what either option would mean for Downtown, and what else we could do with the money or the land. We have the privilege to judge them on their record of balancing all of those things, consistently, for years. The ballot petition would only ask whether we want to stay in City Hall. It would not ask us to approve a particular repair budget, or say what we are willing to give up to pay for it, or say what tradeoff we would be willing to make for preservation. In two years, the charter amendment and its organizers will have no seat to keep, no voters to face, and no record to defend.

Most people on the Save City Hall side of the debate would tell you, publicly or privately, they think the estimated costs of staying and repairing the building are badly inflated. They could be absolutely right.

For the purposes of their charter amendment, this is completely beside the point.

The requirement they want in the charter is not tied in any way to them being proved right about the costs to stay in the building. There is no built-in, takesies-backsies if major building systems fail, if structural problems turn up, or a clearly better use for the building comes along. We’ll all just have to fight again then about whether those numbers are inflated. It is about as close as we could get to writing a blank check. Even if all fifteen council members later agreed that it should become a free public art museum, relocating would still require another charter election.

In effect, we would not be asked: “Do you want to keep City Hall?” The ballot proposition instead asks us to say, “I am willing to stay at Dallas City Hall regardless of the cost.”

Those are two different questions. I could like to do all kinds of things until someone tells me what it means I am giving up. That is most of what choosing things consists of.

Compare this instead with Dallas County Proposition A. The ballot language identifies that it is a $0.024 property tax rate increase, and then names the purposes: “reducing homelessness and encampments, improving access to mental-health treatment, and supporting stable housing.” Both the tax and what it would fund appear side-by-side in the same question.

We can think that is a good or a bad deal. We are free to think the programs will work or that the county spends enough on homelessness already. However, we cannot vote for the proposed benefit without at the same time also voting on the exact cost. That is what the Save City Hall proposal leaves out. It would only settle the part about keeping the building, while leaving out the actually difficult part of figuring out exactly what that’s worth to voters, instead letting some future generation or some future council figure it out.

Of course, recalls and charter petitions are available to us for a reason. There are reasons to remove someone that is truly unfit to serve the remainder of a term, and reasons to put a question directly to voters. However, the existence of these powers does not relieve us of having to explain why this specific disagreement requires them. “We did not get what we wanted” cannot be sufficient, because somebody will be able to say that after every decision a city makes.

If everyone acted on that basis, we would spend most of our time just fighting about whether to undo the thing we had just done, or removing the people who had done it. The elected officials who survived those efforts would learn which groups were expensive to disappoint and which people could safely be ignored. That would be a very peculiar result for campaigns ostensibly organized around the claim that everyone deserves a voice.

The most likely outcome, at least, one that can’t yet be ruled out, is that these recall elections go absolutely nowhere. Each requires organizers to collect signatures from 15% of the registered voters in a district, roughly 10,000 in District 13 and 7,000 in District 1. Again, if that sounds like a lot, it is. These are council elections where only 7,000 people voted last time around in District 13, and only 4,000 in District 1. Here’s the second catch: they only have 60 days in which to collect them, a clock that is actively ticking on both efforts.

Save City Hall’s petition can be signed by any voter in Dallas, so despite requiring a higher threshold of 20,000 signatures, it may well make. This petition would not have a 60-day shot-clock on it either, though if they want to make it in time for the May 2027 election, they would have only roughly 100 days to turn in their signatures. It’s likely no accident that all of these petitions, despite having been floated all year, waited until closer to the November midterm elections, when lots of registered voters will all be in the same places at voting centers, to help them get over the signature collection hump.

But I’m not writing this essay to tell you what to do when someone hands you a clipboard, or to handicap the odds of the petition taking. I’m writing because the very impulse, the yard signs, the Facebook posts, the websites and political action committees are killing our city. Regardless of whether these recall elections amount to anything at all other than a great deal of wasted time, money, and emotion, it is the impulse, the way of thinking behind the petitions that is toxic to the project of living with one another.

What makes this behavior so hard for me to stomach is that it depends precisely on other people being willing to do exactly what the organizers will not. Lose. If they win, they will expect the rest of us to recognize that a vote was taken, accept the result, and get on with living in the same city. They will want their victory to carry a meaning that they do not think their defeat does.

This is why losing matters more than winning. Winning asks you to accept an outcome you already wanted. Losing asks whether you really believe other people have the same right to a voice that you want for yourself, even when they use it to choose something you dislike.

Living with other people means that they sometimes get to help decide what happens to you. That is a considerably harder proposition to accept than the general observation that everyone deserves a voice, but it is the flip side of the exact same coin.

So, I’d ask the organizers one question. When there’s a conflict between what you and your neighbors want, somebody has to be disappointed. Who should it be, and why? If the answer is always them, you aren’t asking for a voice. You’re asking to be the only people in this city who never have to lose.

And your whole idea of democracy depends on the rest of us being better at losing than you are.

love/hate/other to Kirk P. at: onemansdallas@gmail.com

Today we are going to keep it strictly local. As a city, we are about to embark on a full rewrite of our city’s development code, which has only been comprehensively updated one time since 1965. That means parts of our zoning code are exactly as old as NorthPark Mall, and for reminders, here’s what Dallas looked like at that time.

About 16% of that 1965 code still persists word for word today, the largest revisions coming in 1987. Most of the rest, about 78%, comes from that Reagan-era update. However, our single-family districts, the type of zoning that covers close to 65% of the city and about 86% of where we allow housing, have hardly changed in the ways that matter since the 1960s. These zoning districts, which in their own words, set aside some of the city for “estates” and other parts for “moderate value” housing, have escaped major revisions. There were seven districts in 1965. There are seven of them now.

All seven districts were and are built atop the same two essential commandments. The first: thou shalt not build more than one home on a lot. The second: thou shalt not build a house on a lot that is any smaller than a minimum size we picked in 1965. Those two rules, in conjunction, gave us the Dallas we know today. One lot means one house, not two, or four, and the size of those lots has a minimum, which would differ depending on which neighborhood or part of town you were in. The districts themselves are named after that minimum size: in R-7.5 we require a house to be built on 7,500 square feet of land, in R-16 it is 16,000, and in R-1ac it is a full acre.

Those two commandments seem like they might be laws of nature, or handed to us on a mountaintop. It’s hard not to think of a neighborhood as a place with mostly houses that don’t touch each other. But, they’re just rules on a piece of paper someone in Dallas wrote down sixty years ago. All kinds of people in all places and times have gotten by just fine without rules like this: big cities on the East Coast, Europe, or even here in Dallas for most of our own first century.

With the upcoming zoning rewrite, we are all collectively about to decide whether or not we want to keep these two rules. Up until this point, I don’t think we have ever stopped to ask what they are for, what they cost, or why we have cleaved to them for so long. Answering that means going back even further than 1965, into Dallas’s own long and weird history with zoning, which is both oddly well-documented and even more oddly, well, racist.

In 1916, Dallas became the first city in Texas to segregate housing by race via city ordinance, reserving separate blocks for White and Black residents. We lifted that ordinance directly from Louisville, KY, which had passed a nearly identical law two years earlier. Both ordinances began with the stated goal that segregating housing would “prevent conflict and ill-feeling between the white and colored races.” A year later, in Buchanan v. Warley, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously struck down the similar ordinance in Louisville.

Dallas did not take the hint. In 1924, we passed a second ordinance, this one making it a crime to break a private agreement that provided for segregation. In other words, Dallas could enforce segregation as long as it was contained in private agreements, such as deed restrictions, and not through a public ordinance. When my wife and I bought our first house, the packet of paperwork from the title company showed, in fact, our street had once had such a deed restriction governing it. If you live in Dallas, especially in a pre-war neighborhood, and are a big enough nerd to have read your house’s title work, there’s a good chance you would have seen the same.

The Liberty Annex Corporation, a residential developer with homes to sell and twenty or more Black families wanting to buy them, sued the city over this ordinance. In court, Dallas maintained that the police power, exercised “in the interest of public peace and the general welfare,” still authorized the city to enforce residential segregation. As we discussed last week, that is the same “police power” Justice Sutherland had upheld in Euclid three years earlier as permitting the general idea of zoning, but applied now to races instead of warehouses. The court flatly rejected Dallas’s argument in June 1929, holding that ordinances “segregating whites and blacks, based on the color line,” were unconstitutional and unenforceable, and struck down Dallas’s law.

Seventy-four days later, Dallas adopted the city’s first comprehensive zoning ordinance.

The new ordinance did not classify people, nor housing, as white or Black. It didn’t need to. It was facially completely race-neutral. It instead added the requirement that houses come with minimum quantities of land, in an amount that differed from zone to zone. On the high end, homes required 6,000 square feet of land, and in some districts, it could be as low as 375. Land isn’t free. So, a house with more land is a more expensive house. Require 6,000 square feet under every house on a street and you have effectively set the lowest price at which a house can be built. Allow the smaller, more dense housing only far away in another zone, and you’ve created a pretty good fallback without de jure segregation

The ordinance offers no health or safety justification for why some neighborhoods would be just fine with a family housed every 375 square feet, and why some neighborhoods, for their “general welfare,” would receive only houses built on at least 6,000 square feet of land. I note, the city didn’t yet think to go so far as to separate what it called “apartment houses” and “dwellings,” which consisted of up to two units, in most areas of the city. As long as you had enough land, you could build anything you wanted to: apartments, or duplexes and detached houses.

In 1943 the city hired Harland Bartholomew, a consultant who wrote zoning plans for cities across the country. What he noticed about Dallas, in his resulting report, was how “mixed” it was. Uses were “badly intermingled.” Some neighborhoods were labeled as “blighted” due to their “proximity to negro development.” To his horror, duplexes were scattered so widely that he could find very few single-family areas without one, and even apartments were turning up in the same neighborhoods.

It is a description of a city where you could potentially find cheap housing and expensive housing on the same street. To a mid-century city planner like Bartholomew, that was a defect. He proposed giving duplexes and apartments their own limited districts and reserving far more of the city for single-family houses alone.

The city passed new ordinances based on the Bartholomew Plan in 1947 and 1951. In between, in 1950, Dallas hired its first full-time planning director, Marvin Springer, hiring him straight out of Bartholomew’s firm where he had been chief planner. Springer pushed the city to annex land aggressively, and it did. Dallas went from about 50 square miles in 1945 to 198 by the end of 1955. All of that new land needed zoning, and Springer, worried that the growth had outdated the code, set about devising a new one.

A draft of Springer’s proposed ordinance went to public hearings in late 1962, and in March of 1965 the City Council passed it as Ordinance No. 10962, the code from which many key parts still persist today.

That ordinance greatly boosted the amount of land required per house. Under the new ordinance, the default zoning would be 7,500 foot lots, or R-7.5, for all new residential development. Recall that in 1929, even the most restrictive district still allowed a home every 6,000 square feet. The R-7.5 classification still to this day covers 67% of our single family neighborhoods and at a total of 96 square miles, an area larger than the entire City of Plano.

So, picture with me that it is 1965. It would be four more years until the first section of LBJ opened to motorists. No one had yet walked on the Moon. The population of Plano at the time was less than 4,000 people.

At the time, Dallas was building over 50,000 single family homes per decade. Considering roughly half the homes we build today are just replacing one other home, Dallas was building five times more houses than we build today, and adjusting per capita, ten times more.

That is the Dallas for which our current zoning code was largely written. It was a city that could not possibly have imagined it would have ever run out of places to put houses, fed by an endless supply of annexable land. We had no worries that drawing up a map that capped the number of houses per street, or put a floor on the size of every lot, would ever have consequences that came home to roost.

You already know how this story ends. In fact, we’ve known how this story ended for at least two decades. In 2006 the City Council adopted forwardDallas!, its first comprehensive land-use plan. By the time that report and plan were made, the open land and annexations of 1965 were long gone. “Dallas must move beyond its heavy reliance on vacant land,” the report said bluntly at the time.

Unfortunately, we did not, and the numbers all show it. Dallas is the slowest major city in Texas at building new housing, largely because we have not taken steps such as permitting new smaller townhomes, like Houston did in 1998 when it allowed 1,400 square foot lots in many areas, or Austin has done more recently, allowing up to three homes on a lot in large parts of the city. Our rents and home prices have increased the most of any large city in Texas since 2015, while we have correspondingly grown our housing stock the least over the last decade, only growing it 8%.

Our failure to build more housing, now that the City has finally grown out to its borders, is a direct result of clinging to those two commandments, which keep our planning and zoning stuck in an era where land was still available and vacant in every direction.

Take R-16 zoning, which is used overwhelmingly in North Dallas and specifically in Preston Hollow. It requires a lot of at least 16,000 square feet and allows one detached house on it. Per data from the Dallas County Appraisal District, land in the city’s R-16 districts is valued at roughly $2 million an acre, or about $46 a square foot. Do the math, and the zoning code is effectively requiring $750,000 dollars of dirt underneath every house before anyone pours a foundation, frames a wall, or buys a refrigerator.

In R-1ac, the one-acre district found mostly in Old Preston Hollow, the same math comes to a little over $2 million, before you’ve even built the house. I feel like I might be picking on Preston Hollow here, but it’s the only neighborhood that received what the City called “estate” zoning, and so it makes for the most extreme examples.

Look, the City doesn’t owe everyone a house in Preston Hollow. We shouldn’t even pretend, as I’ve argued in the past, that when we do add housing in Preston Hollow, it might or needs to be “affordable” in any real sense of the word. That’s not the point.

There can still be neighborhoods with housing for rich people. However, that is not an excuse for our zoning code to exclude everyone except the richest people in these neighborhoods. The millionaires who want a one acre lot can have it! But, ask what you are expecting the city to protect you from by not allowing anything but that around you. The same standard applies in our R-7.5 areas: why can’t a duplex or an ADU fit next door?

Remember where we ended up last week: zoning is at its most defensible when the city is regulating health and safety. We already have the city’s answer on what is safe. We allow 5,000 square foot lots happily in other areas of the city. As a health and safety rule, it makes no sense to have seven different minimum lot sizes across the city. It can only make sense if you see it as a floor on what it costs to live in each part of town.

I didn’t choose either of the two examples last week, parking spaces at bars or college students living together, by accident. In May of 2025 the Dallas City Council voted fourteen to one to scrap most of our minimum parking ratios. Then a few weeks later, the Texas Legislature, R’s and D’s voting together, passed Senate Bill 1567 and told university towns like College Station that they could no longer arbitrarily cap household occupancy by counting how many of their residents share a last name. Neither city, to the best of our knowledge, has slid into the sea. The sky has not fallen.

These rules are not the fifth law of thermodynamics. We wrote them, so we can unwrite them, and the morning after, the city is still standing.

None of that means bulldozing zoning, becoming Houston, and letting the steel foundry or the hog slaughtering plant open behind the kindergarten. To paraphrase Justice Sutherland, pigs will stay out of the parlors.

It means moving the burden of proof.

Today, zoning rules are presumed innocent, and anyone who wants to build has to prove himself, hearing by hearing, vote by vote, as some hostile invader. Flip it. With the rewrite, we have a once in a generation opportunity here, and our first since 1987. When Dallas publishes the new zoning code, make the old rules justify themselves, and ask what the rules are really getting us. Ask what they are costing us too. We are on the path to becoming the most expensive big city in Texas.

Our zoning code is totally ours to choose, and we should treat it like a choice. We don’t. We are merciless when we deliberate the budgets and the costs of everything else our city does. A convention center has to promise jobs and a return on investment. Even parks or schools get measured in economic development and increased tax base. The reason is not civic virtue.

The reason is those things have an obvious line item in a budget. That is an easier thing to argue about than the city that we could have built and did not. The tradeoffs of zoning never appear labeled on any budget, and a budget is seemingly the only thing this city knows how to fight about anymore.

There is a cost to what we do not build, but it is invisible, perhaps by design. It is the house that never got built and the family that gave up and moved to Celina where the smaller home on a 3,000-foot lot got built. It is the renter wondering why her rent has gone up 71% in the last decade. It is the neighborhood that your kids grew up in and can’t afford to move back to.

It’s time to agree on whether that cost is worth it.

love/hate/other to Kirk P. at onemansdallas@gmail.com

In the hallowed pages of this blog, usually when I am discussing zoning it is some specific case or controversy with an upcoming vote, like recent fights in Oak Cliff or Preston Hollow, or whether our existing zoning code allows for data centers at all and whether it should. The stories we tell about zoning are fairly one-dimensional: one person wants to build something and another person would rather they didn’t.

Today, there is no motion on the floor and no agenda item to approve. I want to talk about how zoning is both a great deal weirder and, despite our seemingly constant debates, actually a great deal less examined than it should be. As a city, we’re going to talk about zoning a lot over the next several months (hurray!), as staff is embarking on a top-to-bottom rewrite of the city’s entire development code. This week and next, I just want to start with a foundation for how and why we have the rules we have today, before we get to what the rewrite should say and why.

If you’re like me and grew up anywhere near a computer in the 1990s, you learned how a city works in a video game made by a man named Will Wright. SimCity let you build a city by first handing you three crayons. Green for residential, blue for commercial, yellow for industrial zones. You painted zones on the map, the little Sim citizens built their own buildings and moved in. If you put the yellow zone too close to the green, the green got angry and left. The lesson absorbs quickly. A city is a coloring book, and some colors do not touch.

Zoning wasn’t just a choice you made in the game. It was the game. To the surprise of absolutely no one who has read this blog for very long, I played a lot of SimCity growing up.

I point all of this out because the SimCity version of the world is roughly how many of us still think a city works. Paint lines on a map, and a city of a million people can emerge out of the ether. Zoning feels less like one possible policy choice among options, and more like the operating system of reality, or a law of nature, somewhere between the speed limit and the weather.

It is why the existence of Houston reads almost like a glitch in the matrix. The fourth-largest city in the country has no zoning code at all. In spite of that fact, it has yet to slide into the Gulf of America. If zoning were a law of nature, Houston would be its black hole, some place where the laws of space and time cease to bind us. Instead, it is a city with traffic and good Mexican food, same as the rest of Texas.

So, if zoning is not Newton’s fourth law, where exactly did the zoning game come from, and who decided we all had to play it?

In 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court heard the case Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty. Euclid was a suburb of Cleveland that wanted to keep heavy industry away from residential areas, so it drew up a zoning ordinance. Ambler Realty owned sixty-eight acres directly adjacent to a railroad, which had been chopped up into several distinct zoning districts without its consent, most of which allowed only residential. It contended the zoning ordinance made the property near-worthless and undevelopable. It sued the village in federal court, seeking an injunction against the ordinance, arguing that it took Ambler’s property without due process or compensation, in other words, that it was unconstitutional. Euclid instead contended this was a very ordinary exercise of the village’s police power: not in the sense we would use the word ‘police’ today, but its ability to regulate public health, safety, morals, and the general welfare.

The trial court agreed with Ambler Realty and struck down the village’s entire zoning ordinance, writing that the argument for zoning rested “both on a mistaken view of what is property and of what is police power.”

On appeal, the Supreme Court eventually reversed that decision in a 6-3 ruling. Justice George Sutherland wrote the majority opinion that solidified the notion of zoning within our constitution, and in the process made the modern American city legal. He justified the whole zoning arrangement by an analogy to nuisance. A nuisance, he wrote, “may be merely a right thing in the wrong place, like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.” However, he importantly limited the concept, saying zoning ordinances “must find their justification in some aspect of the police power, asserted for the public welfare.” Justice Sutherland himself cashed in on that warning less than two years later, overturning a zoning ordinance in Cambridge, MA, that the court unanimously found had no “substantial relation” to the city’s police power or health and safety.

In any case: A right thing. A wrong place. That is the founding logic of what came to be known as “Euclidean” zoning, named after the town in Ohio, not the Greek mathematician. There are pigs, and there are parlors. Zoning exists to keep the former out of the latter. The slaughtering house, the steel foundry, the leather tannery, all the things that stink and smoke and grind, can be kept at a distance from the rooms where children sleep.

Nobody wants a hog rendering plant sharing a fence with a kindergarten. Separating genuinely noxious uses, ones with real health and safety issues, from genuinely vulnerable ones is a public good, same as keeping the air or water clean, or keeping streets safe and writing speeding tickets. A local city government, not the state or the Feds, is probably the best-equipped entity to manage the process, where local elected officials are most accountable to the property owners affected by these tradeoffs between safety and property rights. That is the whole argument for zoning from first principles, and it is a hard one to argue against.

The trouble is everything that happened after zoning won that argument. The pig-in-the-parlor logic got stretched, year by year, ordinance by ordinance, until it was no longer sorting the harmful from the harmless. It was more often sorting the harmless from the harmless, in enormous legalese and detail, and with a completely straight face.

Consider how Dallas, until very recently, regulated the places where we can go out for a drink.

The city’s development code does not contain a single category for “a place where adults go to consume alcohol.” It contains several. A bar was one use. A microbrewery was another. Commercial Amusement (Inside) is the technical term for what a bar became if you added a dance floor.

Each was a separate legal species with its own paperwork and, crucially, its own zoning requirements. Those zoning requirements regulated “off-street parking,” the business’s obligation to provide parking spaces, with inordinate levels of detail. For every 1,000 square feet of bar, you needed to provide 10 parking spaces, double what other retail uses needed. Unless you were a microbrewery. Then you needed 10 parking spaces for every 6,000 square feet of bar and more still for the working areas. Add a dance floor, and now you’re adding back a parking space for every 25 square feet of disco ball-lit vinyl flooring, on top of the parking requirements for the bar area. A parking space is usually around 175 square feet, so this means that your dance hall’s parking lot was at a minimum seven times larger than the dance floor itself.

One consequence of these rules was it was harder to build all of these things: bars, dance halls, wine bars, or breweries. For some, however, that was ostensibly the point of the rules, not a bug. Bars and dance halls have people at them drinking in the late hours, who could stumble out into the night, or start a fight, or be unruly, loud, or needlessly Texan. Surrounding bars with a sea of parking seven times larger than the use itself meant there were precious few places in the city you could actually find enough land to put them in the first place. When you did, they would be buried in a parking lot, far away from neighbors. Because the parking requirements were double that of other retail, it also meant in the city’s many retail centers and strip malls, the existing parking lot was likely not large enough to see a nail salon or bookstore turned into a new saloon or watering hole.

The point was ostensibly never the parking. The point was fewer bars.

You could imagine a city regulating drunkenness, fighting, or noise with laws about drunkenness, fighting, or noise. We could keep the good parts of bars and breweries, the nightlife and the entertainment and the gathering space and the tax revenue, while regulating only the externalities, the costs unwillingly paid by others. You do this by aggressively policing bad behavior if it occurs, but you do not start by assuming every bar will create these issues, you respond to them if and when they occur. Instead, we threw the baby out with the bathwater, and decided the city was better off having fewer and more expensive-to-build bars or entertainment venues.

Further, I’m no expert, but I’m willing to stick my neck out a little here: the correct number of people who should drive themselves home from a bar is zero. Of all the ways we could have chosen to manage where bars were built in this city, we perhaps chose the one that amplified drunkenness’s worst externality: drinking and driving.

Over the years, this became the recurring pattern. Zoning became a blunt instrument used to solve other policy problems, managing noise and revelry, instead of preventing adjacency of truly incompatible and noxious land uses. Zoning slid from keeping the pig out of the parlor to refereeing whether your IPA was being consumed at a bar or a microbrewery, and how many parking spaces that would require. Remember: zoning is at its most defensible when the city is regulating health and safety issues. Tell me what health and safety issue we are regulating by giving people more parking places to drive drunk home from! Zoning changed from being a shield against real harm into a thousand-page manual on the highly regulated shape of ordinary life, most of it written before the moon landing, but most importantly, almost never required to justify itself or to have its tradeoffs examined.

Drive south and past a couple Buc-ee’s, and College Station shows what zoning can do when it is aimed at people instead of dance floors. Since 1939 the city has had a rule on the books it calls ‘No More Than Four’: no more than four unrelated people may occupy a single-family house. It had started policing and enforcing the ordinance aggressively in recent years, going as far as sending officers around town checking the last names on license plates in driveways, in order to build cases against students living together. Again, the rule uses zoning to make a distinction not between the health and safety of how many people can safely share a house, as eight people living in a home together is just fine if they share the last name. Instead, the city used a rule that was on its face about occupancy, to manage something other than occupancy, namely complaints about trash and noise.

I will grant that a house rented by five Aggies likely makes more noise on a Tuesday and generates more trashcans on the curb than the couple next door would like. It’s probably hard not to notice that you live next to five college students. Fair enough.

College Station, though, already had the tools for regulating all of that. It has a noise ordinance that runs from ten at night to seven in the morning. It has trash rules, limiting you to putting trash out for only twelve hours before you must get your bin back off the street. The town had the scalpel to manage externalities, and instead reached for the hammer, capping how many human beings may legally sleep in a house, instead of managing the costs that only some percentage of them may have created. It presumed bad behavior from all college students, when it could have managed only the ones that truly were bad neighbors.

Worse, an occupancy cap simply spreads college students out into more houses in more neighborhoods, meaning you likely ended up with more students and non-students sharing a fence. Further, it shrinks the effective housing supply by spreading students out, which lifts the rent or home prices on every other house in town. The ordinance had a stated purpose of targeting noise and trash, and maybe it did that. But the tradeoff was that it made College Station a more expensive city for everyone: students and professors and families and the couple next door alike.

This system prevents us from ever having an honest conversation about the tradeoffs involved. A conversation about parking minimums now becomes a conversation instead about people not wanting to live close to bars, because we secretly regulated bars by requiring inordinate amounts of parking. But, did you ever think about what ten parking spaces adds to the price of a cocktail? Was it worth the peace and quiet we allegedly bought? Did we instead just get a more expensive city, without preventing all that much nuisance that we couldn’t have handled another way?

Further, there’s a progression here worth noticing. In each case there’s some alleged harm lurking underneath the rule. Over time, zoning leaves us less interested in regulating the actual harm itself and more comfortable regulating some proxy for it: the parking spaces or the last names of the people sleeping under one roof.

That last step matters, because Dallas and many other American cities (except Houston) have now spent a very long time using land-use and zoning rules to decide not merely what sorts of buildings belong near one another, but what kind of people do.

And that, dear readers, is where we are going to pick it up next week.

love/hate/other to Kirk P. at onemansdallas@gmail.com

Note: another zoning quirk in the photo above that you can’t unsee. Notice how the buildings get shorter from right to left. There is an FAA-regulated height restriction for planes coming and going from Love Field, which caps the heights of most of our buildings in Uptrown around 25 or so stories tall. There is a gradual plane as you get further from the airport, which is how you end up with the 72-story Bank of America tower (“The Pickle”) to the right. Driving into Downtown on the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge gives the best experience to see this for yourself.

Blow it up to every Netflix stream your kid watches, every FaceTime call, every piece of medical equipment talking to another in the cloud, and you start to have some idea of how inextricably connected the modern world actually is.

Which brings us to the news. In January, Crow Holdings announced a data center campus rated for up to 245 megawatts (how much power it could consume, equal to about 24 million LED lightbulbs), to be located on 40 acres it has owned for decades in the Stemmons Corridor, the stretch of I-35 northwest of Downtown. The first of three total buildings was slated to break ground in late 2027. That news arrived like a tree falling in the forest, which is to say it did not make a sound, and nobody outside of the real estate publications noticed or said anything for six months. Then in late July, Robert Wilonsky over at the Morning News noticed which 40 acres on Stemmons they had been talking about, and that the campus would entail the demolition of Dallas Market Hall. Concern, if not outrage, ensued.

That leads us to last week, five Dallas City Council members [for nerds: Districts 1, 3, 6, 13, 14] signed a so-called “five-signature memo” about the topic, which is how Dallas City Council members can force something to appear on an upcoming meeting agenda. The memo asks City staff to rework the development code to update the rules regarding data centers, outlining two options. Either: rewrite the rules for “communications exchange facilities,” the existing 1990s-era telecom category under which data centers are largely-by-accident-of-history currently built and permitted in Dallas, or second, create a brand-new “data center” land use.

A “use” (like carwash, convenience store, taxidermist, yes really, taxidermist) is distinct in the code from a “zoning district” (Regional Retail, Mixed-Use 3, Light Industrial). Each use has its own rules, and each use is either allowed or isn’t in every zoning district. If Dallas writes new rules for data centers, that “use” would specify what a data center looks like (how tall it can be, how far set back from a property line it must be), but those rules would also specify which zoning districts it can be built in: say, all commercial districts, or only allowed by exception with a special one-off permit, called an SUP, regardless of the zoning.

The Rules Today

The current state of play in Dallas is that we build data centers under a use written for telephone equipment and switchboard operators. The rules were clearly not written for buildings measured not by their size but by how many megawatts of power they consume. Creating a separate use for data centers is not a bad idea, nor is it necessarily hostile to data centers. We are simply recognizing that this new land use exists, it is different from other things that came before, and we should write rules that fit it.

Great. That was the easy part.

The harder question is what the new rules should actually say, and this is where I think the conversation is already starting out on the wrong foot. In the Facebook post where the memo was first announced, Councilmember Chad West described the goal of the memo as giving residents and Council “more say on if and how data centers are to be built” in Dallas.

If and how. Not where.

Zoning tells us the right and wrong place to put a concrete batch plant. We do not get to decide whether concrete exists. The moment a council starts asking zoning to decide if, it has stopped doing land use and started doing something else entirely, and I fear that something else turns very quickly into a veto.

In the grand scheme of things, “if” is not really on the menu. We are lying to ourselves if we think we can build a city or a world free of data centers. First, Dallas already has at least two dozen data centers, according to recent comments from City staff. But further, data centers will be built. Somewhere. I can promise you that with more confidence than I can promise anything else in this essay. Our lives already depend on them in a million different ways, whether or not that’s necessarily a good thing.

So, the questions that remain after we admit that “if” was never really one of the options are instead all the boring questions that zoning was actually built for: where they belong, how to control what they do to their neighbors, and whether their tax base lands inside or outside of our city limits.

Where Data Centers Do and Don’t Belong

Data centers can be bad neighbors. They can be ugly, they can be loud, and they can contain batteries or fuel or hazards that make them inappropriate next to more-sensitive uses. We can regulate all of that through zoning, the same way we already regulate genuinely noxious uses. We wouldn’t let an Amazon warehouse butt up to your front yard. (Apologies in advance if we did.)

However, most of what data centers do to their neighbors already has a regulatory tool. On-site electrical generation, something many data centers would have today have for generation or backup power, already requires its own SUP in Dallas today. Noise too has its own ordinance. There are incredibly detailed noise rules about the decibel limits at your property line or the noise crossing any neighbors’ based on the existing noise in the area and what you are allowed to add. If any genuine gaps exist that are new to the specifics of a data center, like cooling systems, generator fuel, or whatever else, our new data center use can be written to responsibly govern them.

But much past that, a data center is still just a giant box, closest to “industrial” of all available or familiar categories. We can tell developers what the box should look like, however if it is not bothering any neighbors, there is no land use concern with, nor does the City have any business regulating, what is happening inside the box. Whether that box holds two computers talking to each other or two eighteen-wheelers swapping Amazon packages, it is only the externalities, the costs the box imposes on its neighbors, that the zoning code should control. (If you ask me, I’d rather live near to the computers than the trucks.)

Why Stemmons?

There is a specific data center project that has kicked this conversation off, so it’s worth talking about in specifics. One illuminating question to ask when you’re deciding whether data centers belong in an area is, are there already data centers there? In 1985, Trammell Crow built the Infomart at 1950 Stemmons, modeled on the Crystal Palace from the 1851 London world’s fair, for the purpose of housing those newfangled technology companies. In 2018, global data center company Equinix bought it for roughly $804 million, because by then it had become one of the largest and most important internet interconnection hubs or carrier hotels in the country, hosting hundreds of companies and cloud providers. Two miles away, a 26-story tower Downtown at 2323 Bryan Street, one you might recognize for having “Univision” written on the top, also serves as one of North America’s main internet gateways with over 100 companies locating computer servers inside. By its owner’s count, a fifth of the nation’s internet, voice, and data traffic passes through that building.

Buildings like Infomart and 2323 Bryan are the physical space where Netflix’s movie last touches Netflix’s servers and goes onto AT&T’s, or Verizon’s, or Charter’s, before making its way to your phone or living room. They are the literal crossroads of the modern world, and through some accident of history, two of the most important ones in the country sit in Downtown and Uptown Dallas. Go on DCAD and you can see the companies which keep an address in these buildings: Bank of America, Netflix, JP Morgan Chase, Southwest Airlines, even Red Lobster, in addition to all the tech and cloud companies. The Stemmons Corridor is already some of the most valuable digital real estate on earth, and Crow’s planned 245-megawatt campus is not located where it is by accident.

So, pop quiz. Is this a good place to build data centers? Roughly 200,000 cars and trucks a day on I-35 already make more noise than the data center likely ever will. The surrounding blocks are other trade or wholesale buildings, hotels, and parking lots. The closest homes are about a quarter mile away, but they sit closer to the noise of cars on Harry Hines and several DART tracks than they will ever be to the data center.

Matching heavy-traffic, high-intensity locations like this to the uses they are best at serving is the whole point of zoning, not a favor to data centers. Not only is this one of the best locations for data centers in North America, it is exactly where our City should allow them if we do not want more of them intruding into more-residential areas where cheap land is available, which, as you would guess, would largely be the far, far-southern reaches of the City, where data centers are already sprouting up in neighboring Lancaster and Red Oak.

Why People Are So Worked Up

So far, we have only looked at the reasons people might not want a data center as their neighbor, or why they would or wouldn’t want them where Crow has proposed. There is, however, a class of opposition to data centers that is really opposition to building them at all, not to building any specific one or in any specific location. Again, “if” not “where” thinking.

Water and power are two of the topics you will hear in this dimension. On these two fronts, the rhetoric has far outkicked its coverage, however. Scott Lincicome at the Cato Institute published a piece this month titled “Data Centers Are Not the Problem. Bad Policy Is,“ compiling some data I find worth citing here.

Many of the claims about data center water usage are greatly exaggerated, partially because water usage is something the industry has rapidly improved in recent years. Every data center in America today, combined, uses less than one-half of a percent of the nation’s water. Even the projection for all the data centers we will build by 2030 puts their water consumption at only around eight percent of what golf courses alone use. Americans, present company included, pour about three trillion gallons of water a year on our lawns. Nobody has proposed requiring an SUP for Bermuda grass, though give the City Council time.

I’m not saying data centers don’t use water, I’m saying that lots of things use lots of water and you never hear lots of people talking about it. We are holding data centers to a standard on water usage that we do not apply anywhere else in our daily lives. That to me, suggests it’s not about the water.

Electricity is a harder question than water, but again, this is an if not where question. Our power grids are statewide or regional. Dallas banning data centers does not save anyone in Dallas a dime on their power bills if they are instead still built elsewhere in Texas.

Further, there is scant evidence that data centers are even associated with higher power bills in the first place. The chart below actually shows that the states that have seen the most power demand growth on their grids have simultaneously seen the biggest price declines in power costs. This lines up with the reality that most data centers are “base load” power users, meaning they use roughly the same amount of electricity 24/7, and can actually help spread the fixed costs of running the grid over a larger power load.

Alternatively, the states where people are paying more for power than they were in 2019 are the states like New York and California, where regulation has made it too expensive to add even clean energy to the grid, not because of new data centers. Supply matters far more than demand, and Texas is currently only behind China (yes, the country of over a billion people) in adding new power supply according to the Texas Tribune, with most of what we have added in recent years in fact being renewable energy.

It's Not About the Buildings

So, if water and power aren’t as good-faith of concerns as social media has made it seem, what is the resistance actually about? Some of it, obviously, is a bigger argument about AI. Beyond that, fears in general about Big Tech, and who owns or controls these large AI companies. The worry is not really about buildings. It is about the work happening on the machines inside them, and who profits from what those machines can do.

We are facing a future where a few very large companies owned or controlled by some of the world’s richest people are building AI systems that will, depending on whom you ask, replace a noticeable share of the work done by humans. The returns from that replacement will not linearly flow to the workers, if they flow to workers at all. I do not think this is a crazy thing to be upset about. I do not think I am not upset about it myself. It is without a doubt the most consequential economic question my generation and the next ones will face, and I have virtually no confidence we are going to answer it well.

It is also, for the purposes of this essay, completely beside the point.

Zoning does not have a tool for deciding whether AI is good for the economy, or for workers, or whether Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are good people. A city council can write rules about what a building does to its neighbors. It has no jurisdiction over whether the computers inside the building are good for the labor market. Those are questions for Congress, or for the courts, or for the ballot box, and maybe even for philosophy departments. Pretending Dallas on its own can tip the scales of AI progress here is vanity, if not self-sabotage.

The Math

According to data from JLL, data center construction runs around $10 to $12 million per megawatt at current industry benchmarks. So, the new 245-megawatt Crow campus on Stemmons would cost north of $2.5 billion, maybe even $3.0 billion, and that’s all real property added to the City’s tax rolls. That’s before you haul in a single computer chip, and the chips are taxable too as business personal property (BPP), which Texas taxes at the same rate as land and improvements.

At Dallas’s property rate, $3 billion in new taxable value corresponds to roughly $20 million a year of new City property tax revenue. For illustration, this single project, before the computer chips are brought in, would fund almost half of our city’s library budget or nearly a fifth of the park department.

You do not have to take the illustration on faith. Facebook’s (technically, Meta’s) Fort Worth data center campus, owned under the modestly named “Winner, LLC,” sits on the Tarrant County appraisal roll at $2.4 billion of total appraised value, and $1.7 billion of it just the computer chips. It is the single largest taxpayer in its school district. That one data center campus is appraised at more than four times the value of everything Walmart owns in Tarrant County: every Walmart, Sam’s Club, and distribution center combined.

We do not have to guess at what data centers are already worth to Dallas, either. The Infomart, 1950 Stemmons, is appraised at just over $1 billion when you count the building and the roughly 500 businesses that claim BPP inside it. That is just one seven-story building next to a busy interstate. Downtown, the two carrier hotels in old office buildings at 2323 Bryan and 400 S. Akard, the old Federal Reserve Bank, each contribute about $110 million in appraised value to the City’s tax rolls. Both are valued higher than notable, actual-Downtown office buildings, like Comerica Bank Tower, and they each sit just behind Dallas’s tallest building, the 72-story-tall Bank of America Plaza, in appraised value.

Last year, all new construction within the entire city limits of Dallas only added up to around $3.9 billion, according to the 2026-2027 budget book. A single data center campus plus its computer chips could clear that easily.

The Billionaires Will Be Fine

We are in a budget season where the City just cut over 300 staff positions, and long-standing obligations to things like the Police and Fire pension are finally coming home to roost. At the same time, we have a new category of buildings that offers almost comically high property tax value compared to its demand for City services. Data centers don’t send kids to school. They don’t wear out residential streets. God willing, they don’t generate 911 calls.

Pushing these projects outside of Dallas does not “own” the billionaires. The billionaires will be fine. It will only mean less money here for parks, police, or potholes, pick whichever one you care most about.

Dallas should write new rules for data centers, if nothing else to acknowledge they exist. But watch what the new rules say when they are written. If the code says a data center can only be built by SUP, we didn’t write rules for building a data center, we gave ourselves an excuse to veto every one that comes up.

Further, the Stemmons Corridor is one of the best places to put data centers in the country, and is largely zoned “Mixed Use – 3,” our highest-intensity commercial use. While I grant data centers are more like industrial buildings than what we intended to go into MU-3, the Stemmons area is already so intense with traffic and with existing data centers, I would submit we should allow data centers going forward as a use within at least MU-3. The same standard applies to Downtown, which has its own CA zoning, and where data centers are a possible candidate for converting more old office buildings when they don’t work for residential.

So, let’s write the new rules. Require screening, setbacks, tighten noise limits. But, if we don’t leave a path to build them by-right in the areas where we already allow big industrial boxes, or let the highway corridor that has hosted the internet since 1985 keep doing so, then we haven’t really written rules, we’ve just written a data center ban. We cannot let “data centers deserve their own rules” turn into “data centers should not be built anywhere,” when all that will really mean is “not in Dallas.”

I can promise you the data centers are going to get built. We don’t have to like it. We just have to agree it’s okay if they pay Dallas taxes.

love/hate/other to Kirk P. at onemansdallas@gmail.com

The kinds of budget cuts we have practiced in Dallas in recent memory, closing four or five libraries to save a couple million dollars, are not going to close a fifty-million-dollar gap. Even if we closed every city library tomorrow, we don’t pick up $50 million: the entire library system’s operating budget is only about $43 million. Neither can this be fixed by a few more unpaid days of leave for city staff.

We are firmly in the “drastic action” territory, and the city will have to look hard at every nickel it spends. Given there is almost no such thing as a popular budget cut, protests will be raised in the coming months by nearly every interest group affected. So, expect to hear from every organization with “Friends of the” in their name before this is all over. (Nor is this going to be the last time you read something about the budget from me.)

We have a budget paradox in Dallas. The City Council has voted to cut the property tax rate, the amount of tax collected per $100 of assessed property value, every year for the last ten years. Also, every single one of those ten years, the City’s spending was higher than it was the year before. The paradox is supported by the simple fact that property values have skyrocketed. You don’t need to collect as much per dollar of property, when there are more dollars of property. This is not some weird trick. It’s just algebra.

We cut your taxes. We collected more taxes. The tough thing is, both of those statements are true.

I think that’s the problem.

My working theory is that homeowner displeasure with skyrocketing property tax bills has made most Dallas budget conversations over the last ten years about revenue, not expenses. The people we sent to the horseshoe have all been able to look their voters in the eye and say, “I cut your taxes.”

They are half-right. After all, they voted ten times to cut the tax rate.

Over those ten years, however, the City’s General Fund spending grew by roughly 71 percent. Inflation, primarily during the post-pandemic period, eroded the value of a dollar by about 36 percent over that decade. So, that explains roughly half the increase. However, the other half represents genuinely higher real spending: services that became more expensive faster than the rate of inflation, or programs, positions, and obligations Dallas did not pay for a decade ago.

This is by no means to say that anything we spend more money on today than we did ten years ago is automatically a waste. What it does mean is we have allowed the size of the city government, measured by its spending, to grow by almost a third in real terms. We need to be honest about what, if anything, that money is buying us.

Proposals are rightly coming in from every direction on how to get Dallas to spend within its means. Here’s mine. Consider this my modest, slightly outside of the Overton window proposal on how to fix a part of Dallas’s budget woes, from the revenue side.

We should start actually using all of the property taxes we collect.

Yep. That’s it. That’s my big idea.

That sounds less radical before you realize Dallas currently doesn’t do this. The city diverts about $134 million a year of City property tax revenue into tax increment financing districts or “TIFs.”

To put this in perspective, the City of Dallas collects about $1.55 billion per year in property taxes. We take one of every twelve dollars we collect in property taxes, and instead of putting them in the general fund or using them to service the city’s debt, we leave them captive in the budget of a TIF district. That is larger than the operating budget of the entire park system, and more than the budgets of libraries, code compliance, and animal services combined.

What is a TIF?

I would take for granted that most of the people who read my newsletter know what a TIF district is. In fact, I might have the opposite problem. My average reader is probably someone who has been on a TIF board or asked a TIF for money. I am in hostile territory already here.

For the uninitiated, a Tax Increment Finance District is a mechanism under state law for a city to set aside newly-collected property taxes in a given area and reinvest them in that same area. They do this by freezing the taxable value of properties in the district on the day it is created. As values rise, taxes on the growth above that frozen base (the “increment”) are allocated to the TIF district’s own account rather than the General Fund. The TIF can pay for sidewalks, streets, affordable housing, parks, environmental remediation, development incentives and nearly anything else a city can lawfully spend money on.

The city sets a “participation rate” that determines how much of the increment is kept by the city or sent to the TIF. Dallas participates in most of its TIF districts at 85 to 90 percent of the increment, meaning the TIF is keeping almost all the money.

We have a lot of active TIFs. Eighteen of them by my count. They cover many of the most important commercial areas of the city, including Downtown and Uptown, Farmers Market, Deep Ellum, Victory & American Airlines Center (“Sports Arena” technically), and Design District. In many of these areas TIFs have collected and paid out hundreds of millions of dollars since their creation, and several of them have been in existence for over thirty years, collecting increment off a base that has been frozen since the Clinton administration.

The theory behind a TIF is straightforward. A neglected or underdeveloped area may need expensive infrastructure or public assistance before private development would occur without subsidy. Once that development gets started, the TIF works like a flywheel, reinvesting growth back into growth.

The idea goes, the money that goes into the TIF is all revenue that would not exist without it. They aren’t soaking up all the taxes, just the amount created after the TIF was set up, growth which can be attributed to the TIF’s magnanimity.

The Control Group

The formula does not estimate what property values would have been without the TIF. It treats any and all value above the baseline as increment, and calculates the taxes diverted away accordingly. It does not subtract inflation, separate out the appreciation of old buildings from new construction, or estimate how much development would have occurred simply because Dallas is a large, growing Sun Belt city.

To try and do that myself, I pulled together a “same-store” sample of the six TIF districts that existed throughout the entire ten year period from 2015-2025 and whose boundaries were reasonably stable the whole time: Sports Arena, Design District, Vickery Meadow, Davis Garden, TOD, and Maple-Mockingbird.

The six districts grew from about $2.68 billion in taxable property value in 2015 to $7.32 billion in 2025, an increase of approximately 174 percent.

The entire rest of Dallas, the parts that have a TIF over them or don’t, saw their property tax base grow by about 132 percent.

Here lies the first problem. These six districts only beat the greater Dallas property value growth by around $1.1 billion. The tax increment that is collected is calculated against the entire $4.65 billion increase, without adjusting for inflation, general increases in property tax values, or controlling at all for what could actually be attributed to “good economic development” by the city.

You could rightly say: well, Kirk, 174% is more than 132%. You just proved that TIFs are working. Sure, and you won’t hear me argue that TIFs don’t work. Economic development being a good thing is not a justification to fund TIFs based on a formula that gives them full credit for growth they only partially produced.

Further, consider what areas many TIF districts cover. Downtown Connection includes much of Downtown and parts of Uptown up until about the Crescent. Sports Arena includes Victory Park and all the land surrounding the AAC as well as Trinity Groves. Deep Ellum has, uh, Deep Ellum.

These six districts were not made TIFs randomly. They contain rail stations, sports arenas, and major mixed-use projects that were planned before the TIF was created. They are among the best-located real estate in Dallas, and, importantly, they have some of Dallas’s most permissive zoning rules. The fact that they only produced an incremental 40% more taxable value than the rest of the city, when most other areas of the city are single-family homes with homestead exemptions and appraisal caps is perhaps its own indictment.

The PID Alternative

There is a better tool on the shelf for many mature areas, and funny enough, we already use it often. Dallas operates fifteen Public Improvement Districts, or PIDs, which fund supplemental services such as extra security, landscaping, street cleaning, lighting and marketing.

The critical distinction with a TIF is who pays. A PID levies an additional assessment (more taxes) on property owners inside the district. A TIF carves away a share of the ordinary City property taxes generated within the district and makes those revenues unavailable for unrestricted citywide use.

A PID asks a neighborhood to pay extra for something extra. A TIF allows a neighborhood to retain taxes assessed at a rate that the rest of the city is expected to pay for the ordinary cost of city government. The mechanics of the TIF accounting make it seem like the TIF district pays for things, when in fact it’s every other taxpayer in the city left footing the bill for the cops and roads that TIF-routed taxes aren’t paying for.

Funny enough, some areas in Dallas have both a PID and a TIF operating with mostly overlapping footprints. Downtown and Deep Ellum are two prominent examples. If a district’s property owners are stable enough to assess themselves extra for supplemental services, we should seriously evaluate why the City would continue diverting ordinary property taxes into the same geography.

Uptown here is our example. The State-Thomas TIF expired in 2008 and the Cityplace Area TIF expired in 2012. The Uptown PID, managed by Uptown Dallas, Inc., collected around $4.06 million last year from Uptown property owners and spent it on things that help make Uptown exceptional: the M-Line trolley, public safety, and other street and sidewalk improvements. There are many areas across the city where we should thank the TIF for a job well done, and ask neighborhoods that want above-and-beyond amenities to pay for them with a PID.

Don’t Let The Sun Go Down on Me

At its creation, a TIF plan is given an expiration date and an estimated project budget, an amount of money it is authorized to collect over its lifetime. The district is supposed to terminate when either the term ends or the authorized amount is collected. Both should serve to stop a TIF from becoming a permanent subsidy for certain parts of the City.

However, Dallas has fallen into a pattern of repeatedly amending both caps, the time and dollar horizon, across nearly all of its TIF districts. We have extended the maturity of seven TIF districts and only ever let three expire. One in North Oak Cliff that was formed in 1992 when Steve Bartlett was mayor, we have now extended until 2052.

Downtown Connection is the cleanest example. The district was created in 2005. By 2022, City staff reported that “explosive growth” in Uptown had caused it to collect increment sooner than expected. Staff projected the district would hit its original $231.6 million cap in 2026, nine years before its scheduled 2035 termination date.

There was a not-insignificant complication worth acknowledging here: Downtown Connection TIF had outstanding tax-increment revenue bonds extending beyond 2026. Allowing the TIF district to terminate when it hit the cap would have left the TIF expiring before it could retire that debt.

However, the Council did much more than make a narrow adjustment for existing debt. It increased the original subdistrict’s budget from approximately $454 million to more than $1.06 billion. Separately, it created the new Newpark subdistrict within the TIF to further expand the boundaries, with a fresh $90.3 million collection budget and a 2052 sunset.

For the few TIFs we do allow to expire, Dallas has created a retirement home of sorts for their tax increments. It is called the Infrastructure Investment Fund, or IIF.

When a TIF expires, the properties simply return to the ordinary tax rolls, with the district going away like it never existed. However, since 2023, the City has adopted a policy that for the first ten years after a TIF expires, the City will take the amount that TIF would have collected in its final year, and instead will transfer that amount to the new IIF account.

The Council must still appropriate the transfer from the general fund to the IIF annually, and also like a TIF, approve each of the projects. However, the policy commits the same original sin, by creating a presumption about where the money belongs before the rest of the budgeting competition with police, parks, and potholes begins.

The current annual payment to the IIF is modest, around $6 million per year, as only two TIFs have expired since the IIF was created. The concern, however, is what the IIF policy could balloon to if larger districts expire.

The entire premise of a TIF is that a temporary diversion catalyzes growth for a defined period, after which the revenue returns to the government. The premise of the IIF is that even after the geographic TIF expires, an amount equal to its last annual payment should remain dedicated to the economic development game for another decade. IIF or TIF projects can all individually sound like things the City should support. However, that is not an excuse to evaluate those projects in a vacuum away from everything else the city needs to spend money on.

The Trick

The central trick of tax increment financing is to make ordinary tax revenue look like a separate pot of money. It is not. No accounting fiction can make the money that goes into a TIF district anything other than a collection of property tax. My objection goes further than that, because our budget is rife with accounting fictions. The problems begin when we start acting as if we believe them.

Dallas starts each fiscal year with nearly 9 percent of our property tax revenue already designated for specific geographies, based on a formula that looks at values that in some cases are more than thirty years old. We begin each budget with well over a hundred million in taxpayer dollars that are not available for police benefits, to fix a pothole, keep a library open, or even to offer property tax relief. We are letting twenty or thirty years of appraisal growth in Dallas decide, on the city’s behalf, what the right amount to spend on economic development and real estate projects is, and worse, where they need to go, to the exclusion of the rest of the city.

This is silly. The city should absolutely spend money on economic development, and fund many of the projects that TIFs currently are used for. I’m not here either to pick a fight about the really great project in your neighborhood that got TIF funding. However, the flawed math of a TIF district is a terrible way to decide how much money we spend as a city as a whole on projects like this, and where. Add to that, the TIF program is becoming a larger and larger drain on the rest of the budget, mostly due to growth the TIF district itself didn’t plausibly cause.

When inflation makes police, roads, and parks more expensive to hire or maintain, the general fund and every other taxpayer paying into it have to eat that cost. When inflation makes land in a TIF worth more money, the TIF district gets the benefit. This is just bad policy design.

Spend All the Money We Collect

I think we mostly got here by accident. All of these TIF districts were created before anyone could have anticipated a decade in which Dallas property values would more than double. The formulas behind each TIF were just not designed to absorb growth on this scale. The math doesn’t contemplate it. What began as a limited economic development tool gradually became a claim on nearly one out of every twelve property tax dollars the City collects.

But, hey, now we know.

I have a few recommendations to operationalize this advice. None of this can happen overnight. TIFs have adopted plans, outstanding contracts and, in some cases, debt. Some of the TIFs cover areas that are legitimately still good candidates for prioritized, outsized public investment. Some today are not.

Going forward, Dallas should stop reflexively extending TIFs, expanding their boundaries and increasing their budgets whenever they approach the limits originally approved by the Council. We should begin winding mature districts down by first voting to decrease participation rates early, allow successful districts to declare victory and expire, and return their property tax growth to the ordinary City budget.

Also, a sunset should mean a sunset. That means ending the presumption that the last year of a TIF’s revenue should automatically become ten more years of IIF spending. If a project deserves City money, bring it forward. Put it beside every other street, drainage project, park, library, fire station and public facility Dallas needs. We have a very robust process to prioritize projects through the bond task forces. Let the Council and the public decide where it belongs in line with all our other priorities, in a budget. Otherwise, sometimes when you set aside money, the money finds a way to get spent. It becomes an answer in search of a problem.

Dallas is preparing to make painful decisions about basic services. Before we close libraries, reduce park maintenance, or tell residents that the City cannot afford the government they already pay for, we should at least begin every budget with a full view of all the money we collect.

It’s time to start making decisions as though all of Dallas’s property taxes belong to all of Dallas. I said it was a modest proposal.

love/hate/other to Kirk P. at onemansdallas@gmail.com

The new convention center had its design altered last year to save the project around $600 million, namely by lowering the building out of the air by two stories. The building must be cantilevered in the air regardless; there are Union Pacific rail lines as well as DART tracks that run beneath it. However, the original design had it raised up so high that the existing Jefferson Boulevard viaduct, which is one of the bridges connecting Oak Cliff to Downtown over the Trinity River, could pass uninterrupted underneath.

Doing that ain’t cheap. The proposed lowering of the building would save money (hundreds of millions, but who’s counting) but make that vertical stacking impossible, making a perfectly good bridge dead-end into the back of the new convention center.

While the convention center is under construction, there would be a re-routing of Jefferson Street first on to the parallel Houston Street Bridge, which would temporarily become one lane each way. Eventually, a new ramp off of Jefferson would be built around the convention center, making the bridge dump out before it dead-ends into a time-wasting loop-de-loop past Reunion Tower. Still open, but annoying.

Traffic engineers hired by the city estimated the greatest impact would be during construction when traffic both ways drops from five total lanes to two, creating a ten-minute delay for commuters from Oak Cliff entering Downtown this way at peak morning rush hour. This delay drops to a permanent two-minute increase after construction is done.

That future two-minute trip relies on a new permanent solution to be built, when the city would build a new bridge over the railroads to make the old Jefferson bridge, well, a bridge again. That is, if said new bridge ever gets built. It’s a $100 million proposition on its own, assuming we get Union Pacific and DART to agree on letting us build over their railroad. Also, we haven’t identified a funding source or even a design for it. Small details, really.

People in Oak Cliff pushed back. It was the thing to talk about in Dallas, and especially in Oak Cliff, for about two weeks in mid-June. Proposals were made to return to the original, more expensive convention center design to avoid disrupting the bridges.

In its final meeting before summer break on June 24th, the full city council voted 9-6 to reject that recommendation and instead keep the lower and cheaper convention center design, and in turn, permanently change the alignment of Jefferson as it enters Downtown. We’ll talk about why that was the right decision, but that’s not actually the story here.

I didn’t write about the Oak Cliff viaduct fight before the vote. I didn’t think the policy question was important enough to merit a position from someone who doesn’t live nearby, or that there even was a policy question buried here in the first place. I still don’t. In our fifteen-minute-news-cycle world of 2026, some of you are probably already wondering, is this guy still talking about the bridges?

So, I am breaking my own personal rule (yes, this place has rules) and I am writing about an issue that’s already been voted on. Here’s why. I would submit the Oak Cliff viaducts fight is perhaps the richest text we’ve gotten in a while for understanding how politics in Dallas actually works right now. The fight, the public rhetoric, the way information moved and mutated, the city’s own role, the 9-6 split, and the coalition on council that formed all make this issue one of the most informative microcosms of this moment’s politics.

Dallas has thankfully given us a month to think about anything else while the city council is in summer recess. When we come back in August, we will have the same old politics, the same old fights, and the same old problems to deal with. It’s been a terrible start to the year. I can’t imagine anyone would disagree. I don’t think the second half is going to get much better, as it necessarily will feature a fight over the annual budget, when cuts to, uh, everything (which in Dallas means everything except Police & Fire) seem to be on the table.

This is a case study, and the month off from council meetings now gives us a chance to chew on it and read it like one.

The General Observation

None of this needed to happen. That is the plainest and most honest way I can describe this entire situation, being downstream of a convention center project that was so wildly ambitious that there was even $600 million from a budget to cut in the first place. The convention center team, which includes departments of city staff as well as private developers, contractors, and architects, designed no fewer than sixteen potential layouts of the convention center over four years. They settled on Option #15 in part because it was one of only two layouts (Slide 15) that were rated “excellent” for the evaluation criteria of “Connectivity” and “I-30/UPRR Constraints,” referring to the interstate highway and railroads that surround the building. The plan would have preserved the Jefferson viaduct as-is.

That was, of course, before the building had to be dropped out of the air and right into the middle of the Jefferson viaduct. When Option #15 ceased to be the best option because it wasn’t really Option #15 anymore, they should have gone back to evaluate the dozen other alternatives instead of pretending the cheaper, worse version of the best idea was still the best idea.

Then, when the convention center team realized they would cut off the bridge, the right time to start talking about it was immediately. Staff presentations to the council as recently as January 2026 (Slide 25) still show renderings with Jefferson Street passing beneath the convention center, well after the re-design. Presentations that same month to the Transportation Committee show maps of road closures and clearly label some of them as permanent. Jefferson Street is not one of them, marked only as being closed from 2026 to 2029, but there is no mention of the fact that a section of it, the section that actually makes it a bridge to somewhere, would be permanently removed.

It is honestly hard to distinguish whether they only recently stumbled upon the fact they designed a building in the middle of a bridge, or if they decided to sit on it for as long as possible until the manufactured urgency of cost overruns and delays would force the council’s hand. During the June 24 meeting, Councilmember Chad West pressed staff on this exact issue after they claimed council should have known about the closure for over a year, bringing out the actual presentations and catching staff completely flat footed. Between incompetence and dishonesty, I’m not sure which one I prefer as an explanation here.

Other People’s Money

The city has limited funds with which to build the convention center, namely, future collections of hotel and related tourism taxes. While hotel taxes are usually pitched as “other people’s money,” (in fact, in 2022 Mayor Johnson campaigned for a tax increase related to the convention center by saying it would “be funded entirely by visitors”), it is still possible to run out of other people’s money. That seems to be the case at the convention center, where projected future collections of hotel taxes support us borrowing convention center debt (plus cash on hand) of a little under $3 billion, while the project has a total cost that has been reported as high as $3.8 billion.

If the math isn’t math-ing to you, don’t worry, we have a plan to sell the convention center naming rights to close this nearly billion-dollar budget gap. That sounds silly because it is. Fort Worth is in negotiations to sell the naming rights to its convention center for as much as $500,000 annually. Financed over the life of the project, that would support around $5 million in debt.

As funny as the Southwest Airlines Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center could be, we would need to sell the naming rights to this building more than one-hundred-times-over to close the projected budget gap. The math flies in the face of a recent claim from the Assistant City Manager over Convention & Event Services, Robin Bentley, that a “large percentage” of how we would fill the gap was to come from selling the name, per the Morning News’s Devyani Chhetri.

Add it to your vocabularies, everyone: “a large percentage” in Dallas now apparently includes “less than one percent.” I can already foresee getting good mileage out of this one. I plan on telling my wife I have remembered to take out the trash or unload the dishwasher “a large percentage of the time.” I digress.

The Plan Before the Plan Before the Amendments To The Plan

This is a minor point, but there is a detail of the story that belongs right next to the other regrettable and unnecessary decisions by the city convention center team that led to any of this happening. The City and North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG, or “the Cog” to the cool kids) have already paid for and conducted a long-range traffic planning study on Houston and Jefferson Viaducts. No fewer than five community meetings were held in 2024 and 2025 with Oak Cliff residents about a future plan for these bridges, which feature a streetcar, walking paths, bike lanes, and two directions of travel.

The study recommends converting Jefferson into a bridge for two-way car travel, while converting the three-lane Houston into a pedestrian, bike, and streetcar bridge only. The city would also realign the Zang, Colorado and Jefferson around the site of the former Oak Farms Dairy with the goal of increasing connectivity to Downtown and taking up less space as public right-of-way. It’s a plan that serious people spent serious time, treasure, and talents on, and the community was briefed on it for several years.

The City’s new alignment of the convention center essentially makes this plan impossible. We cannot go forcing all vehicular traffic onto the bridge that isn’t a bridge any more. This whole Oak Farms mobility plan goes back to the drawing board until the City can figure out how to replace the section of Jefferson that it removes when it builds the convention center, if you recall, that unfunded, undesigned $100 million bridge over railroad tracks we don’t own or control.

We had a plan for these bridges that people at the City and the community worked on together for years. The convention center needed to be shorter and that all went out the window. This was another unnecessary “own goal” by the City, if we are still allowed to use soccer metaphors. (I do miss the World Cup already.)

What’s Actually Happening to the Bridges

This whole story got muddled badly, and some of the muddling was organic and some was strategic. During construction, the northern stretch of Jefferson will be closed for construction work where the bridge comes within 30 feet of the convention center. That closure was happening regardless of how the council voted. Throughout construction, each bridge will continue to exist, albeit in a new alignment that pushes traffic headed into Downtown onto one shared bridge at first, and later down a ramp and around Reunion in what will be one of Dallas’s most confusing detours.

However, you can still drive on these bridges. The bridges will still be there.

As complicated as the plan is, and the fact that the route will change three times between now and 2029, a few things are undeniably true. The bridges are not closing. They are not being demolished.

If you went online and read about this story, you would never know this.

The plan is complicated, so it is understandable why people gravitated to the worst and wrong version of the facts. The problem is that the worst and wrong version was also the version some people chose to amplify. The rallies were called “Save the Bridge.” Flyers handed out by activists on the bridges to cars passing by read, in all caps, “the bridges would be closed or cut off in just days.” A YouTube video posted by one activist last week is titled, “Bye Bye Jefferson Bridge.” Some public speakers at the June 24 council meeting very clearly genuinely believed the bridges were being torn down.

When you know that they aren’t and you don’t correct it because the panic is useful, we’ve crossed a line from honest confusion into weaponizing misinformation. Or, more simply, lying. If lying is too strong a word for this, how about: “not telling the truth.” The rhetoric on one side of the bridge debate very clearly took advantage of a perception, or even amplified one, that something much worse was happening to these bridges than an annoying re-alignment that represents an addition of roughly ten or two minutes to people’s commutes in one direction.

There is ultimately a broader philosophical point here, one of the reasons I do this blog, and one of the reasons I think our local politics is worse off than it has any reason to be. People are far too comfortable these days lying or stretching the truth in the pursuit of political goals.

Please don’t hear this as a tsk-tsk. I am also a “citizen journalist” (if that isn’t an oxymoron) doing much of the same work as people keeping their neighbors informed on Facebook, email chains, and Nextdoor posts. The temptation in politics however is always to win, and ends are often made to justify means.

That’s not the city any of us should want to live in, the one where the side that’s willing to lie the most always wins. Lying to get your way just makes you a liar. When we get too comfortable letting this genie out of the bottle, it is eventually going to come back to bite you in the ass when you are on the side against the ‘convenient lies’ in the next fight.

The Double Standard

We hold bridge disruptions to a completely different standard than roads. We close roads all the time in this city for construction. It is annoying, but it never generates a yard sign.

The plausible difference is that a bridge is as much a metaphor as it is infrastructure. When someone says a bridge is being taken away, it sounds like real separation. Oak Cliff has plausible historical reasons to hear it that way. The push for the construction of the Houston Viaduct came after the Flood of 1908 where the Trinity River briefly became two miles wide, and Oak Cliff could only be reached by boat.

But, there are some numbers here worth keeping in perspective, from TxDOT’s Statewide Traffic Count Map. About 4,600 vehicles per day use one viaduct (into Oak Cliff on Houston) and 7,200 use the more-affected bridge (into Downtown on Jefferson). In comparison, over 175,000 cars cross the Trinity to Downtown on I-30 daily. Another 110,000 cross the river the same direction on I-35. The West Commerce Street Bridge a mile to the north sees 12,000 cars per day, while the Margaret Hunt Hill sees 36,000. A mile to the south, the Corinth Street bridge sees 9,700 cars. In other words, there are seven bridges from North Oak Cliff and West Dallas to Downtown, and Houston and Jefferson are the sixth and seventh most popular ones.

If the claim is that redirecting a bridge will “cut off” our communities, the existence of five other, more popular bridges would beg to differ.

We, for a moment, with the support of six members of the city council, considered spending $600 million in order to help keep the commutes of roughly 7,000 people a little shorter, when there are five other ways to cross the Trinity within a mile of the Jefferson viaduct. If we assume this would have saved every commuter going into Downtown on Jefferson the full 10 minutes five days a week for three years, we would have spent over $100 per morning commute.

We do not treat any other road project in this city with that kind of deference, especially with that small a number of affected commuters and very especially not at this proposed cost. If we started to, it just might be time to let Fort Worth annex us.

The Coalition That Doesn’t Make Sense

The vote to keep the cheaper, lower convention center design was 9-6. If that sounds familiar, it’s the same vote count for and against nearly every measure related to leaving City Hall that has been voted on in 2026. The six who voted to preserve the viaducts were Councilmembers Mendelsohn, Roth, Ridley, Bazaldua, Cadena, and West. The City Hall six is Councilmembers Mendelsohn, Roth, Ridley, Bazaldua, Cadena, and Blackmon. You’ll count two flips. Chad West and Paula Blackmon switch places. Everyone else stayed locked in formation.

This doesn’t make any sense to me. There is absolutely nothing on its face that makes the Oak Cliff bridges vote even a little bit like the “Leave City Hall” votes.

Let’s take the two votes that most prove this point in my eyes. Councilmembers Roth and Mendelsohn represent parts of far north Dallas. Their constituents do not use these bridges and these councilmembers are often vocal about fiscal responsibility. The facially fiscally conservative position here was straightforward: don’t add half a billion dollars and more delay to a project already costing north of $3 billion. Inconvenience a few people in Oak Cliff by adding two minutes to their commute that don’t vote for you anyways.

Here’s why I bring this all up. We need an explanation for why the two most fiscally conservative members of council voted to spend half a billion dollars to help the commutes of one-half of one percent of the city’s population. The only explanation that can square this for me is that this is more of a Kim Tolbert referendum than a bridge vote.

If this is a proxy vote on whether you trust the city manager’s judgment, then maybe it’s also the same vote the council has been taking all year, over and over again on City Hall.

That should completely reshape how we talk about and even how I understand the City Hall fight. In my head, the City Hall relocation came from some combination of the Mayor, a few key leaders on the council, maybe a few key private sector voices who were in their ears, all fighting to keep a Mavericks Arena project alive in Downtown. The bridges vote gives me reason to update that prior belief.

This is the step that the “greedy developers have paid off our council” narrative around City Hall skips over. This is not the Mayor’s great idea or even something the nine members arrived at after having an envelope full of cash slid to them. The city manager thinks relocating is a good idea, and the nine votes follow from there, rather than the other way around.

Two people flipped from their recent votes. At a surface level, Chad West is the more tempting one to write about, but he is actually the least interesting of all fifteen votes. A council member who represents North Oak Cliff voted to protect North Oak Cliff’s connection to downtown. Color me shocked.

What makes his vote more interesting is the op-ed that he published in the Dallas Morning News on June 24, the same day as the viaduct vote. His primary criticism was that “staff” has produced no transparent plan for what happens to the City Hall site if the city vacates. He even connected the two issues explicitly, citing the viaduct rerouting as an example of the same short-sighted planning by “staff” now hurting his district.

The word “staff” appears seven times throughout that piece. Staff has no plan. Staff is rushing the decision. Staff’s recommended convention center alignment would cut off Oak Cliff’s connectivity. In Dallas city government, “staff” sometimes means the people who work for the city. But sometimes it just means the City Manager herself.

What the Vote Tells Us

Three things at least are true here at the same time.

First, the council got it right on June 24. I’ve already spent more words than I meant to on the arithmetic, so I won’t relitigate it. You do not spend $600 million to protect ten minutes of somebody’s morning when there are five other ways to cross the Trinity less than a mile away.

Second, the council should have never had to vote on it. Somewhere in a parallel universe there was a version of the last four years in which the convention center team, upon discovering that the cheaper building would land in the middle of a bridge, figured that out and said so, last year, in a public meeting, before the project broke ground.

Third, by the time the vote happened, there wasn’t a vote about bridges happening at all. It was a 9-6 vote, the same vote we’ve been having all year. Whatever was printed on the agenda that day, the thing actually being voted on was whether you will take the city manager’s word for anything.

A city runs on the assumption that when the government tells you what it’s doing, that’s what it’s doing. Every part of local politics that works or doesn’t is downstream of that. Public hearings, agenda items, the people who show up to speak for three minutes, all of it presumes we’re arguing about the same set of facts. When the facts stop being reliable, we don’t stop arguing. We just start arguing about people instead. Can we trust them? Are they corrupt? Are they listening to us? That’s cheaper and faster and it feels really great, and it produces exactly the politics we have.

That’s how you get a flyer in all caps saying the bridges are closing in just a few days. Not because people in Oak Cliff are gullible, but because the alternative is that you believe the City’s version of the story, which wasn’t the truth either. The lie worked as well as it did because the truth was never in the room with us in the first place.

I said earlier, the city where the side that’s willing to lie always wins is the city none of us should want to live in. That standard has to start and end with our own city government, its staff and manager.

I opened this piece with a Music Man joke, and I have deleted several others from an already lengthy piece. In the musical, the trouble with a capital T that Harold Hill sold River City on wasn’t real either, and the joke of the show is that a con-man leaves town better off than he found it.

I guess we ended up there too. We saved $600 million, the convention center doesn’t get more delayed, and Jefferson can still be a bridge to somewhere again as soon as the Wells Fargo wagon brings us $100 million to pay for it. Fine.

It took a lot of lying to get there. Nobody should want to run a city this way, where the right answer arrives by accident at the end of an argument neither side was having in good faith.

We spent June pretending to argue about a bridge. We’re going to spend the rest of the year pretending to argue about a budget, when we’re all just really fighting over whether we trust the City Manager. It would save everyone a lot of time if we all just said that’s what this was really about, and maybe, could all start telling the truth.

Love/hate/other to Kirk at onemansdallas@gmail.com

EDIT: an earlier version of this post stated that Councilmembers Roth and Mendelsohn flipped their votes on convention center redesign following earlier discussions in the transportation committee. They voted ‘YES’ in committee to send the issue to council, and ‘NO’ at council against a “motion to deny” the item. However, both of those votes had the same effect, to save the bridges. Apologies to both.

That week, she signed the petition against the proposed zoning change at Preston and Royal, the one that would allow a 240-foot, 19-story hotel-and-condo tower and a 210-foot, 18-story multifamily apartment building at one of the busiest commercial corners in North Dallas. Current zoning allows 54 feet.

The opposition website, Preserve Preston Hollow, warns that the project would turn a “well-planned neighborhood into something similar to Houston.” This is a wonderful sentence, as it treats Houston less like a city and more like a communicable disease. It is a more honest self-admission of the Dallas psyche than I could ever hope to write. I digress.

My mother-in-law has lived around that intersection for almost forty years. She knew I knew she signed the petition. I knew she knew I knew. When it finally came up, everyone at the table had the look people get when a family conversation nears a man’s most boring hobby: writing about local politics.

She winced when I brought it up. Not dramatically. Just enough to say she had hoped she might make it through dinner without a cross-examination.

I told her I was not going to shame her. (I mostly meant it.)

Why did you sign it? I asked.

Her friends had asked her to.

That was the first answer and also the most human one. People sign petitions because their friends ask them to. People oppose zoning cases because someone they trust tells them a thing is bad. Most of the time politics is someone handing you a clipboard.

What bothered you about the building?

She gave the answer everyone gives.

It’s too tall.

Too tall. It has the advantage of sounding objective while meaning almost nothing. Too tall for what? Too tall compared with? Too tall from where? The phrase has done a great deal of work in council chambers, neighborhood meetings, and anxious Nextdoor posts without ever having to defend itself.

The tallest proposed tower is 240 feet. Current zoning allows 54. That sounds tall because it is tall. You do not have to be an architect or the last living disciple of Jane Jacobs to understand that either building is taller than a North Dallas ranch house.

The question is whether that settles anything. How tall is too tall?

What, exactly, is the injury caused by height? Not traffic, noise, or a building pressed against your fence. Those are complaints we can adjudicate. But height by itself.

Seeing the building? A city is not harmed by being visible to itself. If the cost imposed by a tower is that a person standing a quarter-mile away can see it in the distance, then the objection is not really about harm. That is about preference. Preferences are allowed. They just should not automatically become law.

It would not even be the tallest building in Preston Hollow. That record belongs to Preston Tower, the 316-foot condominium tower behind the pink wall on Northwest Highway. The building has been part of the North Dallas landscape since the 1960s. Does anyone think the value of houses in Preston Hollow, Dallas’s most expensive neighborhood, has suffered from people seeing this building sometimes?

Lastly, visibility, and really above all, trees, matter here enormously. 240 feet is tall, but if the cost of tall buildings is sometimes seeing them, how often you will actually see them and from where must be studied. This weekend, I drove around Preston Hollow, looking at where you could actually see the 316-foot Preston Tower. As close as two streets away from the building, a single tree in someone’s backyard, barely taller than the house it sits behind, blocks sight of the entire building from this perspective.

Tall does not always mean visible. This is equally true for “privacy” as a related concern with height. If you can’t see the building, it can’t see you either.

None of this makes 240 feet short. It does however make the apocalyptic version of the argument harder to sustain.

After a pause, she returned, but what about the traffic?

Preston Road has traffic on it all day, and the building will certainly not make that problem disappear.

The site’s existing ‘community retail’ zoning is the City’s highest-intensity zoning for traffic. Apartments produce less traffic than grocery stores, but don’t just take my word for it. An average sized grocery store will generate 2,000 to 2,400 trips per day, per the Institute of Transportation Engineers. Apartments produce 3.31 daily trips per dwelling unit, per the same source. A three-hundred-unit complex (specifically here, one hundred condos and two hundred rental units) would generate just under 1,000 trips per day. Less than one-half of what a grocery store alone would add to this corner, not to speak of the other six or eight businesses one would build in the strip mall around it. If traffic were your only concern with this development, you should be for it, not against it.

But here’s the real catch. The traffic at the intersection of Preston and Royal right now is not generated by people who live at the intersection of Preston and Royal, because nobody lives at the intersection of Preston and Royal. There are no houses here. It is generated by people driving to there from the surrounding neighborhoods to use shops at the corner.

Some of the people who would in the future live at Preston and Royal are people who would otherwise have had to drive there from a little farther away. A household suspended in the air above a corner with two grocery stores is not automatically creating new congestion. Instead, it could allow someone who forgot cilantro to take an elevator instead of an Escalade to go and grab it. That’s actually a trip saved, if the person would have otherwise hopped in their car from Tibbs or Azalea.

The traffic argument, that apartments actually mean shorter trips and fewer cars than if the corner had only retail zoning, was less convincing to my mother-in-law, as it often is. I have ordered many traffic studies for concerned neighbors over the years. Their reading of said traffic study usually results in more disagreement, not less. We moved on.

The next question came between bites of steak, and it is fair: why here? It just doesn’t fit.

“Why don’t you build it at Valley View?” is another version you would often see online. (Sure, we can also build one at Valley View. It sounds like the Mavericks have that covered.) I’m not against it, I’m just against it being here.

The existence of other places where new infill development could go is not an argument against also building here.

By any honest description, Preston and Royal is the part of Preston Hollow that is not houses. It has never been houses. It is where the houses do their errands.

Preston and Royal is not a ranch house. It is six lanes of traffic, a Tom Thumb, a Central Market, Royal China, dry cleaners, parking lots, curb cuts, and a whole lot of strip retail doing its fluorescent duty. This is not some leafy residential block being jolted awake by commerce. This is where the neighborhood goes to buy shrimp, prescriptions, birthday cards, and emergency dinner rolls.

So when my mother-in-law says the tower does not fit, the real question is: fit what? Does it have to fit the houses half-a-mile or a mile away on her block? Or does it get to fit the commercial corner on which it actually sits?

Those are not the same standard. This development is not bordering a single family home, full stop. If a commercial corner must follow the scale of “nearby” single-family homes, then it cannot really become anything except the residential neighborhood’s useful little servant: low, spread out, asphalt-covered, and deferential. None of Dallas can, when we start redefining “next to” to mean near.

But seriously, why here? I’ll tell you. Preston and Royal is absolutely one of the places in North Dallas where this kind of building makes sense. It is already commercial. It is already on major arterials. It is where surrounding households come for commercial activity, buying groceries, and eating dumplings.

It is being proposed at a corner that already functions as a neighborhood’s little downtown, lacking only the one thing downtowns usually have: people living there.

I asked: Remember when Katie and I looked for our first house, you asked us why we weren’t looking in Preston Hollow?

Sure I do, she recalls, you both laughed at the question.

My in-laws bought their house in 1989. In today’s dollars, adjusting for only inflation, but not the strange alchemy of North Texas housing prices, they would have paid only $388,000. A starter home in Celina goes for more today. The lot, the house my wife grew up in, sold in December for well over one million. The builder has plans to demolish the house and put up a three or four million dollar spec home there.

One of the things you hear in conversations about projects like this is that the neighborhood has a character in need of protection. That is not a silly thing to care about. Neighborhoods do have character. Streets have memory. People are not wrong to notice when the place they knew begins to disappear.

Character can be a slippery word. If character means the 1950s ranch houses filled with families and young children my mother-in-law remembers, including families buying their very first home like her, then the neighborhood is already losing it one teardown and one empty nest at a time.

The median household in each of the four census tracts around Preston and Royal today contains only two people, according to the 2024 Census ACS data. The median age across them is 50 years old, including children. The average house has 3.82 bedrooms, and the most common household size, two married adults, is presumably only sleeping in one of them. When you drive around the neighborhood on a Saturday like I did this weekend, you would be hard pressed to find more eighth birthday parties than estate sales.

The people who would live in the proposed building are not invaders from a hostile province. These will be apartments for rich people. I did not tell my mother-in-law, nor would I tell you, reader, that these apartments or condos would be affordable, because they will not be. None of this will be affordable housing by any useful definition of the phrase.

But affordability is not the only housing question. A building like this gives people who already belong to the neighborhood a way to stay without staying in a single-family house forever. It gives empty nesters, widows, divorced people, older couples, or adults moving closer to mom a place to move without leaving their grocery store, doctors, friends, and routines. We have the added benefit of those houses then becoming available to someone else, the next family that looked like my in-laws when they first moved in.

None of this makes a high-rise tower charity. It makes it succession planning.

The strange thing about talking politics with family at dinner is that when you think you are making a point about zoning, you are also finding out whether your politics can survive the people they are actually about. You are putting your ideas on trial in the only courtroom that really scares you.

It is easy to write about upset neighbors as if they are interest groups with lawns, in a newsletter I send to strangers. It is harder when one of them is sitting across from you, eating the steak you grilled, asking a perfectly normal question about the place she has lived for forty years. If I cannot explain this to my mother-in-law, about the neighborhood she actually lives in, then I have not earned the right to explain it to anyone else.

It would be clean and satisfying to tell my mother-in-law that the tower is for the next version of her and her husband in 1989. Young, no kids, just getting started in life. Affordable-ish, upper-middle class at least. That would be the easier and more emotional argument: it would allow her to imagine that my wife and I might be able to afford Preston and Royal today too, at the same age her parents once did if the city only just allowed more housing.

That’s not really true. That door has already closed. This is Dallas’s most expensive neighborhood, and that’s not going to change, especially with an New York investment bank or two relocating here every month.

There are still other doors a neighborhood can leave open. A place for someone’s mother to downsize without leaving her friends. A place for an adult child to live near a sick parent. A place for people whose lives no longer fit a single-family house but whose lives still belong, in every real way, to the neighborhood. The right question is not whether this building makes Preston Hollow affordable. It will not.

The question is whether ‘too tall’ is a real cost compared with the cost of a neighborhood that made room for one generation, then left those very same people the choice of aging in a mostly empty single-family home or leaving the neighborhood.

The question we all get to decide our answer to is whether Preston and Royal is willing to be a neighborhood people can move within, or only a neighborhood people move out of.

And that is not a question about height.

This building is tall. We can all stop pretending that was ever in dispute.

The Dallas City Plan Commission (CPC) is expected to hear this zoning case later this week on Thursday June 25, where it will be voted on by CPC before going to a full City Council vote this summer, presumably after the council’s summer recess in July.

love/hate/other to Kirk at onemansdallas@gmail.com

Relocation from City Hall would free up the site for potentially new, catalytic uses, including a not-totally-out-of-the-question Mavericks arena.

Staying would involve some level of repair to the building, in an amount that is far from universally agreed upon. Since 2018, four independent studies have variously concluded the costs of needed repairs at around $150 million, $300 million, $324 million, and what was briefed to council last week, a range of $532 to $611 million depending on how you phase the repairs out over time.

Those are just the repairs themselves, saying nothing of the added expense of financing the bill. With financing and all ancillary costs like moving or furniture added in, all of the studies we have in front of us today conclude the cost to stay at City Hall stretches into the billion-with-a-b range. Where I grew up, that’s a lot of money.

Tomorrow is going to be a long meeting. I have the distinct honor (you get put on the list in the order you signed up) of speaking one spot before legendary Dallas journalist and author Jim Schutze, and after several former mayors. It will be quite a who’s who crowd (and me).

Regardless of the outcome of this meeting, I have a few thoughts I want to put down on paper now, partially for posterity’s sake.

To start, there’s a good chance, at least looking at the statistics that Substack gives me, if you’ve read anything I’ve written, it’s the three-week series I did on City Hall in February. Why to demolish the building, what we should really expect it to cost (and cost of the alternatives), and the vision of Downtown Dallas you need for any of this to make sense. If you’re still on the fence about any of this or want a refresher, start there.

Those were the very first articles I wrote, and I had the benefit (or burden) of being really the only one publicly litigating the case for relocating those early couple months. A voice of one crying in the wilderness, if you will. “Save Dallas City Hall” had already begun to form as a rallying cry, but a coalition of us had not yet coalesced on the opposite side, a group I lovingly refer to as “Save Dallas From City Hall.”

I point this out, because even with hindsight, and even being early, I have great comfort in standing by everything I have said about City Hall.

When I started writing in February, people were objecting to the size of the $324 million repair estimate, or $1.1 billion total all-in budget with financing and relocation expenses. (People are still objecting to them, for what it’s worth.) The argument against these figures was they had been trumped up in order to justify the building’s demolition. (This is still largely the argument.) One variety of comment I saw often on social media was that the real cost would be little more than $150 million, or that they had a cousin that worked at City Hall and he said it would only be $100 million, something along those lines.

The latest estimate found the costs would be higher than the previous study, which mind you was done only in February, by nearly $300 million, with the all-in cost now at $1.6 billion. This increase came after they looked zone-by-zone and floor-by-floor through the building, and accounted for having the building occupied in part during all repair work. With every round of peer-review and independent analysis, the numbers keep getting bigger, not smaller.

Further, if you look outside of Dallas, as I detail more towards the end of today’s newsletter, you are hard pressed to find any large public building modernization projects that have cost much less than what is being proposed Downtown. In fact, many of these cases call into question whether the current estimates are high enough.

For example, the latest study estimated that HVAC upgrades at Dallas City Hall will cost $44 million, to replace or upgrade the original 1970s system. Boston City Hall, a brutalist-style office building of almost exactly the same square footage and age as our own, started pricing replacements for its original HVAC system late last year, and it expects to spend $93.6 million (page 5) to replace only the building’s air handlers, not including the chiller plant that actually cools the air. Examples like this offer little comfort for heading off on a modernization crusade of our own.

Second, I have been reflecting on what bothered me so greatly about the City Hall debate that I felt the need to publicly weigh in on it, at length, for weeks. I think I have put my finger on it, and it’s what still bothers me about this debate today. Preservation, specifically preserving buildings that are historic in a City’s life, is absolutely something we must weigh when making decisions.

It is not however, the end of the conversation.

When I hear or read the “Save City Hall” speeches and posts, I fail to find too much with which I disagree. The building has a design, an architect, and a role in Dallas’s public life that all make it noteworthy. If we tear it down, the world will have one fewer example of brutalist architecture, designed no less, by one of the world’s most awarded architects, I.M. Pei.

But what is that worth? A million dollars of taxpayer money? Sure. A hundred million? Eh. Maybe.

A billion?

At risk of repeating myself, decisions like this, any decision in running a city, are about tradeoffs. Every decision our elected leaders make is about which of two “good” things we will have less of: in this case, more historic preservation or more money available for roads, safety, and parks.

This is why I think the argument from the Save City Hall folks is never that renovating City Hall is a good use of taxpayer funds. Instead, the argument is almost the opposite, that it won’t really cost as much as we think. This downplays the long-term cost of preservation by simply wishing or pretending large buildings like this do not cost a lot of money to maintain, particularly when decades have gone by without the needed investments.

I have a problem with this. This is a politics that ignores tradeoffs. It is a disease that is not unique to Dallas and not unique to this one debate about a building, to be sure. Of course, preserving unique, historic buildings is a good thing. But what are we willing to sacrifice to do that? We are closing four libraries this year already. Please, into the microphone, pick which parks and libraries you’d close to renovate City Hall.

On my side, demolishing City Hall will not be free. Buying another building to move into, not free either. Fitting that building out with a new apparatus of government, again, it will all cost money. But how much money is what matters. Fort Worth just accomplished a City Hall move for $230 million, buying a vacant office building in its Downtown and turning it into a new seat of government. We know this works, and we know today what it costs with much greater certainty than a repair program that will hit unforeseen costs and obstacles.

We have to name what we’re willing to lose, what our proposed alternative costs, and who it will hurt. Until we do that, we don’t really have a plan, we only have a preference.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, I can’t help but wonder if the City Hall conversation is just the top part of a larger iceberg, the visible portion of deeper issues floating mostly below the surface. Simultaneously, we seem to be having, on at least four fronts, several civic conversations about why everything sucks right now, and each is inexorably related.

• Do our ‘weak mayor’ and ‘14-1’ council systems create worse outcomes than alternative systems would, as argued in D Mag by former mayor Laura Miller?

• What is Dallas’s role as the metropolitan core of the DFW Metroplex?

• What responsibility does the city have to subsidize and retain professional sports teams within the city proper vs. in the suburbs?

• What should the City do to encourage vitality and activity in our urban core, namely Downtown?

I couldn’t possibly get to all four of the questions this week, or even in one week. However, the wrapping up of the City Hall saga that launched this blog, assuming it wraps up tomorrow, may have just been the start of a longer conversation where demolishing City Hall is just one symptom.

I have a nagging suspicion about where exploring these issues is going to take me. I do think they are all related, or at least, in answering one, you will never avoid talking about the others.

What I want to tease you with today is what I am starting to call my “housing theory of everything” that explains both our declining preeminence in our eponymous Metroplex and why our financial decisions are increasingly constrained as a city. In the table below (the data stops at 2023 because that’s as far as we have the jobs data), Dallas over the prior decade continued to add jobs at an astonishing pace. Housing units and households, however, have far from kept up.

The problem with this, is that in Texas, jobs don’t pay taxes, property does. It does the city almost no good, from a pure tax revenue perspective, to have someone work in Dallas and live in Celina. Other than what their employer pays in property taxes on the office building (which have largely been declining in value since the Pandemic), or what we collect in sales tax when they eat lunch out, there is almost no revenue created from one extra job in Dallas, at least compared to one extra house in Dallas.

Over this period, the city added only four houses for every ten new jobs we created in Dallas proper. In a healthy housing market, or one that is not supply-constrained, you would expect to see that number be closer to seven new houses for every new ten jobs, based on national averages, or an average of 1.5 jobs for every household.

Interestingly, you may have noticed in the table, our population has not grown as fast as our number of households. Since every household, by definition, must have at least one person in it, this implies some other part of the population is actually declining. So, despite adding single-person households in the areas we’ve added more apartments like say Oak Lawn and Uptown, we are actually losing population in areas that previously held more people, largely families with children. The families, the parents at least, are largely still there. It’s the children who have grown up and moved.

I don’t think we’ll start to unravel all our current problems, how to revitalize Downtown, how to compete with the suburbs, how to pay for things residents say they want, like libraries, or even preserving City Hall, without having more people living here to pay for them.

We can only grow our population if we build the housing for people to live here in the first place. I’ve said before, population is an output, not an input. This isn’t “if you build it, they will come,” but rather “if you don’t build it, they can’t come.”

Celina, Princeton, Melissa, Anna, and Forney added as many people in a single year in 2025 as we added in a decade. At one point in 2024, there were more apartments under construction in one ZIP code of Collin County than all of Dallas proper.

I don’t know that building more housing will by itself solve every budget or financial problem that Dallas faces. I know it won’t. This may not be the only cure for everything sucking.

But I also don’t see which of our current problems it makes worse. I can’t imagine how having more people to shoulder the same tax burden, to fill up sports arenas, to use our libraries and our parks, or to once again clearly announce Dallas as the top dog in the Metroplex, could at all be a move in the wrong direction.

So, maybe we can work on that next.

love/hate/other to Kirk at onemansdallas@gmail.com

And now, for your moment of Zen, below is the speech I plan to give tomorrow.

Good morning, Mayor and Council.

My name is Kirk Presley. My wife and I live in District 6.

We will lose something when we tear down City Hall.

I want to say that plainly.

It is a noteworthy piece of Dallas architecture. It embodies an ambitious idea: that the City’s hopes and image could be shaped by concrete and glass.

But what we lose cannot be the end of the conversation.

Imagine if staff stood here today to propose a brand-new City Hall.

A famous architect. A unique design, something you wouldn’t choose for your own home, but distinctive, to be sure. It would sit on twenty acres of prime Downtown land.

Here’s the catch: a price tag of $1.6 billion over twenty years.

That is more than a thousand dollars per Dallas resident. Nearly three thousand per household.

Would you spend $3,000 of your family’s money that way?

Imagine the emails. Imagine what this council chamber would look like if you were asking taxpayers for $1.6 billion to build a new City Hall.

We will lose something when we tear down City Hall.

But we will gain something, too.

We will gain twenty acres of Downtown that can actually serve Dallas again.

We will gain the chance to see Downtown flourish as the crown jewel of the metroplex, not rot at its core.

We will gain over a billion dollars we will not spend restoring a building we would never choose to build today.

Some will say, Kirk, it will not really cost that much.

The Minnesota State Capitol. The United Nations in New York. The Utah State Capitol. San Francisco City Hall. Even, the Dallas County Records Building, three blocks from here.

Each of these buildings cost between $800 and $1,000 per square foot to modernize, adjusted for inflation.

That puts City Hall’s repair bill comfortably above the $500 million mark, before adding financing, moving, and operating costs.

We will lose something when we tear down City Hall.

But the question is not whether we will lose something.

The question is whether preservation at any price belongs on the backs of taxpayers. Of our children. Of our grandchildren.

I do not believe it does.

Thank you.

Here are some rough thoughts on yesterday’s news, roughly in the order they arrived in my head.

Gut reaction

Overall, I think this is something like a 5.5/10 outcome for the city, and has about an 80-85% chance of actually getting done. As I write here often, the harder part of governing a city is choosing between two bad outcomes. There were no great, obvious options here. 5.5/10 is a failing score in grade school, but is about as good as we could hope for given all the facts.

Pros: We “kept” the Mavs, we get some serious future tax revenue out of a long-too-empty site that was begging for a single tenant, and what to do with City Hall can now be evaluated solely on its own merits. Tearing down City Hall was never going to be free, and this outcome may cost the City less in the long run than a new arena Downtown, even if it is also worse for activity and property values Downtown. Also, this debate got a lot of people interested in local politics again, in ways that we haven’t seen since perhaps the Trinity Tollroad. I write a blog now. That’s all at least, something.

Cons: We still have to figure out what to do with City Hall, we lose a key anchor in Uptown (AAC), we lose the most obvious opportunity to defibrillate Downtown, and we burned a lot of political capital to rush a City Hall process that now will not result in any catalytic development. The Mavericks will be further from the population center of Dallas proper, and not located near any existing forms of mass transit. Past City investments made in the AAC and Victory now may flip to being liabilities.

Remember, an arena alone was never the point

A modern stadium is an anchor, even a loss leader, for the land around it. League and team revenue, like the lucrative TV contracts, gets split up evenly across all the owners. So, the largest source of dollars that you don’t end up sharing as a pro-sports owner are from the apartments, the offices, and the retail you wrap around the building. Everything else is subject to collective bargaining with the players union, and the NBA players make something like 50-60% of the league revenue as-is.

To cash in on owning the Mavs, the Adelsons always needed a site where they could put monster development all around the arena. Also, probably a casino. That means more land than the City could really offer at City Hall. Here, they have their own zip code to play with. This isn’t too new of an idea, it’s why Victory and Reunion arena were located where they were located too.

“We kept them in Dallas”

Keeping the Mavs inside the city limits was never a thing I personally was too concerned with. At the very least, I couldn’t put a good price tag on what it was worth. The other live option was Irving, the site the Adelsons own by the old Texas Stadium. The site was originally around 100 acres when it was first reported on in 2023, but they have since quietly added another 150 acres around it. In 2025, the Adelsons submitted a zoning request to the City of Irving that included permissions for a casino, which was later amended out of the request. A sports and entertainment district was approved by Irving City Council in June 2025, but no casino yet.

Yes, that site is in Irving, and they are not called the Irving Mavericks. However the site is surrounded by Dallas on three sides and closer to Downtown than Valley View is. Letting the Mavs walk to Irving and letting another city eat the stadium bill and maybe even play host to a casino always struck me as a quiet win. It is a good site for tourism being almost perfectly equidistant from the two airports.

Remember, they haven’t bought any land at Valley View yet, and there is the matter of community push back. Irving has the zoning for this already, Valley View does not. They may not get the money they want for an arena out of Dallas City Council, and they have more land to play with in Irving. I would put the odds the Mavs still land in Irving still at least at 20%.

If nothing else, this “purchase option” period at Valley View may be a chance to jam through a casino zoning case to Dallas City Council since Irving has already stiff-armed them, tying that casino approval to “keeping” the Mavs. If I were the Adelsons, I would probably do this too.

Now comes the outstretched hands

If this all follows the American Airlines Center playbook, the city owns the land, the building gets mostly financed with city-issued bonds, and hotel and tourism taxes actually pay back the debt. Some contribution will be made by the team, plus a promise to pay for any cost overruns.

The real fight is the size of that check, and it hasn’t even started yet. Look at the two closest comps. Oklahoma City put more than $850 million of public money into the Thunder’s new arena while the team chipped in only $50 million and agreed to cover overruns, and San Antonio’s “Project Marvel” NBA arena has $800 million in public funding, with the team covering $500 million and overruns. The only recent example that breaks this mold, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer paid for the entire $2 billion Clippers arena himself, but nothing the Mavs have said suggests they want to do that.

I would expect the Mavericks announce a price tag on the arena somewhere in the range of $1.8 to $2.0 billion, and ask for the City to pay for the first half roughly. Expect numbers to get whittled down from there, but I have to imagine it’s the opening shot. The main problem here is that all our tourism taxes, all that “other people’s money,” have already been pledged to the $3.3 billion convention center expansion. We may not be able to give the Mavs what they will likely ask for given OKC and SATX precedent, simply because we have run out of other people’s money to promise. (As an aside, I think things are starting to look pretty grim on the timeline, budget, and projected footprint of the convention center, given the recent backlash surrounding the closing of the Jefferson and Houston viaducts. The convention center’s problems are going to limit our options elsewhere in the City, specifically with a Mavs arena and AAC refinancing.)

One catch: an arena the city owns pays no property tax, like the AAC. That’s just the arena though. A conservative estimate on the value of the development that will go on the remaining 80-90 acres I would put at about $3 billion.1 That translates into around $70 million in total property taxes alone, with the City’s portion being around $20 million annually. That’s a lot of cops. I wouldn’t add sales taxes to that figure just yet, as an NBA arena is already located in the City today. The buildings around the arena are new, but the economic activity from 40 home games is not.

The TIF

Valley View is in a two-mall TIF district that it shares with the Redbird Mall down south. A TIF district gives a portion of property taxes, specifically the portion in excess of the taxes collected on the date the district was formed, back to projects in the district. TIFs often fund things like nicer-than-normal streets and sidewalks, parks, or affordable housing. The great irony of this TIF thus far has been the success of Redbird and the vacantness of Valley View. Expect city leaders, especially ones in the North, to refer to this TIF constantly as a carrot to build consensus from the South. The same playbook, if you recall, was used to increase hotel taxes for the convention center, by promising Fair Park 20% of the increment. Redbird is the only side contributing serious funds to the TIF so far, and further, Redbird is largely over the hump of development there requiring major city funding. I would expect, when all the ink is dry and the zeros are counted, the Valley View/Mavs side ends up being the beneficiary of funds that Redbird paid into the TIF, but that is not how it will be sold to voters.

They announced this backwards

The Mavs have a site under contract and a press release, but no public will yet assembled to fund the arena. They are also still carrying baggage: the Luka trade, and a public association with the push to raze City Hall (which may actually be unfair, they really never directly waded into that fight), and the unpopularity of a casino. The more obvious path would have been to go to the City and say “how much money will you give us to stay in Dallas” before publicly announcing Plan A is to stay in Dallas.

The Stars

The Stars are reportedly talking with Plano about a billion-dollar arena at Willow Bend, but Plano is no sure thing. If I’m the City Manager, today I’m on the phone with the Stars, not the Mavs. Ask them if they want to be the sole-tenant of the AAC, and offer to throw in $100 million to $300 million to fix it up. We will make this money back and more keeping AAC alive.

Otherwise the AAC goes dark and drags energy from Victory Park and the Lower-Uptown-to-Crescent area with it, which has become our city’s most productive real estate. Also, the city owns the building. Demolition costs, if it ever came to that, would be on the taxpayer. The site if vacant would no doubt become the location of the next controversial, developer-friendly city RFP project.

Public Opinion

Most of the city, from my read of Facebook and Twitter, especially comments below posts from major sources like WFAA and the Morning News, is reading this story backward. Many people were learning only yesterday that the Mavs wanted out of the American Airlines Center at all. A good share of the anger online is not about Valley View, and not about the odds of wanting money for the stadium. It is simply the plain shock that a team that plays at an arena many fans are comfortable with and like and think of as relatively new (because it is, it’s the 12th newest stadium in the NBA) is going to be Mav-less in the near future. A good reminder of the hyper-informed news bubble many of us, myself included live in.

Traffic is the laziest reason to oppose anything + DART

After “Why leave AAC?” the second loudest objection online is traffic. I am done pretending traffic is a serious argument against building things. Per TxDOT traffic count maps, LBJ here already moves 270,000 cars per day, and the Tollway does about 100,000 south of the interchange, and 140,000 north of it. Preston Road north of 635 does an additional 50,000. These are enormous volumes every day, and adding ten to twenty thousand cars spread across all four directions of a major interchange and the associated surface roads over a few evening hours is not the apocalypse anyone would want you to believe it is. It is barely a 10% increase in what the area already handles every day. Also, eventually some percentage of people will live close enough to walk to games, specifically when three or four thousand apartments are added up here.

For anyone who truly cannot abide a single car of added traffic, I’ve got a house to sell you in Forney. Expect this cry to get louder as we get closer to the zoning case, particularly if the casino is not tacked on. I imagine it will be the main objection.

There is no mass transit at Valley View, though the arena will not open for 5 years. We have time to fix that. (There is existing mass transit at the Irving site, for what it’s worth). DART’s new Silver Line crosses about three miles north of the site. Assembling right-of-way would not be easy, but there is an existing (non-DART) short-haul rail line that goes south from the Silver Line, down Inwood Road, largely parallel to the Tollway. You only need to figure out how to get east the last one-mile or so. Based on the cost-per-mile and cost-per-station of the Silver Line, DART’s newest addition, we could add service to Valley View, a little back and forth loop to the Addison Station of the Silver Line, for approximately $250 to $300 million. That seems in the range of the possible, if not a downright good idea.

So, City Hall?

I suppose, for the moment City Hall is “saved,” only because no one has another use for the land this week. Strip the arena pressure out of it, and the most likely outcome I have to assume is the stupid one. Dallas returns to the status quo: deferring maintenance. I cannot imagine sustained political will to spend the $500-$600 million that even the new lower “phased-repair” approach would entail, now that spending is separate from the question of keeping the building at all.

Will we still talk about tearing down City Hall? I have to imagine at least a member or two of the 9-vote coalition that was advancing the plan was counting on a Mavericks arena as the real impetus. So, I don’t know that we have 8 votes to relocate City Hall now absent a clear, catalytic use for the land.

The plan now seems dead, or at least more dead than it was a week ago unless it was truly never about the Mavericks, and instead about the massive expenses of remaining or how the land could be put to better use as part of the convention center and surrounding development. It’s still a good argument on those merits alone.

To that point, one thing I could never make sense of was the Mavericks stated timeline of wanting the arena open by 2031, and the amount of time it would have taken to 1) identify replacement building(s) for all current city hall functions which includes the Emergency Operations Center and 911, 2) build out that space, 3) relocate all city functions to that new building(s) 4) abate the building of all asbestos, 5) demolish the building, and 6) hand it over to the Mavericks for a new arena, which would take some number of years to build. I suppose they could always hang out at the AAC for an extra year or two: the 2031 timeline to move is their own manufactured timeline.

So to my point above, maybe this conversation really was less about giving the site to the Mavericks (it was never really too logical of a fit strictly on a timing perspective), and more about getting it out of the City’s hands period. Maybe there is still a case to tear it down. Let’s have that fight now honestly and perhaps more slowly.

The casino objection that was never about casinos

I notice something has vanished from the conversation the instant the plan moved to Valley View. Among “Save City Hall” speakers at the recent public hearings, the insult-to-injury that drew the most emotional rhetoric was not just that the City Hall would be torn down, but that a casino would be built in its place. Nearly every mention of the Adelsons flattened them to “casino magnates” rather than the family that owns the local NBA team, which are both equally true.

Cara Mendelsohn and Bill Roth are seemingly the two happiest on the council about the plan, but are the kind of people I can’t imagine supporting a casino zoning case up north, which has not been filed, to be clear.

If a casino were the real fear, that crowd should still be furious, because the worst possible spot for one is a more residential-adjacent area like Valley View. There are many homes, single-family and multi-family, within 1,000 feet of Valley View. If there was one thing that the Mavs-to-City Hall side had right, it was the land beside a convention center and an NBA arena is the least offensive place to put a casino in the entire city, from a land-use perspective.

That’s all I got. I look forward to a lively email and comment section here!

love/hate/other to Kirk at onemansdallas@gmail.com

Last week, we looked at the surface-level questions about Fair Park. Who should run it? What kind of shape is it in? Those are the conversations we most often have about our largest park, the most scrutinized 277 acres in Dallas. They do not get at the deeper question.

What is Fair Park for?

Here is my working theory. The test is simple.

Fair Park should be a place where you can take a seven-year-old for the day and never worry about running out of free or nearly-free things to do. A place where you can wander from a museum to a playground to a fountain to an aquarium without constantly running into gates, asphalt, more parking lots, or feeling that the place does not belong to the public.

This is not a radical standard. Versions of it exist all across this country in cities that are richer or poorer than Dallas. Forest Park in St. Louis, Balboa Park in San Diego, Grant Park in Chicago. Great public places, when they work, are the physical infrastructure of a shared civic life. They ask nothing of you. There is nothing transactional about your time there, other than to leave the place as nice as you found it. Further, they are where we socialize the next generation. Fair Park should be a place where, on an ordinary day, the seven-year-old learns and knows what it feels like to belong in Dallas’s shared public life.

That description sounds soft until you notice how rare the experience has become. American life has been quietly privatizing for fifty years. Childhood especially. The world some of us half-remember was different. Bikes ridden out of sight from adults we knew. Pickup basketball. Wandering as an activity. That world has retreated almost entirely behind screens, liability waivers, and weekends scheduled into fine grids of things that cost money. A city in which every encounter is a transaction has stopped being a city in the fullest sense.

Great public places do not depend on constant novelty. They only need a base condition of usefulness. You can go because the weather is good. You can go because the kids need to run around. You can go because you are broke and the city still owes you somewhere beautiful.

Fair Park is not yet that kind of place. The reason it is not yet has less to do with what is inside the grounds than with what runs around them.

Walk past Fair Park sometime.

What you are walking along is not a street. It is half a street. A street is a thing with buildings on both sides. The fence around Fair Park is one long border with life on one side and an empty 277-acre mostly-parking lot on the other. The blocks of South Dallas that abut Fair Park’s perimeter have been heroically doing the impossible work of being a neighborhood next to a non-neighbor since at least 1936.

The fence is the first and largest problem at Fair Park. We will not put “the park” back in Fair Park until it looks like a place that is open to the public.

We get the park-and-neighborhood relationship wrong a lot. Backwards, even. This is not a new problem; it is identified in one of the first chapters of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities as one of urban planning’s original sins. Parks do not make great neighborhoods. Neighborhoods bestow usefulness upon working parks. Parks are not an end unto themselves. They are a pre-requisite, a context, in which public life can happen, but they are no guarantee that it will.

Further, giant fenced parks adjacent to residential neighborhoods, really a giant fenced anything, can actually become destructive to what surrounds them. Again, Jacobs called this concept a border vacuum: a long impermeable edge that pulls activity out of the blocks beside it. Hospitals, college campuses, 277-acre fences. No one opens a shop or a restaurant that faces a fence. You instead open a McDonald’s that most people experience from its drive-thru.

Get past the fence, and you’re still walking another 2,000-odd feet through hot concrete parking lots until you make it to the children’s aquarium, the Discovery Gardens, or any attraction buried within Fair Park. The parking lots serve as yet another barrier behind the fence and communicate clearly that this place is for people who drive in once a year, not people who could enjoy it on a Tuesday.

The new Community Park, approved by City Council in February, is the city’s first attempt at a correction. It is 10.5 acres of green space on land that is currently parking spaces. Good. Build it. Build it beautifully and generously and unapologetically. Then remember that it is being built on the wrong side of the fence.

Many of the walks inside Fair Park are over a mile round-trip, and every path to the new Community Park has zero shade. Where the fence stands today and everywhere inside it, we could instead ring the campus with one continuous shaded path of trees and grass, connecting the DART stations, the Community Park, and the museums. (This is my radical plan, plant trees in a park.) We can even call it a highway, since we love building those.

Next, Fair Park has too many vacant buildings, and they are hard to fill. An ideal tenant has to want an old protected, historic building, with the City of Dallas as their landlord, and a calendar greatly disrupted each fall by the State Fair. It’s a tough sell. It’s no accident the Perot Museum’s predecessor, The Museum of Nature and Science, now sits in Uptown on private land today. The fix is to stop treating every empty space as needing a permanent tenant and instead start treating them as venues: spaces for the trade shows, summer camps, school programs, and seasonal events that already work elsewhere in this city.

The easy argument to make, the one that I have just allowed myself to slip into, is that we should build a park so well programmed and so beautiful that people will drive from all over the Metroplex and all over Dallas to experience it. It would be easier to build the will and the philanthropic support to make Fair Park a much nicer place if it were something people drive to from richer parts of the city. That may still be the winning political argument.

It cannot be the point.

The base level of usefulness for Fair Park has to start with the people that live closest to it. Otherwise, we are just building Six Flags.

Once we invert the “parks help neighborhoods” fallacy, we start to clearly see that anything good for South Dallas is good for Fair Park. Not all things good for Fair Park are good for South Dallas. In fact, many of them are not.

Renovating the Cotton Bowl into a venue that can hold more 50,000-person concerts means more noise, more bumper-to-bumper traffic, more late nights for Fair Park’s neighbors. Adding shade, playgrounds, splashpads, and ordinary civic life that the children who live in the neighborhood would actually use is the kind of change that should come first.

The Dallas Observer ran a good piece last week on the City’s latest plan for fixing the latest plans for fixing Fair Park. Park Director John Jenkins described recent Cotton Bowl renovations as the first step toward “another revenue stream.” The city is in early stages of planning a hotel in the middle of Fair Park, north of Dos Equis Pavilion. The hotel plan briefed to Council on April 6 promises that lease revenue from the hotel could “mostly or fully fund all park and facility maintenance and operations.”

Under state law, a hotel is one of the only commercial buildings you can build on parkland. The city is reaching for a hotel not because it is an obvious answer to a question about Fair Park or South Dallas. They are arriving at the conclusion Fair Park needs a hotel because it is one of the only ways for anyone to make money off of Fair Park, the city included. They are so preoccupied thinking of if they could do something, they have given no thought to whether they should. (I call this Jurassic Park syndrome.)

Regardless of the merits of the hotel, the conversation leaves us with the recurring standard where most Fair Park conversations end today. Fair Park must figure out how to pay for itself.

We do not ask roads to pay for themselves. We do not ask libraries to be self-sustaining. We do not ask the fire department to break even. Public infrastructure is something a city builds because it is worth having.

We already created a new revenue stream for Fair Park, barely four years ago. Prop A, from the November 2022 election, created a local 2% tax on hotel stays, of which 20% goes to Fair Park. That stream is around $4 or 5 million per year. In debt terms, meaning how much money can the city borrow against that tax revenue, it supports roughly $50 million in project financing.

We borrowed against this 2% tax already in 2023, which was only enough to pay for a third of the $140 million Cotton Bowl renovations.

Dallas has not forgotten how to spend public money on public things. Recent major capital commitments for parks and event spaces, going back to the 2017 Bond package, total roughly $897 million. About $707 million went to non-Fair Park parks and venues. Even of the slice that went to Fair Park, the Cotton Bowl received $140 million. Fair Park, excluding the Cotton Bowl, received just $50 million, only 6% of all major park capital funding over the last decade.

The point is not that every dollar on that chart should have been spent on Fair Park. The point is simpler. When Dallas wants to spend public money on public projects, we find a way. When we had money for Fair Park, the Cotton Bowl got the first bite, and it ate the whole turkey leg. The rest of Fair Park is now being told to find a business model.

We are preparing to spend billions, three billion to be precise, rebuilding the convention center. Whatever its merits, it is a building for dentists from Ohio to visit for three days and leave with dorky lanyards. We have not lost the ability to spend big on projects. We have only lost the ability, the will, or the confidence to spend big on ourselves.

In 2036, Texas turns 200. The Fair Park we know from the Centennial turns 100. This is our civic deadline. The rest of the state, maybe the rest of the country, is going to grade our book report.

It is honestly already a little late to start caring about it. Dallas is running out of time to decide that the 2036 bicentennial is the moment that Fair Park fully reenters civic life.

The Centennial Exposition was built with almost absurd confidence, bordering on arrogance. Not every status quo that generation maintained deserves celebration. The 1936 exposition reflected the exclusions of its time, and the neighborhoods around Fair Park paid the price for ambitions that were not shared. Nostalgia gets dishonest quickly here.

The work, however, is to recover the courage without repeating the cruelty.

Fair Park is a mirror. Holding it up, you see Dallas. The ugly parts and the history. What used to be. What could be.

Do we believe children, specifically children from South Dallas, deserve somewhere beautiful to spend a Saturday? Do we believe the buildings we inherited from a people more confident, more arrogant, and more ambitious than us are obligations rather than liabilities?

Do we believe a future Dallas should be able to look back and say the people of 2026 were capable of building something generous, durable, and free?

What do we owe Dallas? What do we owe ourselves?

We owe ourselves at least one place in this city that feels like it belongs to everybody. A place where a child from South Dallas and a lawyer from Lakewood and maybe even a tourist from Houston can go and instinctively understand the same thing: this city built something beautiful for people who may never be able to repay it.

That is what great public spaces are. They are acts of civic generosity. We inherited one at Fair Park. We owe the next generation a better one.

love/hate/other to Kirk at onemansdallas@gmail.com

Programming note: I will be off next week for summer break. See you in June!

I went to Fair Park a few weeks ago to volunteer at an event, and on the walk in I started tallying signs of life.

The Music Hall had a Broadway matinee. The crowd shuffling toward the doors looked less like the cosmopolitan theater types at the Winspear Opera House and more like the Methodists arriving for church. The men had on their nice khakis. I parked in the wrong location and ended up walking past the Children’s Aquarium. It was a weekend of spring break, and you could tell. The line outside the door announced itself before I reached it: sticky kids, grateful parents who had decided two air-conditioned hours were worth the price of admission. Somewhere else, signage for some sort of job fair or workforce training event was drawing a crowd of mainly young Black men. They stood out among the gray-haired Methodists.

A Big Tex-sized hole stood at the heart of all of it. He hibernates in winter and spring and summer.

Fair Park was not roaring. It was not transformed, but it was not in need of “saving” or any of the other dramatic words it would be tempting to write. It was in the loosest but still important sense, working.

It looked like Dallas.

Anyone who has been on these grounds in late September knows what this place sounds like with the volume turned up. Big Tex booms a ‘HOWDY, FOLKS’ every some-odd minutes. The SkyWay creaks overhead. The smell of corny dogs, turkey legs, beer, and, when you are downwind, livestock comes from every direction at once. The Auto Show fills the Centennial Building and the more-aptly named Automobile Building. Two or two-and-a-half million people pass through over twenty-four days.

I love it. In doses. I have eaten the corny dogs, spent too much money on coupons, and taken perhaps my favorite picture of my wife, then girlfriend, looking back and laughing on the Swings as the sun sets. The State Fair is loud, excessive, sentimental, strange, and glorious. For twenty-four days a year, nobody has to ask what Fair Park is for.

The State Fair answers the question by drowning it out. For three and a half weeks, Fair Park has purpose, ritual, money, motion, and smell.

The trouble begins when the fair leaves. Fair Park is not barren those months. In fact, just as many visitors will go to Fair Park over the other eleven months as will go to the State Fair, on days like the Saturday morning I found myself there last.

But on the other 341 days, Fair Park becomes a civic problem again: a collection of public buildings, parking lots, private contracts, deferred maintenance, parking lots, racial inequity, periodic scandals, parking lots, and more than a few broken promises spread across 277 acres.

To understand Fair Park in March, you have to understand three versions of it at once. There is the hundred-year story, in which an old fairground became one of the great civic stages of the Texas Centennial. There is the ten-year story, in which Dallas tried to solve Fair Park by changing who ran it. Then there is the one-year story, in which the latest structure failed and the city took back day-to-day control.

Start with the long history. The State Fair predates the Fair Park we recognize today. According to the Texas State Historical Association’s Texas Handbook, the city acquired the fairgrounds from the original State Fair’s board of directors in 1904, beating out offers that would have seen it become a new residential addition to the City. The old private fair association had fallen on hard times after the state banned wagering on horse races. The City took the land from the State Fair but agreed to keep letting them use the fairgrounds and agreed to assume their debts. For decades, it ran on a simple arrangement. The city owned the property and treated it more or less as a park. The State Fair and its board occupied and operated the grounds each fall.

The physical Fair Park we have today, the one that looms large in the Dallas imagination, was made in 1936.

That year, Dallas hosted the Texas Centennial Exposition, and the old State Fair grounds were remade into an exposition city. It was Texas’s hundredth birthday, but Dallas built it like a world’s fair: in plaster, concrete, murals, fountains, sculpture, neon, and ceremony. Twelve million people came through the exhibitions of 1936 and 1937, roughly two times the entire population of Texas at the time.

San Antonio had the Alamo. Houston had San Jacinto. Dallas had the weakest claim on the history of Texan independence of all the cities vying to host the Centennial but the strongest civic machine. Again turning to the Texas Handbook, our Boosters put up a total of $8 million of their own money (worth $200 million today) and outmuscled cities where Santa Anna or Davy Crockett had actually been.

The result is the Fair Park we know: the Hall of State, the Esplanade, the Tower Building, the murals, the sculpture, and the facades. A temporary exposition gave Dallas its most permanent public prize.1

This is the first complication. Fair Park is not simply a park that has fallen on hard times. It is an exposition ground that outlived its exposition. Its buildings were designed to astonish crowds in 1936, no thought for what they could be doing on a Saturday morning in 2026.

For decades, Dallas got by without a working theory of what to do with this temple to New Deal architecture. The old bargain was the State Fair returned every fall and gave the place its annual reason for being. The rest of the year, some aging buildings held events, the Cotton Bowl hosted a football game or two, it saw children on field trips to the Science Place (which closed after the Perot Museum opened in 2012) while some spaces sat empty, and much of the acreage sat as unused surface parking.

By the 2010s, that bargain no longer looked like stewardship. Mayor Mike Rawlings convened a Blue Ribbon Task Force (not just any kind of task force) in 2014 to say what generations of Dallasites already knew: Fair Park was underused, undermaintained, and overdue for a new future. The Task Force recommended a public-private partnership with power to control the revitalization of Fair Park, including its relationship with the State Fair.

That last phrase was the radioactive part. It treated the State Fair not as the immovable object around which every other idea needed to bend, but as one tenant in Fair Park’s larger civic future. It was like escaping the gravity of a supermassive black hole. Proposals that emerged to shrink the footprint or the number of days before and after the Fair reserved for set-up were short lived.

Rawlings turned to chief DART visionary and former Hunt Oil CEO Walt Humann to build a private foundation that could take over day-to-day operations and raise the level of ambition, following the path taken by both the Dallas Zoo and the Arboretum.

Humann's plan reached the Park Board in 2016, which entailed forming the “Fair Park Texas Foundation” to which the City would hand over operations of Fair Park. The city attorney later ruled (no doubt with some prodding by the plan’s detractors) that handing operations to Humann’s new foundation without public bidding would violate state law. The 2018 RFP that followed still required the operator to be a nonprofit. It produced Fair Park First: another new local nonprofit partnered with a for-profit venue operator Spectra, who ran convention centers and professional sports arenas around the country, later acquired by the Oak View Group.

The dream was familiar: keep the public asset public, summon private-sector competence, launder it with nonprofit virtue, and hope the resulting creature could do what City Hall had not. Spectra’s bid immediately saved the City around $10 million per year compared to what we spent running the place ourselves. The council chamber burst into applause when the contract was approved, per the Morning News.

The arrangement had structural problems from the start. Fair Park First was brand new and had no money, other than what Spectra would pay for. Its first executive director reported to the nonprofit board on paper, while also being paid by Spectra. Fair Park First was a contractual middle man between Spectra and the City of Dallas itself, preventing direct accountability from City Council or the Park Board for the performance or condition of Fair Park. For several years, the place ran anyway, until 2024 audit findings found $5.7 million in private donor funds had been allegedly misspent on operations and other disallowed uses.

Finally in 2025 the City brought Fair Park operations back inside Park and Recreation and terminated the Spectra (now OVG360) contract. Fair Park First, the nonprofit, is still in the picture as a conservancy to raise and steward private philanthropy.

That is the “one year” story, but it still points back to the old question. Dallas had never decided what Fair Park really was, so we kept experimenting instead with who should have the keys.

The model Dallas is reaching for now has a successful American example in Forest Park Forever, the nonprofit conservancy founded in 1986 to support Forest Park in St. Louis. Like Fair Park, Forest Park is a centrally-located civic asset that once hosted a World’s Fair. It hosts the zoo, the Muny Theatre, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and is the kind of place you can take a seven-year-old for the day and never worry about running out of free or nearly-free things to do. The city owns and operates the park, while the conservancy’s role is in raising private money, supporting planning, funding capital projects, and giving donors a durable civic vehicle that lasts longer than an election cycle for stewardship.

It is not hard to see why Dallas would find that attractive. The comparison clarifies the problem more than it solves it. Forest Park is mostly a park. There is more grass than concrete, and it’s not particularly close. Fair Park is not a park, at least not in the ordinary sense.

Fair Park is a fairground, a historic exposition, a landlord, a parking reservoir, and a neighborhood wound. It is a lot of things, but a park is not one of them. Every major plan for Fair Park over the last generation has circled some version of the same aphoristic phrase: “Put the ‘Park’ back in Fair Park.” It sounds obvious, which is one reason Dallas keeps repeating it. The phrase may also be a diagnostic error. Fair Park was never simply a park that was short on grass. It was a fairground that became a Centennial Exposition ground that became an inheritance and a problem no single model could solve.

We are working on that.

On February 25, 2026, the City Council unanimously approved a $40 million development agreement with Fair Park First for a new 10.5-acre “Community Park” inside Fair Park’s eastern boundary, where the largest parking lots now sit. Funding is roughly 90 percent raised. Groundbreaking is targeted for August 2026, after the FIFA World Cup Fanfest is hosted here. It is a step in the direction of putting the “Park” back in Fair Park.

The Community Park is, among other things, a moral make-good to the residents of South Dallas. As catalogued most recently by Zac Crain for D Magazine in “The Fair Park Lie”, in 1968, the city cleared nearly 300 Black-owned homes to expand Fair Park’s parking lots.2 Residents fought eminent domain offers they regarded as grossly unfair. At one 1969 meeting, civil rights leader J.B. Jackson pointed out that land belonging to Councilman Abe Meyer had been appraised at $4.17 per square foot, while Black-owned land on the same block had been appraised at 75 cents.

The promise of a park is not new. Throughout the 1968 takings, Park Director L.B. Houston assured the public the new acreage would include preserved trees, picnic areas, a lighted playground, basketball courts, and maybe enough room for a baseball diamond. He spoke of “getting away from concrete.”

It became 4,000 parking spaces, same as it is today.

Fair Park First will oversee the development of the Community Park on behalf of the city, aiming to open by late 2027 on a timeline dictated by some of its federal funding. It will be a test and tone-setting exercise for Fair Park First, now without the private-sector operator Spectra at its side.

The new arrangement may solve a custody problem. It gives Park and Recreation the keys, Fair Park First a narrower philanthropic role, and the long-awaited Community Park a path to construction. Still, custody is not a replacement for purpose. The temptation is to answer purpose with use: more events, more programming, more grass. The deeper question is whether Dallas still believes our shared public life deserves a monumental home.

The 1936 question was how Dallas could show itself off for Texas and the country. Last decade’s question was who should run the place. Last year’s question was how to recover from another failed structure.

The next question is harder.

What is Fair Park for?

That is the question for next week.

Two weeks ago, I argued that living in a city means living close enough to other people for their lives to affect yours. That is the bargain, usually for the better. The schools and hospitals and parks and jobs do not arrive separately from the traffic, the noise, the apartment building, the stranger. A city is how ordinary people afford a life none of us could buy alone.

Before that, I promised that every political choice has a cost, and that the work of politics is not pretending otherwise, but being honest about who pays and why. Choices should hurt. If it does not hurt, we have not understood what we are giving up, or we are asking to give up nothing at all.

These two arguments collided at a microphone in City Hall a little over a week ago. That is where the collision most often happens, and it is one whose ripples are now reaching beyond the chamber, including a recall petition for a sitting member of the City Council.

The claim? No one is listening to our residents.

Listening

The Dallas City Council voted 9-5 on April 22 to approve a zoning change for three and a half acres of undeveloped land along Coombs Creek in North Oak Cliff. The change allowed about eighty homes (apartments, if you must) on a site previously zoned for about fifty homes, which would have meant more lot coverage and less protection for the floodplain. What the developer offered instead of straight multifamily zoning, was lot coverage capped at thirty percent, no short-term rentals, more parking spaces than the city would otherwise require, and a twenty-foot environmental setback from the creek.

Twenty-six speakers signed up to testify, most opposed. The hearing ran about two hours at the end of an already long council meeting. It was after 10:30 p.m. when the vote was finally taken.

Neighbors were not crazy for showing up. Eighty new homes on a dead-end street is not costless to the people who already live there. More people means more cars, more activity, more strangers, more moments that remind us of a city we share with a million other people.

During the meeting, Council Member Cara Mendelsohn, voting no, asked, “When are we going to start listening to our residents?”

The council had just spent the evening listening to its residents. People came to the microphone. They gave their names, their addresses, their worries, their reasons. They were heard.

What Mendelsohn meant by “listening” was something else. It is what most of us mean, if we are honest. She meant the council should have agreed with the residents she agreed with, and those residents should have been understood to speak for residents in general, who should have been understood to speak for The People, whose voice the council was elected to honor.

Each link in that chain is a small inaccuracy. Together they become a civic theology in which the people who show up become The People, and the act of their losing becomes proof that nobody listened.

The neighbors are not wrong to show up. They are doing exactly what the system is built to absorb. They are being listened to. The danger comes when their testimony is treated not as evidence to be weighed, but as sovereignty.

That is not what representative government is for.

Representative government exists because every private interest cannot be given final authority over the common life. Everyone gets a voice because everyone has dignity. No one gets a veto because, well, then everyone else does too.

We elect people to be tradeoff-weighing machines. That is their job. They listen to the people in the room, and then they are supposed to remember the people who are not in the room. The future tenant. The renter whose lease renews in August. The teacher who works in Dallas but cannot afford Dallas. The adult who grew up here and can no longer come home.

They are residents too, or they would be if we built them a place to live.

The costs of building are most visible to the people who live on a street. The costs of not building are scattered across people who do not yet know one another. The neighbor can point to traffic and say, “This will change my life.” The person priced out of Dallas cannot point to the apartment that was never built and say, “That would have been home.”

American political scientist Mancur Olson described this exact pattern in a famous 1965 book, The Logic of Collective Action, as “concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.” In this case, concentrated costs and diffuse benefits. A small organized group will fight hard for a benefit or against a burden that matters intensely to them. The larger public often will not organize because each individual share of benefit per person, per renter, is too small, too abstract, or too delayed.

Power is Power

The zoning case has the same geometry. On one side are the neighbors whose daily lives may change in understandable ways. On the other are the future neighbors who will call these apartments home. Behind them are Dallas’s hundreds of thousands of renting households whose rents are set by a market that responds, slowly and imperfectly but in the long run, to whether we build enough homes.

If the “unknown future neighbors” are too abstract for you, the City of Dallas conducts a city-wide citizen survey every year. The 2025 edition found that 46% of Dallas residents believed “access to affordable, quality housing” should be one of the city’s top priorities. First place, and it isn’t close. The 2024 and 2023 surveys said the same thing. Again and again, housing comes first as the top issue residents think the city should prioritize.

The hundreds of thousands of residents in this city for whom housing is a top priority were not at the microphone that night. That includes the majority of Dallas residents who are renters and see their rents going up every year, or who would live in the neighborhood they grew up in if they could afford it, or who are telling themselves Celina isn’t really that far away.

Here is what bothers me. It is not the anger. Anger is ordinary. It is not the self-interest. We all have interests. It is the laundering of self-interest through the language of democracy by equating the loudest voices with the ones most worth listening to. It is the conversion of “this imposes a cost on me” into “the city has no right to choose otherwise.”

The danger in local politics is that domination often arrives wearing the clothes of neighborliness. The thing being requested is still power: the power to decide that other people's need for housing matters less than one's own desire for things to stay as we imagine we like them.

Power is power. It does not become more noble when exercised by a neighborhood association instead of a corporation. A veto does not become more democratic because the people asking for it say “residents” a lot.

If you oppose eighty homes on your street, say so. If you believe the traffic, parking, drainage, or change are too much, make that argument. But then say the rest of it. Say that your preferred outcome means fewer homes. Say that it means fewer people can live near the jobs, parks, schools, and grandparents that make Dallas worth living in.

The tradeoffs do not automatically make you wrong. I only argue we all owe each other the obligation to name them.

Here’s my turn. This does not mean every project is good because someone might live there. I cannot tradeoff-launder my side to always be right. Not every idea that a real estate developer has ever had is a good one. Let me say that from personal experience.

Further, not every block of this city is an apartment complex that just doesn’t know it yet. Our neighborhoods should be places where people can make a life and stay long enough to know the dogs and the kids and the cracked sidewalks. That can include homes of more shapes and sizes, for more ages and stages. The list of options should always include single-family homes. What I am submitting is there is an option for “protecting the neighborhood” that is not never building anything in it ever again, but instead, building units that will serve younger families, downsizers, widows, or retirees better than the four-bedroom house.

The Recall

After the zoning vote, a campaign appeared online to recall Chad West, the council member in whose district the case was located. The first justification cited for the recall: “Failure to meaningfully listen to and respond to residents.”

As of this writing, recallchadwest.com is anonymous. (I get to criticize that now.) They are saying there are people who need to be listened to, but they just aren’t ready to specify whom. The domain name of the website is registered through a service that hides the name of the person who bought it. I reached out on April 28 to the listed contact email on the website, but no one got back to me.

The speakers at the zoning hearing, to their credit, accepted the cost of being identified. They came to the microphone, gave their addresses, and stood by their preferences in front of their neighbors.

The unnamed organizers of the recall have not done the same. They want the moral weight of what their website labels “grassroots organizing” without the burden of belonging to a community in public. Where the rhetoric of “We the People” is turned up the loudest, the names of those people are absent.

West was re-elected less than twelve months ago with 59% of the vote. He was re-elected on a public record that included workforce housing and zoning reform. This vote was completely consistent with that record.

Elections are how residents are listened to. Public hearings matter, but they are not a replacement for the voting booth. The people who returned West to office are residents too. Representative democracy works because our officials have to face all of us, at regular intervals, and we get to decide together how good of a job they did at listening.

A veto

The angry neighbor is so close to being right. He is right that his street matters. He is right that people who live on a street facing change are owed a voice.

But that thinking allows us to make a fatal move. We treat the fact that a concern is valid as proof that it should be decisive. We mistake injury for authority. We mistake being heard for being obeyed.

That is the line I am asking all of us to do the hard work of drawing.

A city is the place where your good and my good have to survive contact with each other. Our desire for quiet is legitimate. Another person’s need for a home is also. Our fear of change is human. Another family’s hope to make a better life here is too. Politics is the hard work of weighing those realities without pretending any of them vanish because they are inconvenient to our side.

A veto is not just a “no” to a project. It is a “no” to the city as a shared undertaking. It says the present resident counts, the future resident does not. The visible neighbor counts, the absent neighbor does not. The person with a microphone counts, the person priced out before they ever got one does not.

This line of thinking reduces a city into a customer service department. It bothers me every time I see the city use the new motto, “Service First” (recently expedited to “Service First, Now!”). I understand what it means. The pothole should get fixed. The trash should get picked up. Fine.

We are not customers. We are not consumers of products made by a corporation called Dallas.

We are citizens.

That is a reciprocal relationship. It means the city owes us something, and it also means we owe something back. It means that on some days, the city will ask more of us than it gives us. Patience, or inconvenience, or willingness to live near people we did not personally invite.

That is not the burden of living in a city. That is the point.

love/hate/other to Kirk at: onemansdallas@gmail.com

I was bound to run out of things to say, at least at the pace I was saying them. I do not want to pretend I always have something to say, nor subject you to that either.

No contrarian opinions or Greek philosophy today. All I am going to offer you is my real name and a little more about me, say thank you, and tell you the plan going forward.

To get to the anticlimactic part out of the way: Hi, I’m Kirk. (Hi, Kirk.) I’m a thirty-year-old guy who grew up in Memphis before moving to Dallas a little over a decade ago to attend SMU, which led to now working in real estate development as tipped off last week, and I live off of Lemmon near Love Field with my wife.

For those of you expecting anything more exciting than that, sorry to burst your bubble. Several of you wrote in with theories as to who I might be, and while I was flattered by all of them, I am a nobody (and plan on remaining one). If you Google my name, the first thing that pops up is a minor league baseball player who last touched the mound before I was born. I am not even the most famous Kirk Presley, and there are only four of us. I don’t say that to put myself down in any way. I just mean, politically speaking or otherwise, none of you are going to have heard of me. I am just a guy who liked writing, with a couple of things to get off my chest, and now my chest is lighter.

Writing pseudonymously (big word) never sat well with what I've been arguing for. It was nice that it kept the focus on what was being said and not who was saying it, but it came with a credibility tradeoff as well.

The Plan

When I started writing I felt like I had a few specific things to say, and seeing as people seemed interested in reading and sharing it, I kept writing. A decade-plus lived in Dallas came out through my keyboard, years of ideas and opinions I’ve never said out loud or found a home for.

Some of them, the thoughts of an carpetbagging outsider who grew up somewhere else with much less going on. Some of them, the thoughts of a newly-minted or at least imagined insider who spends (an inordinate amount of) time at my day job thinking about city or state policy, particularly regarding housing.

This is a project I am still very interested in pursuing. At the very least, I want to provide a counterweight to the “everything is bad/corruption/insert thing I don’t like” social media discourse that both right- and left-leaning people seem to play into, especially regarding local politics.

There will be more articles. Look for 1,200 or 1,800 words in the future, something more respectful both of your time and mine. Weekly seems to work, but again, I don’t want to pretend I always have something worth saying. This is one of those weeks, the city’s Friday afternoon announcement that it’s broke notwithstanding. (Raise taxes. There: I fixed it.)

Going forward, I plan to lean into data and visualizations as a follow up to the Leaked City Hall Emails viewer that I built. AI-powered coding has greatly increased the speed at which I can build a website or contextualize public data on a map. I think our discourse could be better for it.

To that end, I am working on a few data projects already about the latest release of Census data, the length of City Council meetings, and one I’m sharing here: a public map for the state alcohol tax by venue, which helps you answer some of life’s most persistent questions such as, “who sells more booze, Round-Up Saloon or Nick & Sam’s?”

Also, I am hoping to do a little more real “journalism” than just policy and opinion writing. That means meeting with real people (read: possibly you) with their own side of the story, reaching out to councilmembers or other players for comment (it still sounds so fancy and official), and even maybe trying to break a little news here and there.

What I wrote a few months back still holds: I’m not trying to be right. I’m trying to be honest, and I’m trying to be worth arguing with. Shorter articles, more data, more weight over volume. I hope it’s all in service of that goal.

To everyone who has read, shared, and reached out to me over the last three months, you are the reason I did this for more than a week or two. Thank you.

One more thing, now that I am writing under my real name, I will be able to write for other more-official outlets. I hope I’m not betraying any trust by saying you will likely get to read bits of my writing in D Magazine at some point this year (Sorry, Tim.)

I am aiming among other things, for those to be a little funnier than the ground I’ve tread on here thus far. Y’all will get to be the judge of that.

As always, love, hate or other to Kirk Presley at onemansdallas@gmail.com

This week, I am going to attempt to answer that very same question. What is this all for? What’s the point of living in a city? What should we build here, if not toll roads and arts districts? Along the way, this will mean quoting at least one more dead guy, and at points, will become a full-throated defense of real estate developers.

If that sounds like a contradiction to last week, I understand. I hope I can show you how it is not.

Dallas’s Booster Myth is about building grand things for the sake of control or love of self. Our current housing crisis (we will discuss whether we should call it that) is about our having failed in building ordinary things for ordinary people. The strip mall down the street, the vacant lot next to my house, the new apartments someone proposed at a commercial intersection, there are thousands of projects out there smaller than a new toll road from which ordinary people would stand to benefit.

There is a reason we need to talk about building ordinary things. Housing has gotten more expensive, relative to people’s incomes. In 1965, the median U.S. home cost $21,500 while the median family earned $6,900, a ratio of roughly 3.1x income. As of 2025, the median home costs $416,900, which is now 5.0x the median household income of $83,150.

Those are the national figures. In Dallas, the pattern is even more stark. Over the same time period, according to Census data, the ratio has gone from 2.0x to 4.4x. The cost of housing in Dallas relative to incomes went up 120%, meaning it more than doubled, while nationwide it went up 60%.

The ratios are abstract. Here is the same fact at work in the life of a family. Last year, the average age at which mothers had their first child was twenty-eight. The median age of the first-time homebuyer last year was forty.

There is a reason homes are getting harder to afford here. We are not building enough of them. This is often hard to see, as when we tear down one house, the thing we build most often in its place is a larger and more expensive house. The reason for that is simple enough. The only thing you could build in that spot, on a majority of Dallas’s land, is another single-family home, one expensive enough to justify the demolition of another.

That policy, zoning, is a choice. As with all choices, it comes with tradeoffs. However, I submit those tradeoffs are going to be increasingly more expensive for all of us to live with as we ask a declining or stagnant population to foot the bill of running this place. The prescriptions or the sacrifices that we will propose instead when we could have just built housing will start to get sillier, more expensive, or more painful the longer we wait.

Further, it is a choice that is starting to defy the very purpose of living in a city at all.

The Third Rail

There are three reasons I am willing to grab this third rail with both hands and stand up for zoning changes (about as popular as root canals) and real estate developers (about as trusted as used car salesmen).

First, real estate, in all its forms, has an odd habit of breaking our brains. It leads us to say and do things we would never say or do about any other industry. There are good enough reasons for this, given it is a basic human need, but it’s also fair to mention that per Census data, 40 percent of Dallasites are real estate investors via their homes, who directly benefit from housing values when they go up.

Second, we have a genuine problem in this city with the cost of housing. We have a hard time talking honestly about it, given the weird politics in which housing lives. Everyone “wants” affordable housing1, but no one wants their house to be worth less. We are going to keep having the wrong conversations until we are honest about this.

The third reason I will stand up for real estate developers, and perhaps the most important one as I decide on the right mix of anonymity and honesty with my readers — I am one. At least, I work for one. (I suppose working at a farm makes you a farmer. But, working at a hospital does not make you a doctor. In this instance, I think the former rule fits. We’ll go with it, I am a real estate developer.)

My goal in writing this blog was to help advance an honest discussion about policy and politics that affect Dallas. Honesty here includes being open and transparent about my own intentions or biases. I want to say up front that it is more than fair to think I have a dog in this fight. It is also a topic, in my humble opinion, that I spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about. Expertise is a two-edged sword.

The Thing That Breaks Our Brains

Starbucks, according to the quarterly SEC filings, has an operating margin in North America of about 22%. Southwest Airlines, conveniently for our example, has also averaged around 22%. D.R. Horton, the largest homebuilder in America for 24 consecutive years: 20 to 22%, depending on the quarter. These are their profit margins before interest, taxes, or depreciation. It is the cleanest measure of what they sold you, less the cost of the things they had to assemble to sell it to you.

Nobody organizes a town hall against Starbucks for earning a 22 percent margin on coffee. Nobody calls Southwest greedy for turning fuel and labor into a seat they sell for twenty two cents more than it cost them. We understand, in those cases, that a business takes inputs, transforms them, and sells the output at a markup. It is not in-and-of-itself evidence of exploitation. It is commerce. We participate in it all day without distress.

Then we get to real estate and something happens. Housing is different. It is not a latte or a flight to Phoenix. We all have to live somewhere. It is what Maslow’s pyramid would call a “physiological need.” That puts it on a list that includes air, food, and water. There is something, for lack of a better word, icky, about someone making money on housing.

Someone, unless that person is us.

We have all heard some version of the idea that housing is a great long-term investment, a path to long-term financial stability, or a major generator of wealth. These are all just abstract ways to think about selling your house for more than you paid for it (or paid to build it.) This is also what real estate developers do. The “ickiness” puts onto others a standard to which we do not equally hold ourselves.

The downside of this system, of constantly increasing home values, is that it is a zero-sum game. Homes were good investments because they were scarce. That fact was exactly as good for one group of people as it was bad for another. The house that you sell for more than you paid for it is a house that someone had to buy for more than they could have bought it for 10 or 20 years ago. It is no longer costing them 2.0x or 3.0x their income, it is now 4.0x or 5.5x their income. It is a home that the homeowner living it may not even be able to afford again today, and in a neighborhood their adult children could not afford to move into either.

How This Plays Out

Everybody wants affordable housing. No one wants their house to be worth less. These two facts are in constant and perpetual tension with one another. Our conversations about housing are not going to be honest until we admit that anything that appears to affect the value of homes is going to be a tough sell.

That seems to include, building more of them.

A developer files for a zoning case in Dallas. It may involve apartments. Five stories, maybe fewer. The neighbors show up at a town hall or a community meeting. They raise traffic, parking, height, shadows, or storm drainage, generally in good faith, as issues.

Less charitably, some of these changes, traffic for one, simply come with the territory of living in a city of a million people. I told you I would offer a theory of a city. Here is the simplest one I know: a city is how ordinary people afford a life none of us could buy alone. A city multiplies our access to civilization. It does not itself create a good life, but in the words of Aristotle: “exists for the sake of the good life.”2 (I promised you: more dead guys.)

Living in the city means, guarantees even, you will interact with and be influenced by the people and the buildings around you. Schools, hospitals, arts and sports you would never have if you lived alone. The whole point of living close to other people is living close to other people. Maybe, not always for the better. But that is the bargain and it has been that way since Athens or Babylon. The good outweighs the bad. If not, we could have all moved to Oklahoma years ago.

Back at the zoning hearing, after the concerns about traffic or parking, someone approaches the microphone and finally says the word: greedy. The developer is greedy. Greed is bad. We learned this in Sunday school. The moral claim shuts down the conversation before it starts. The whole project is illegitimate because someone intends to profit from it.

We spend twenty-three hours a day participating in markets where profits are the ordinary course of getting a cup of coffee brewed or a flight taking off. We spend the twenty-fourth hour at a zoning hearing pretending profit is the reason to never build anything again.

There is a real tension here, and it isn't anyone's fault individually. Most of us own our homes chiefly because we want to live in them, but also in part because we hope they will grow in value. When something new is proposed down the street, it is genuinely challenging to separate what we think about the project from what we worry it might do to the largest asset most of us will ever own. That's not a character flaw. It is an incentive of the system that has been set up, and it is why these conversations are so hard to have honestly.

However, when we protest new development, some of what we are asking for is simply to not be burdened with the cost of living in a city. We want the benefits of their ever-appreciating home values near the hospitals and the jobs, without the chance that anything else nearby could ever mess it up. Further, it is the same double-standard at play again, developers are greedy for selling homes for more than it cost to build, but it’s fine when I do it.

Here is the other problem with the greedy argument. I don't think the people saying it actually believe it. I do not think an organized bloc of Dallas homeowners recently became Marxists and now believe the state should seize the means of housing production. If the same building were proposed by a nonprofit, most of the same people would still show up to oppose it. The claim isn't really about profit at all.

What’s In a Name?

A word you hear often about the shortage of homes that the average person can afford, is “crisis.” This term is not without its detractors. This point came up this month during a housing hearing at Dallas City Council. Councilwoman Cara ‘14-1’ Mendelsohn asked, "So, if we've added all of these units and we have vacancy and we're not adding population, why do you think we're calling it a housing crisis?"

There is not a housing crisis in the way that, during COVID, there was a ventilator crisis. Housing is not physically absent. Homes exist. D.R. Horton built 85,000 of them nationwide last year. Further, vacant units exist. The crisis is not that housing has disappeared. The issue is just that it costs too much.

Still, let’s take vacant apartments and a flat population as good faith objections. To be fair, they both certainly seem like the kind of evidence you’d look for to determine the existence of a crisis.

Food on the shelves at Tom Thumb does not tell you anything about what percent of people in Dallas will have a hard time paying for groceries this month. A vacant one-bedroom listed online for even an “affordable rent” of $1,000 a month is a data point about supply. It doesn’t tell you anything about demand. At most, it proves that nobody who can pay $1,000 a month for a one-bedroom needed that specific unit yet this week.

You could only conclude the existence of that vacant apartment means there isn’t a problem with affordability if your standard is that there should be zero. That is not what the “crisis” has ever contended. There can be shortages and issues with affordability long before the shelves are empty. Have you bought gas recently?

Again, our rising housing costs are an issue with who can afford to live here, not whether anyone can. All housing is affordable to someone. We have not done a good enough job to keep that slice of the pie of people who could call Dallas home growing, or even just keep it as wide as when we got here.

Second, Dallas’s population has been roughly flat for a decade (the city proper.) The 2020 Census found the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, meanwhile, added about 1.2 million people over the same period. If you are skeptical that housing scarcity is the story, this is the fact you reach for. Why does Dallas need more homes if nobody new is coming?

Think about that harder again for a second. The supposed evidence that we do not need more housing, is that for ten straight years, 1.2 million people, two Southwest Boeing 737s per day every day for 3,650 days, moved to North Texas, and not a single one of them wanted to live in Dallas. Could that, perhaps, have been because we had not built them a place to live?

Population is not an input. It is an output.

When Dallas did not build the homes a young family could afford, that young family did not stop existing. They are going to live somewhere. That is why D.R. Horton builds in Prosper and Anna and Howe and Van Alstyne, and in towns you have not heard of or been to, and why the people who buy those homes tell people they live in “Dallas” when they travel. The land in those towns is cheap enough to make the numbers work. The land inside Dallas, closer to the jobs and hospitals and schools and arts and sports that make this place worth living in, is more expensive because proximity to those things is valuable. We have zoned most of it in a way that prevents more of the kinds of housing that would bring the per-unit cost down.

The second piece of this, and it is the one that contributes to the greedy developer narrative, is the housing Dallas has actually been building, instead of more. Walk through North Dallas or North Oak Cliff or Lakewood and you will find the pattern. A 1950s ranch house on a 10,000 square foot lot gets torn down. In its place goes up a 4,500-square-foot “modern farmhouse.” Asking price: $1.8 million. Maybe more. (Probably more.)

One house came down. One house went up. The city's permit numbers show we built a house. The household that moved in makes three or four times what the last one did. The family that would have lived there a generation ago is now in Celina.

That is not supply keeping up with demand. That is one-for-one replacement, a filtering out, of a median family with a top-decile family, block by block across our city. At a neighborhood level, we call this gentrification. However, there is almost no neighborhood in Dallas in which we are not seeing this effect. We are slowly filtering out the generation of people who could afford the last Dallas with the people who can afford the new one.

That is why our population is flat. Dallas could have absorbed a lot more of the 1.2 million people that moved to the Metroplex over the last decade. We probably did, to some degree. We just also priced out exactly that many more.

Change is Coming

Dallas did not get more expensive by accident. We wrote the rules. We showed up at the hearings to defend the rules. The city we have is the city we asked for.

The Dallas Development Code, which includes zoning, is being rewritten for the first time since the mid-1980s. The draft is expected to go before City Council in 2027. Depending on where it ends up, it may recommend allowing accessory dwelling units, duplexes, and triplexes in more districts where currently only single family homes are permitted. In some neighborhoods, it may allow dividing lots to allow two homes where one used to be. The rewrite would also likely create transit-oriented development zones around DART stations and along existing commercial corridors.

The new houses, the density, will not be the point. Building things is not an end unto itself. That is what the Boosters got wrong. That is what urbanism in some of its modern forms gets wrong. I am proposing an urbanism that is 2,400 years old and simply asks, “does this place help people pursue a good life?”

Townhall meetings for the zoning changes have already started. A vote is coming, though it is well over a year out. People will have opinions. They will claim Dallas is ending single-family zoning. That we are voting to turn our beloved city into… Houston.

They will claim they must preserve their neighborhood. I fear a neighborhood that cannot house the children of the people who already live in it is not preserving anything worth preserving.

I gave you a theory of a city. It is not a complicated one. Our lives are all better for living closer to one another. The proximity is a feature, not a bug. Whatever your version of the “good life” is, I cannot pick it for you, but it is made easier by living near other people that are striving for their version of it also.

Millions of people moved to Dallas and their lives were, or are, better for it. We did not build that. We inherited it. It is not ours to do with as we please. It is neither ours to pull up the ladder behind us, nor deny the next million the same. This was a city ordinary people could live in.

We are not going to leave the next generation a city they can afford to live in. That is not a line. I believe it.

Dallas’s zoning code is going to change. It is going to be okay. Things probably are not going to change as much as you think. Someone in Dallas already lives next to a building taller or denser than the one you are worried about. Their home values probably went up because of it.

Everybody wants affordable housing. Nobody wants their house to be worth less. Next time you go to the zoning hearing, just be honest about the latter. We inherited a city ordinary people could afford to build good lives in. The only question is whether we’ll lock the gate behind us.

love/hate/other to: onemansdallas@gmail.com

In those great books, Dallas is not a setting but a character: the main character even. Dallas does things in those stories; it bends reality around it. It is a sentient being whose desires are acted upon the unwitting residents of this North Texas floodplain.

This is of course, nonsense. Dallas does not do anything, the same way the bank does not foreclose on your house, and the hospital does not discharge you. People do those things. Dallas is just a place. It has borders. Anything beyond that is a narrative, a story we tell ourselves. Individuals act, and narratives like “Dallas” coordinate those individuals. They give us an excuse or a pre-text to act, and perhaps permission to do what we wanted to do anyways.

Beyond those great books, there is a single sentence that more succinctly describes Dallas than any other I have come across.

“Dallas is the city with everything that money can buy, and nothing that it cannot.”

Everything that money can buy. Nothing that it can’t.

I first stumbled upon it last year on Dallas’s Reddit page, buried in the comment section of a post titled, “What do other cities have that Dallas doesn’t have?” It has stuck with me ever since. I will give credit to the user who posted it, DiracFourier (apparently not a real name, though, who am I to judge?)

I have been thinking about this sentence every day for a year. It captures so succinctly the soul of a city seemingly locked in a constant audition to be the Cathedral of Capitalism. A city which is more comfortable being measured by its Fortune 500 headquarters than by its soul, its beauty, its art.

Of course, this too is a narrative. Again, Dallas does not do anything. Dallas is a story we are told we tell ourselves about this place in which we live, and the important part is that it becomes true in our believing it.

The great books about Dallas knew this too. They have a word for the myth. Their key to understanding the Dallasness of this place they called “Boosterism.”

The Boosters

Dallas is a city that should not exist, we are told we should tell ourselves. Jim Schutze, in The Accommodation, cites a campaign flyer from a bond election in the 1980s that lays boosterism out plainly: “There is no real reason for a place called DALLAS. No harbor drew people here, no oceans, no mountains, no great natural beauty. Yet, on a vast expanse of prairie, people made out of Dallas what it is today: the shining city of the Sunbelt, a city of opportunity, a great place in which to live and work.”

A great place to live and work. Living and working in this sentence, given the same moral weight. That is not a typo, it is an admission.

In this founding myth, Dallas was brought to bear solely through the work of great men and their steely Protestant determination. The Boosters. The city is here because it damn well pleased them. When they die, we bestow upon them the highest known honor in our culture. We name highways after them.

The myth did not merely flatter the business class. It licensed it. If Dallas existed because they built it, then Dallas was theirs to govern. Boosterism was control, and control was boosterism. For most of the city's history, that governance meant a white business oligarchy where control over what got built and the maintenance of the racial status quo were one and the same.

The Dallas myth is a lie. Schutze knew it. Harvey Graff, in The Dallas Myth, documented it. There is, in fact, a reason for a place called DALLAS. The forks of the Trinity River were a natural place for a settlement. The land was surrounded by cotton, cattle, and wheat. Downtown Dallas is one of the narrowest points at which to cross the Trinity. It was therefore the cheapest place to build a bridge, which eventually hosted a railroad. The path of that railroad, the Texas & Pacific Rail, still exists Downtown today as Pacific Avenue, parallel to Main Street. There were perfectly practical reasons to build a city here, and those reasons had nothing to do with the vision, or skill, of the bankers or the business class.

For as many books as have been written about boosterism, there are perhaps now as many books dispelling the idea. That does not make it any less true, in the sense that people believe it. People believe that Dallas was built by sheer force of will because it lets them imagine they could be the next great builder. That one day, a highway will be named after them too.

The cost of this myth is not that it is false. Writers proved it false decades ago and the myth survived the debunking. The cost is that it works. The booster story does not merely describe Dallas. It produces the Dallas it describes. A city whose founding story is about great men building great things will measure itself only by what it builds, only fund what it can measure or profit from, and gradually lose the language for everything else. What we will be left with is only that which looked good in a rendering, or that which replaced what came before it when that had ceased to be great. We will be left with only what money can buy.

A City of Man

We are not the first city to try out this myth. I would submit the greatest book about Dallas is not about Dallas. It is not The Accommodation, or White Metropolis, or any book currently on your nightstand. The word Dallas never appears in it. It was written 1,600 years ago by a man living on the edges of a failing empire in its last century.

In 410 AD, the Visigoths sacked Rome. The eternal city, the city that had conquered the known world, was suddenly mortal. Its citizens wanted to know why. Augustine of Hippo (Saint Augustine to some) spent thirteen years writing his answer.

His book, The City of God, runs over a thousand pages, and its subject is not the military failure of a city but the spiritual condition that made the failure inevitable. Augustine was not interested in which barbarian broke which gate. He wanted to know what the city loved, and whether what it loved was worth the loving.

Augustine writes, “Two loves have made the two cities. Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city. The former, in a word, glories in itself.” A city built on the love of self, glorying in itself, which is still love, but a love wrongly ordered.

The earthly city is not a dystopia. That is the whole point. The earthly city builds roads and aqueducts and stadiums and writes laws and governs. Its spectacles are thrilling. Its commerce is vast. Its citizens take genuine pride in the republic. Its statesmen serve it with real sacrifice. If you had lived in the earthly city, you would have been proud to live there. You would have told your friends it was the city that had everything.

Nothing in the earthly city is loved for its own sake. Things are loved for what they produce. The citizens compare themselves constantly. A library that does not increase property values is a failed library. A park that does not attract jobs or talent is a waste of land. The sports and games are magnificent, but they are not an escape from the earthly city. They are its purest expression. The earthly city entertains its citizens so well they never have to ask what any of it is for.

Augustine didn’t find fault with what the earthly city could build. He says it is all true, and it is all built on the wrong foundation. The earthly city, he wrote, “though it be mistress of the nations, is itself ruled by its lust of rule.” Ruled by its own lust of rule.

That lust of rule to Augustine was called libido dominandi. It is the desire to rule the world by shaping it, mistaking glory for virtue, or control for order. In this lust, controlling others and building things becomes a way to project the self outward, until what looks like a city is a collection of wills made physical. The need to see the city as yours because you willed it into being. It is the same myth the boosters told. It is what the flyer told us when it said there was no reason for a place called Dallas except for the ambitions of the men who made it.

Augustine's city had a founding myth too. The poet Virgil wrote its most famous version down in the Aeneid, five hundred years after the founding of the Republic. "But you, Roman, remember: rule with all your power the peoples of the earth — these will be your arts: to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace, to spare the defeated, break the proud in war." It was permission to conquer and rule, as if to rule was the entire point. This was the story Rome told itself about Rome. It was the pre-text, the excuse for the existence of a city which had already by then conquered the known world.

Dallas had our campaign poster. The earthly city had Virgil. Both myths worked backwards, dignifying what the powerful had already done by making it look like destiny or virtue. Augustine’s subject is a city that told itself it conquered for the sake of peace, civilization, and order, and he diagnosed the ability to believe those claims as the disease itself, libido dominandi. Dallas, on the other hand, only needs its founding myths inasmuch as the boosters need them to justify boosterism. The myth transformed our desire to control and dominate the world around us into something good, into civic virtue, into even our very reason for existence.

What Dallas Cannot Answer

The Dallas Myth, the idea we are here thanks to the work of a few good men, was our attempt whitewash into virtue what Augustine would have known as vice. Even our most splendid vices, building, shaping, leading Dallas, self-sacrificial though they may appear, were wrongly ordered towards love of self, towards a desire for control. We turned that desire for control and domination into civic virtue, perhaps our chief one.

Boosterism is not civic virtue. It is socially acceptable libido dominandi in a blazer, which we let into the country club.

I fear we have the wrong foundation. The reason that the love of self is the wrong foundation is not simply that self-interest is immoral. It is that a city organized entirely around itself has no way to answer the question: what is all of this for?

That question requires a reference or a standard outside the system, other than the system itself. Without that standard, there is no terminal point, no arrival, no moment where the building becomes something other than more building. The system does not know how to stop. Stop is not a word in its vocabulary.

Augustine diagnosed this 1,600 years before anyone thought to make Dallas their next real estate project. Dallas is Augustine’s earthly city. You can hear it every time the city is asked to explain itself. Ask Dallas what it is for and it will tell you what it has. Ask Dallas what it values and it will tell you how many corporations are headquartered here. Ask Dallas what comes next and it will show you a rendering larger and more expensive than what came before.

Hell, our mayor rang the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange yesterday, as if our city was a company going public or announcing a great quarter to shareholders.

The city has no language for itself that is not a sales pitch. The purpose of Dallas, according to Dallas, is more Dallas.

Growth

The boosters built Dallas from the love of self. But, if it was worth building once, why ever stop? Each round of investment depends on the next round to justify it. Other than power, this perhaps is what the boosters were always most interested in. The toll road needs the subdivision. The subdivision needs the families. The families need their home values to rise, which requires more families to arrive after them. The next families live further up the toll road in the next subdivision, where they can afford it.

There is a word for a system in which each round of participants depends on the next to make the previous round whole.

The Ponzi-like quality of this arrangement is not that any of it is fake. The toll roads are there, and so are the subdivisions. Prosper got an H-E-B before we did. The Ponzi is that the growth requires more growth to justify itself, and the justification for growth is therefore more growth. The boosters are selling growth because it is the only thing that monetizes the investment they made in the growth that preceded it.

The Ponzi does not stop at the city limits. It runs concentrically. Each new ring grows around the trunk centered on a railroad bridge across the Trinity River. Each is the next wave of the boosters, come to spread one more highway, one more master-planned community, that all will require someone else to move there after them. Celina grew 314 percent in a decade. Prosper grew 81 percent.

These are not organic cities with their own reasons for being. They are the next ring of the tree. We have ceased to call these places Dallas after they left our borders, but we know why they are there. They aren't there because Celina had a better Neiman Marcus. They are there because "Dallas" continued to be an excellent sales pitch, long after we ran out of Dallas to sell to them.

What Money Can Buy

The Dallas Arts District describes itself, on its own website, as an organization that “unifies culture and commerce into a dynamic destination for locals and tourists alike.” The largest arts district in the United States wrote as its own self-description, a sentence in which “culture” and “commerce” are morally equivalent. That is not a failure of copywriting. Again, it is an admission.

We did not build the Arts District because we love art. We built it because a great city is supposed to have one, and we could afford it.

That is the meaning of the sentence I cannot stop thinking about. Dallas is the city with everything that money can buy, and nothing that it cannot. We have every Pritzker Prize-winning architect on the shelf. We have so many I. M. Pei-designed buildings that many people, myself included, have called to tear one down. We have the largest arts district, the most-centrally located airport, the tallest something-or-other. Yet, something else is missing, and it was never on the menu.

Dallas doesn't have anything that money cannot buy, because it doesn't want anything that money cannot buy. We never taught it to.

What we cannot buy is the thing that makes a city worth living in rather than worth moving to. We cannot buy the sense that the city belongs to the people who ride the bus, not only the people who build the convention center. We cannot buy a civic identity that is not also a sales pitch. We cannot buy the willingness to spend money on a park, a library, or a transit system that will run whether or not it turns a profit or convinces an investment bank to relocate here.

We cannot buy the knowledge that we, all of us, present company included, are going to die, and that when we do, the gross domestic product of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan statistical area will not have thanked us for our having lived and worked here.

Dallas is not a city without a soul. It has churches, temples, mosques, parades, arts, and neighborhood organizations that owe nothing to the booster class. That life is real. The booster myth simply has no room for it. It cannot measure how many corporate relocations a quinceañera will bring.

On Sunday, the Dallas Morning News editorial board recommended the voters approve a $6.2 billion bond package for DISD by writing that “a city as prosperous as Dallas should not educate children in tin boxes.” They did not write that failing to spend money educating our children is a moral failure that reflects poorly on all of us. They wrote that it is inconsistent with our prosperity. They continued: “a great city has great schools to match its wealth.”

We should have great schools so that everyone will know how much money we have.

Even our newspaper lacks the vocabulary for paying for anything that does not reflect how rich, how powerful, how great our city is or its business people are.

I promised you the Dallas Myth had a cost. This is the cost. It is why I am writing this article and it is why I cannot stop thinking about the sentence, that we have only what money can buy, and nothing that it can’t.

What Will We Have?

I live here. I was not born here. I chose this city. I plan on raising children in it. That is what makes this a confession, not an argument. It costs me nothing to diagnose the machine from inside the machine. I can call it a Ponzi-scheme and still pay my mortgage, on a house which appreciates because someone else will move here after me. I am writing about libido dominandi on a laptop I bought at NorthPark.

Even writing this essay is an act of the love of self. I have some desire to perform cleverness in front of strangers, and that is the same instinct I have spent three thousand words diagnosing. Yet, none of it costs me anything.

What costs me something is the question I cannot answer at the dinner table: what do I want my kids to love about this place? What will I tell them this place is for?

If the answer is that the airport is centrally-located in the middle of the country, then the best part of Dallas is buying a plane ticket to go somewhere else. If the answer becomes the safety or the schools, that is a service that we purchased. If the answer is the restaurants, the trails, the job market, the economic opportunities, that is purchased, all of it. Every reason I reach for when I try to explain why I live here is a thing that money can buy. I have not yet found the one it cannot.

Maybe that is enough. Perhaps all we can ask of where we live is that it is a decent enough place to live and to work.

But, I do not want my kids to grow up in the city built on love of self. I want them to grow up in a place that loves something beyond its own reflection, something that is not for sale and cannot be put on a poster. I do not know if Dallas is capable of becoming that place. I know that the question is worth asking, and that answering it is the one thing the earthly city is allergic to.

Augustine’s earthly city was not a failed experiment. It was a spectacular city. It built everything worth building and could not stop building it. Its residents lived well. The aqueducts are still there two thousand years later. Its boosters believed they had earned what they had. Augustine’s ultimate verdict on the citizens of the earthly city was one borrowed from the gospels: “they have received their reward.” They had everything that the love of self could offer them, and nothing that it couldn’t.

What will Dallas have?

love/hate/other to: onemansdallas@gmail.com

There is the version of the emails allegedly reviewed but not published by Councilmember Adam Bazaldua, a copy that the Dallas Morning News obtained (which I wrote about here), a corpus that D Magazine requested under public information laws but have been stonewalled on thus far, and now a version obtained by Councilmember Paul Ridley and shared for downloading by veteran Dallas journalist Jim Schutze, on a new website aptly named dallascityhallemails.com.

The 5,000 emails that everyone in Dallas has been dying to read for weeks are now public. It’s just out there as one giant PDF document.

Here’s the fun part, and why I am bothering you all again about these emails. I took the liberty of setting up a website that lets you interact with the leaked emails as if it were your G-mail inbox.

We’ll call it D-mail.

Actually, now that I think about it. Let’s not call it that.

Here’s the website:

https://emails.onemansdallas.com/

Have fun. Use it, responsibly?

Note: I don’t know how to properly thank or give credit to Schutze for obtaining and publishing the emails. In lieu of that, here are links to support his latest book Pontiac, published by local non-profit publisher Deep Vellum. Also, if you are reading my blog and you have never read his book The Accommodation (I do not suspect such a person exists) go pick up a copy today.

https://store.deepvellum.org/products/pontiac

https://store.deepvellum.org/products/the-accommodation

It is a remarkable promise, and he means it. Patrick intends to bring the plan to the 2027 legislative session as a constitutional amendment. If it reaches the ballot, it will pass. Homestead exemption measures have been approved by Texas voters with 78, 79, 83, and 86 percent of the vote in recent years. The exemptions keep growing. Nobody is going to vote against cheaper property taxes for themselves.

Outflanking him to his right, Governor Abbott has entered the fray with his own five-point tax plan. Forget a freeze at age 55. Abbott’s plan would end school district taxes for homeowners entirely. Stumping for it last week in Houston, he claimed that “everyone’s property tax bill is going to be more than cut in half.” Everyone, apparently meaning, people who own a home. The roughly forty percent of Texans who rent did not make the cut.

These two competing plans suggest major property tax reforms are coming in 2027. Whatever passes may ultimately be less radical than the two plans on the table today. Regardless, they will call them tax cuts. For at least ten million Texans, they will not be.

In Texas, we boast that we do not have an income tax. We say that as if it makes us free. What we have instead, is a property tax system that is bad and getting worse. When voters approve plans like Operation Double Nickel or Abbott’s Five-Points, they are not cutting any government budget line item, any expense, or any spending anywhere in the state. They are only cutting homeowners’ taxes. That only leaves local governments and school districts who depend on property taxes with two options. Cut spending, or let the tax burden shift onto someone else.

Who Pays

Consider three people living in (or near) the same $350,000 house, around the median home value in Dallas, per the most recent census data. We’re going to pick on a block of Carroll Ave. from Central Expressway to Capitol (which also most famously includes the empty field that once hosted the Leaning Tower of Dallas).

The Renter is 31, earns $45,000, and she pays $1,550 a month for a one-bedroom apartment at the large complex overlooking the highway that you have no doubt driven past, called Cityplace Heights. (Disclosure: I lived in this building too once upon a time. If that’s how disclosures work.) To ground her income, this is roughly equal to the City of Dallas’s published living wage, the minimum pay all city employees and contractors receive. Her complex pays property taxes to five local taxing entities at a combined rate of roughly $2.24 per $100 of assessed value. The building is assessed at $81 million dollars. Spread across 396 units, it’s as if each home were taxed at $204,000. The total bill is $1.8 million this year. Per home in that complex, that’s $4,554 per unit in annual property taxes. It is roughly equal to her January, February, and March rent.

No homestead exemption. No school exemption. Apartments do not qualify. Yes, her landlord “pays” the tax bill, but not out of the goodness of his heart. This expense was baked into the cost of the building when it was first built and when the landlord bought it, and it is still included in the rent today. Her imputed share of property taxes is roughly $4,500 per year, or 10 percent of her annual income. If the building could claim a homestead exemption per apartment unit, its tax bill would be 41 percent lower.

Add the 8.25 percent sales tax she pays at the Kroger or Target at City Place. According to ITEP, which publishes the annual “Who Pays?” study of tax policy, the lowest-income Texas households pay an effective sales tax rate of about 6.5 percent across all their spending. Her combined state and local rate from the property and sales tax: 16.7 percent.

The Homeowner is 42, earns $90,000, and owns the median-value home, down the street from the apartment complex where we started. I won’t name a random house like I did the apartment complex, but clicking around on DCAD, I found 5 homes on this block around the $350,000 figure that the Census cites as our median home value.

After the existing $140,000 school tax homestead exemption and 20 percent city and county exemptions, her bill is about $5,000. She can deduct this from her federal income taxes against her 22% tax rate under the new $40,000 SALT cap, so she ends up paying close to $1,000 dollars less in income tax thanks to these local taxes. She pays sales taxes too, but on a lower overall share of her income, given she can afford each month to put a little bit in savings. The net effective state and local rate: about 8.3 percent.

Now the Homeowner is 72, earns the same $90,000, and lives in the same $350,000 house. She gets $200,000 exempt from school taxes, which was the largest chunk of the bill. Further, her school taxes are frozen at whatever they were the year she turned 65, which was 7 years ago before home prices went bonkers after COVID. Effective state and local rate: roughly 7.4 percent and falling every year, because the freeze does not adjust and inflation does the rest.

The tax brackets these Texans fall in. 16.7. 8.3. 7.4 percent and falling. If I showed you those numbers without labels and told you they were income tax brackets, you would assume the highest rate applied to the highest earner. The opposite is true.

Most egregiously of all, these are just the tax rates I am drawing your attention to. Look at the amount of taxes themselves. The Renter actually pays the most per year of anyone, not just as a percentage on her income, but in the total check she writes.

This is before Operation Double Nickel or Abbott’s plan goes into effect. This is the system already on the books today. By November 2027, the odds would tell you it gets worse.

Back-Asswards

According to the same ITEP “Who Pays” report, Texas has the 7th most regressive tax rates, where poorer people pay more, out of all 50 states. There is something deeply wrong with this. Government provides things we cannot provide for ourselves. That costs money. It is a fee we pay for civilization, and there is something inherently wrong with a society that sends the largest bill to the people with the least.

A tax system ought to ask the most of the people who have the most. This topic alone could be the essay. While I may not do this point justice today, what I want to impress is that this is not a left-wing position or a right-wing position. It is the first principle of taxation, and you do not need an economics degree to see it.

For those of you that do have an economics degree, Adam Smith, whose 1776 book The Wealth of Nations underpins much of free market capitalism, opens his taxation section with this simple claim: “The subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities.” This is not about taking from the rich to give to the poor. It is about not taking from the poor to give to the rich.

The Texas Comptroller’s office is required by state law to produce a biennial report on who actually pays Texas taxes. The January 2025 edition, signed by Comptroller Glenn Hegar, uses a statistical measure called the “Suits Index” to assess the fairness of every major state and local tax. A score of zero would indicate a “proportional tax,” that everyone pays exactly according to our income. Scores higher than zero indicate a progressive tax, and negative ones indicate a regressive tax.

Every single tax in Texas scores below zero. Property Tax. Sales Tax. Motor Vehicle Tax. Even the Gasoline Tax. Every tax we charge is regressive.

The report goes further. The bottom fifth of Texas households pay over 14 percent of their income in state and local taxes. The top fifth pay less than 4 percent.

This is not some think tank’s estimate. It is the state of Texas’s own math, measuring our tax system and finding it upside down.

Exempted Away

I should be fair to the existing structure of homestead exemptions before I break it apart. The school district homestead exemption, as designed, is genuinely progressive. A flat $140,000 exemption on a $200,000 house eliminates 70 percent of the taxable value. On a $700,000 house, it only eliminates 20 percent. On a $2 million dollar house, it barely makes a dent. It helps the family in Pleasant Grove more than the family in Preston Hollow. Among homeowners, this is the right structure.

Two problems.

First: the renter still gets zero. A flat-dollar exemption is progressive between homeowners, but still highly regressive to renters, because well, zero is zero. Every dollar exempted from the school tax base is a dollar the school district still needs. It collects that dollar from every property that did not get the exemption, i.e. the renters and businesses or customers who use them. There is no exemption fairy. Every dollar forgiven is a dollar moved.

Second: the school exemption is not the only one. The City of Dallas and Dallas County offer percentage-based homestead exemptions at 20 percent of appraised value, the maximum allowed under state law. Twenty percent of a $200,000 house is $40,000. Twenty percent of a $2 million house in Lakewood is $400,000. The richer you are, the bigger the tax break. This is proportional in theory, if you do not factor in that wealthier people spend less on housing than middle-class homeowners.

This system we have asks the most of those with the least, and every two years in Austin, our legislature digs the hole deeper. The Weatherford-based think-tank Texas Policy Research said it plainly with the last round of homestead increase amendments in 2025: “this measure shifts the tax burden onto younger and non-exempt Texans, expands state spending commitments without reform, and erodes tax equity.” Take my word for it, these guys are not bleeding-heart libs.

This is not a side effect. I fear it is the point. It is at best, democratically speaking, a runaway train that we are going to keep voting for until homeowners perhaps pay no taxes at all.

Faction

You hear the same argument at every town hall or every Thanksgiving dinner table. “I paid off my house ten years ago. Why do I still have to pay property taxes just to live in a home I own?”

I have heard this from smart people. I have heard it from my own family. It sounds like common sense. It is also the most expensive idea in Texas tax policy, and one of the worst ones I could imagine. It is exactly the sentiment that Greg Abbott’s or Dan Patrick’s plans play into.

You still pay property taxes for the same reason you still pay for electricity: because you are still using the service. It is a consumption tax on the services you are consuming by owning a property in this city. The fire department does not stop protecting your house when you turn 65 (or 55.) The roads do not maintain themselves. Parkland still treats you if you have a heart attack. Dallas ISD still educates the children in your zip code, including the grandchildren that you moved to be near.

Property taxes are not a mortgage. They are the annual cost of living in a place that works. The question as we pass deeper senior or homeowner tax exemptions is not “why do I still pay.” The question is “who pays instead of me.”

In the 2022 midterms, 58 percent of homeowners voted and 37 percent of renters did. Stanford researchers, studying 18 million voter records in Ohio and North Carolina, found that buying a home causes a roughly 20 percent increase in the propensity to vote in local elections, an effect that nearly doubles when zoning or property tax issues are on the ballot. That is what it looks like when one group is large enough, organized enough, and reliable enough at the ballot box to vote itself a tax cut every two years and send the bill to people who do not show up. The people who absorb the cost are not absent because they do not care. They are at work, or they moved, or probably nobody told them they were paying 16 percent. Heck, they may have even voted for it too in hopes of owning a home one day.

Cutting taxes is the same thing as cutting revenue. The revenue shortfall temporarily gets backfilled by the state surplus, which sounds free until the surplus runs out. Then it gets backfilled by whatever is left of the tax base: renters, businesses (and their customers and employees), or younger homeowners who have not yet aged into the freeze. When that is not enough, we will have to start cutting things we fund with property taxes. Yes, that will mean schools.

Don’t California My Texas

We have seen this movie. Texas would not be the first state to try and freeze its property taxes due to a populist push-back about rising bills.

There is a bumper sticker or a billboard you might have seen. “Don’t California My Texas.” It is a warning to the exodus of Californians coming to the Lone Star state that they should leave behind the policies and politics that made them seek greener pastures in the first place. California’s top income tax bracket is 13.3 percent, for people earning over a million dollars a year. Texas has no income tax. We are supposed to be opposites.

In 1978, California passed Proposition 13. Among other things, Prop 13 got rid of tax re-assessments, locking in the price you paid for the home as your assessed value. Only a 2 percent annual increase is allowed.

It hasn’t gone well.

A paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that in the decades after Prop 13, California homeowners stayed in their homes 10 percent longer and worse, renter tenure increased 19 percent. Fewer homes went on the market. Property tax bills were locked in. Renters were stuck renting longer. Texas's over-65 freeze is the same basic deal with a different name, and it produces the same lock-in. A 72-year-old empty nester in Old East Dallas, with a frozen tax bill that declines in inflation-adjusted terms every year, has zero financial reason to downsize. She is responding rationally. That is the problem. The four-bedroom house stays off the market. Supply tightens. Everyone else's taxes go up. The renter's rent goes up. Calls for rent relief, city spending on affordable housing, and more out-migration to cheaper suburbs will surely follow.

Worse still is what Prop 13 did to actual tax revenue. It devastated school district budgets across the state. California’s per-pupil spending in its public schools fell 15 percent in the twenty years after Prop 13, indexed to the rest of the country. It fell from fifth in the country in education spending per student to forty-seventh. Operation Double Nickel does not advertise the cuts to budgets that will follow freezing and cutting taxes for millions of people. They want you to focus on a property tax cut. They do not want you to think about what that money might have gone towards.

It is not insanity to think we are on a slippery slope to passing our own version of Prop 13 and having the same disasters. What we will likely pass this year is not all that far off. Further, these things become very hard to undo. Prop 13 is now the untouchable “third rail” of California politics. Imagine the Texas governor who runs on a platform of reinstating taxes on homeowners.

We may very well California our Texas. It will not be the California emigrants’ fault. We are doing this to ourselves.

The Right Villain

Nationally, 78.6 percent of Americans over 65 own their homes. Among those under 35, the figure is 36.4 percent and falling. If you think this is only a generational conflict, the number of DFW renters 65 and over has surged 66.5 percent in the last decade too. The freeze does not help them either. It largely tracks wealth, not just age.

The senior homeowner in the empty house with the frozen tax bill is not the villain of this story. I want to avoid this becoming a young versus old issue. Worse, I cannot fault someone for voting in their own interests.

I can however fault the politicians who give you the opportunity. Our representative form of government was built to handle issues like this, where one faction uses its voting power adversely to the interests of another group. It is why we do not have a simple direct democracy and instead elect senators and representatives to make our laws. (It is also why you don’t let your toddler vote on their bedtime.)

We can let Dan Patrick or Greg Abbott be the villain today and leave it at that.

Texas’s property tax system already asks too much of the people who have the least to give. We are actively making it worse in that regard, not better.

Further, it is starting to ask the most of the young, and the least of the old. The family that has three kids and could use the four-bedroom house is still waiting for the big-enough house to come on the market, or moving to Celina where it was just built. They are paying property taxes on their rental house at a tax rate that covers both their portion of the bill and recoups the frozen taxes from their neighbors across the street.

Last week, I wrote that one of the reasons I write is that I believe this city is our inheritance. To be honest, I actually believe something much stronger and more specific than that. I believe our society is a generational partnership between the dead, the living, and the yet-to-be-born. There is a contract between the generations, and we fail to uphold our end of it when we cut taxes today and let someone else pay for it tomorrow. We received public schools, public roads, and public safety for the decades we were raising our families. We owe the same to the people who come after us.

Police, roads, and schools are not going to go away. The question is whether we will make the family in the rental house pay both their share and everyone else’s at the same time.

Dan Patrick and Greg Abbott have an answer to that question. It is on its way to the ballot. Some version of it will pass. The 31-year-old at Cityplace Heights, paying double the share of taxes as her neighbor, will never know why.

love/hate/other to: onemansdallas@gmail.com

Photo by Pete Alexopoulos on Unsplash

I have been writing this blog for six weeks. In that time I have argued that Dallas should tear down City Hall, built a financial model to try and prove it, painted you a picture of Downtown in twenty years, and even spent a week on libraries. Thousands of people have read along so far (crazy, right?) and dozens of you have reached out.

I have also been wrong in public. That part matters. The leaked emails have made the City Hall process look worse than I hoped, and I had to write about it, because not doing so would have been not telling the truth. My Sunday school teacher never taught me the difference between not telling the truth and lying. I do not think she thought there was one.

I am not trying to be right. I am trying to be honest. I am trying to be worth arguing with.

This is not my usual newsletter. There is no spreadsheet this week. No council vote, no leaked email, no dollar amount with one too many commas. I have been writing about Dallas for six weeks and I owe you a plain account of what I think I am doing here before I go back to the numbers next week. There will be more spreadsheets. I promise.

The test for me is simple. If I read an article again in ten or fifteen years, after the facts have changed and Dallas has done whatever odd thing it was always going to do, I want to be able to defend the reasoning even if I would no longer defend the conclusion. The Mavericks might just leave for Irving. The arena deal might fall apart or it might be the best thing that ever happened to the south-west end of Downtown. The libraries might reopen. They might not.

I cannot control any of that. What I can control is whether the principles I used to arrive at the conclusion were sound. Whether I engaged with the strongest version of the other side’s argument rather than the weakest. Whether, when the evidence moved against me, I followed it instead of pretending it had not moved.

If the principles hold, I’ll feel okay about it. Even if I would make a different call with the benefit of hindsight.

That is the standard. Everything else is just rooting for a team.

Good vs. Good

The specific principle I keep coming back to is one that almost nobody in public life will say out loud: every good policy has a cost, and the cost usually comes at the expense of something else that is also good.

We have somehow arrived at a version of politics in which tradeoffs do not exist. Every policy is all upside if your team proposed it. Every policy is all downside if theirs did. Tax cuts will pay for themselves. Congestion will ease if we just add one more lane. (How’d that go?) Nobody loses. Nobody sacrifices anything they value.

This is, to use a technical term, bullshit.

It is bullshit because the most important questions are not choices between good and evil. Those are the easy ones, or at least, they should be. I am aware that some of what passes for politics in 2026 does not fit this framework. Some things are not tradeoffs. They are just wrong, and saying so should not require a spreadsheet. I am talking about the rest of the boring, everyday decisions that a city makes, like maintaining its buildings and picking up the trash.

The hard (and boring) choices are between good and good, and even more between bad and bad. Choosing one good thing means getting less of another good thing. That is what a tradeoff is. It is the price of choosing.

There are load-bearing contradictions at the heart of any society. Tradeoffs that human nature never lets you escape. Freedom is good. Order is good. A society that maximizes freedom at the expense of order is not a paradise. It is a place where the strong do whatever they want and everyone else locks their doors. Conversely, a society that maximizes order at the expense of freedom is not safe. It is a place where the streets are clean and the jails are full. The American system, at its best, holds these two goods in tension. The Constitution is, among other things, an operating system for forcing that tension into a structure that survives the ambitions of the people operating it.

That requires something specific of the people making the decisions. It requires us to love both sides of the tradeoff. Not tolerate. Love. We have to believe that freedom is genuinely good and that order is genuinely good and that losing either one is genuinely bad. We have to choose. The choice should hurt.

Growth and preservation follow the same pattern. You can build the new thing or you can protect the old thing. You can tear down the historic building or you can spend a billion dollars keeping it standing. You can rezone the shopping center to add apartments, or you can keep collecting taxes on mostly empty parking lots.

Justice and mercy. A legal system that is all justice and no mercy is a machine that grinds people who made one mistake into dust. A legal system that is all mercy and no justice is a system where the people who follow the rules feel like suckers. At every sentencing, every parole hearing, every act of prosecutorial discretion, there is a human being standing at the intersection of two good things and picking one. The pain of picking is not a bug. It is the only evidence that the person choosing understands what they are giving up.

In Dallas this takes our own specific forms. Libraries are good. Low taxes are good. We cut the library budget in September and yell at the library director for closing four libraries in January. We talk about bond money as if it were free and property taxes as if they were being ripped out of the hands of the needy. We promise new parks with one hand and starve the old ones with the other. We approve a bond program and a police staffing mandate in the same year that cannot co-exist. The tradeoff does not disappear because it lived on two different spreadsheets.

Dallas is not special in facing these tradeoffs. Dallas is special in pretending they do not exist. This is perhaps our chief civic virtue.

In every case, the tradeoff is not a problem to be solved. It is a condition to be managed. The people who tell you they have solved it, that you can have order with no cost to freedom, growth without any cost to preservation, tax cuts with no cuts to services, are either lying to you or lying to themselves. The most dangerous are the ones who believe it.

The Reasons

The reason we have stopped naming tradeoffs is not complicated.

If I name the cost of my position, I have given the other side a weapon. I have admitted that something they value is real and that my choice damages it. In a political culture where the goal is to win the argument rather than to run the city well, that admission is a strategic error. You do not hand your opponent a talking point. You do not concede that their concerns are real. You do not say “this will hurt and here is who it hurts,” because someone will clip that sentence and use it against you in the next campaign ad or text message blast.

So, at first, we stop saying it. Then, we stop thinking it. Eventually, we arrive at a place where half the people believe that their preferred policies have no costs at all and the other half believe the same thing about theirs. Neither side can fathom why anyone would disagree, because disagreement requires acknowledging that the other side might value something worth valuing.

This is how you get a politics that feels like rooting for a team instead of governing a city. The other side is not just wrong about the tradeoff. The other side does not exist. There is no tradeoff. There is only our good idea and their obstruction.

Disagreement is not the thing that is broken. We clearly have not lost our ability to disagree. We have lost the ability to imagine why someone would disagree. We have lost the desire to talk to the person who does at all. That is the thing that is broken.

I find this increasingly difficult to live with. I think City Hall should come down. I do not think the fiscal math is close. I also think that the people who want to save it are protecting something real, and if I cannot name what they are protecting, and what it costs to override them, then I have not earned the right to make the argument.

What this is not

The version of public argument that is better than this is not centrism. It is not a slightly better-dressed “both sides have a point,” deployed by people do not want to commit. If I am nothing else, I am on a side, at least on the City Hall debate. What we need instead is the version where you pick a side, make your case, and name what your victory costs. Where you fight for your position without pretending the other side has nothing worth fighting for.

This is harder than it sounds. It means leaders telling their people things they do not want to hear. It means saying yes, this policy I support will make that thing you care about worse, and here is why I think the tradeoff is still worth it.

It means understanding the job is a series of tragic choices rather than a series of obvious ones.

I do not know how to make this popular. The version of politics where your side is right about everything and the other side are villains is more satisfying, more shareable, and better for fundraising. The version where every choice has a cost and every cost falls on someone is exhausting and depressing and makes for terrible yard signs. It hardly fits on a bumper sticker. (I tried.)

But it is how buildings get fixed. It is how cities get governed, and it is how the trash gets picked up.

The point.

I have told you what I think I am doing. I have not plainly said why I am doing it. Here goes.

I think the point of a city is to help its people build a life that is worth the trouble of living. Every tradeoff I have written about, the buildings, the budget, the libraries, is a different version of the same question: which path helps people in this city live a little better, or makes their life a little easier, or leaves this place a little better than we found it.

This city is not just where we live. It is our inheritance. It is where our kids are going to grow up, and hopefully their kids are going to grow up, and hopefully their kids are going to grow up, and hopefully it is still a place in which it is worth living when any of that happens.

So here is what I owe you for as long as I keep doing this.

I owe you my actual position, stated plainly, with the work visible. I owe you the strongest case against me, not the easiest one. I owe you the cost of what I am proposing, stated as clearly as the benefit. I owe you why I think it will make your or your kid’s life better, even if in some little ways, it will make your life worse. And when the evidence moves against me, I owe you the decency to move with it.

Most civic choices do not offer a clean win. They ask what we are willing to lose, who will pay for it, and whether we will admit that before we vote. A city that cannot say what it is willing to give up may eventually give up everything.

Running a city asks more of us than winning. It is, or it should be, the act of choosing not if we lose, but what we lose. This blog is an attempt to do that work in public, one week at a time, for as long as the city gives me something worth arguing about.

Given this is Dallas, I do not expect to run out of material.

To the people who have been reading, sharing, and writing in since the beginning: thank you. I did not expect this, and I do not take it for granted. If you think what I am doing here is worth doing, the best way to support it is to send it to someone who might disagree. That is, after all, the whole point.

love/hate/other to: onemansdallas@gmail.com

Photo by Erin Hervey on Unsplash

The Skillman Southwestern branch was proposed for closure in 2024. Councilmember Paula Blackmon found $485,000 in one-time money to keep it open three days a week. A library open three days a week is a library in name only. The city spent $485,000 to delay a decision it had already made. One year later, eight councilmembers and the mayor voted to shut it down. The building was auctioned in February 2026. Within weeks of that, four more branches had landed on the chopping block in this year’s budget.

The total annual savings from closing those four libraries: $2.6 million. Our annual general fund: $1.97 billion.

Dallas is fighting, yet again, over 0.13% of its operating budget. That is less than one-sixth of one percent. A city fighting over that number is not under austerity. It is putting on a performance of austerity. The amount saved is negligible. This is fiscal theatre, not fiscal discipline.

Line items in a $2 billion budget do not earn protection simply because they look small as a percentage. You will not hear me make that argument, here or ever. The question isn't whether to close libraries. Rather, what I want to submit is the annual library fight is not really about libraries at all. It is the one visible skirmish where Dallas residents are allowed to see the deeper problem: the city keeps building new things and cutting taxes, all while the load-bearing decisions that actually shape the city’s finances happen without us ever being honest about them.

Libraries

There are good reasons to close a library. There can be, at least. The city built the new Vickery Park library a mile away from the Skillman branch, opened it seven days a week, and staffed it properly. Keeping both open was likely redundant. When a better facility replaces an older one, closing the older one is called planning, not failure.

If you measure computer lab sessions or the books checked out, some of our less-popular library branches are used ten times less than the popular ones, according to a February staff report. Skyline and Arcadia Park, two of the libraries currently slated for closure and near the bottom in usage, each had only 20,000 books checked out last year. Top-performers Fretz Park and Lakewood both had over 170,000 books checked out.

The City is not closing four libraries, however, due to how often people are using them. The City is closing four libraries because the budget adopted by council in September 2025 directed Library Director Manya Shorr to find $2.6 million to cut out of her budget. That budget passed our city council by a vote of 11-3, with the three dissenting votes coming from councilmembers vocal that the City had not cut enough from the year’s budget.

Anyone who followed the Skillman branch saga could tell you: that magnitude of a library budget cut only comes from closing branches, and likely four or five of them. There are not enough operating hours left to cut when our libraries are only open after 5 p.m. two times a week. Shorr’s staff analyzed usage, need, and geographic coverage, and in January 2026 recommended Arcadia Park, Skyline, Renner Frankford, and Oak Lawn.

Councilmembers reacted as though ambushed. Adam Bazaldua called it “a half-assed plan.” Cara Mendelsohn said the plan “was developed without input from communities.” However, this council voted for the same budget that created the directive. Some branches had to close. Those branches were going to be in someone’s district and someone’s neighborhood. The spectacle of elected officials demanding savings in September and attacking the consequences in January is its own form of theater.

The closures may be legitimate. A better library system may revolve around fewer libraries open longer, including the proposed model of five “regional flagships.” I trust people who run libraries to answer that question. That said, the politics around the closures are not being described honestly. The council made a revenue choice and then treated the consequences as though they were someone else’s decision. They cut the library budget and cried foul when that meant any libraries would close.

The Math

The 2026 budget is the largest in city history: $5.2 billion total and $1.97 billion in the general fund. The “general fund” strips out items like Dallas Water Utilities, Love Field Airport, and debt service, and is close to, but not exactly, the City’s “discretionary spending.” Police and fire consume $1.2 billion of that general fund, roughly 62 percent. Last year, the police and fire line alone went up by $63 million.

The entire Dallas Public Library system operates on $43 million. Per a January staff presentation, among peer cities of a million people, the median library system spends $38.74 per resident. Dallas spends less at $32.77. Austin spends $75.50. Our twenty-nine branches clock below San Antonio’s at thirty, and Houston at forty-five. Our spending per branch is 27 percent less than the peer group. In inflation-adjusted terms, the library budget has shrunk roughly 20 percent since its peak in 2008, despite us adding several new branches. By almost any measure, our libraries do not have a spending problem. (Apparently, however, our spending has a libraries problem.)

The cost of operating every single one of Dallas’s libraries, combined, is less than how much the police and fire budget goes up in a single year. Closing every library wouldn’t cover the increase. The single-year $63 million police and fire increase was twenty-four times larger than the savings from closing these four branches.

At the same time, the city has reduced its property tax rate every year for ten consecutive years, from 78.25 cents per $100 of assessed value in 2016 to 69.88 cents today. That is a reduction of more than 10 percent. These reductions are optional. However, constantly rising property values have kept the total revenue the City collects growing, even at a lower rate, as there is more property value to tax. The city has not lost money or shrunk its budget. It has voluntarily lowered the rate at which it collects revenue while telling departments to find savings.

The city’s total taxable property base is $226 billion. Keeping all four library branches open would require a rate increase of roughly 0.12 cents per $100 of assessed value. For the median Dallas household, that is something like $4 per year. The city could have funded every branch set to be closed this year and still lowered the tax rate. The median household would have gotten a $12 tax cut instead of a $16 cut. For most homeowners, the difference would have been trivial. For four neighborhoods, it would have meant keeping a library.

The city chose the $4 cut over the libraries. That is a legitimate choice. I promised I wouldn’t dismiss cuts because they are small. It is not, however, a choice I am seeing the city describe honestly. The tax cut is announced as relief for working families. The library closures are decried as an outrageous, half-assed decision by the library director, as if the two things happened independently, to different people, for different reasons.

Cut the Ribbon, Forget the Bill

In April 2024, the council unanimously adopted a twenty-year library facilities plan that recommended expanding or replacing eleven library branches. It recommended closing none. The future of Dallas involves having well-equipped modern libraries: at least according to that 15-0 vote of the city council. The Dallas Observer reported at the time that the plan devoted only three paragraphs to funding strategy. That strategy amounted to requesting more bond money.

The following month, Dallas voters approved a $1.25 billion bond package.

The bond program allocated $43.5 million to replace and renovate existing libraries. The majority of the money goes to three branches that will be completely replaced or renovated, at a total of around $10 million per library. Of the total, $2.09 million would also go to ADA compliance upgrades at eight library branches. Three of those branches (Skyline, Renner Frankford, and Oak Lawn) are among the four the city proposed closing in January 2026. Yes, you read that right. Voters approved money to upgrade these buildings in May 2024. Twenty months later, the City has proposed shuttering them.

Outside of libraries, Proposition B allocated $345 million for new parkland acquisition and development, the bond program’s second-largest share. Prior to getting these new parks, department staff had already told the council they had close to $400 million in existing unfunded maintenance needs. Bond funds, by rule, cannot be used for routine maintenance and operations. The same general fund that cannot find $2.6 million for four libraries will soon be asked to staff and maintain $345 million in new and improved parks. The city has still not said where that money will come from.

The park and library bond programs were both approved by voters, voters who were being told the City would build and improve our public spaces. Over 80 percent of voters approved the library bond. Those ribbon cuttings will be popular. Councilmembers who fought for those projects will be at them, grinning ear to ear. Our vote was clear direction to the council that we should keep building libraries at a cost of $10 million a pop. However, those same voters who approved spending $43 million for building new libraries also elected a council that thinks $2.6 million more a year to run them is just too much to ask.

In the two years since the bond, the City has only put $100 million to work out of $500 million in bond projects planned through 2026, per the City’s dashboard. It is no accident that less than 20 percent of the approved bond funding has been spent to date. Even the City is realizing there are no operating funds for all the projects voters were promised.

What We Are Not Talking About

I do not know whether Dallas should spend 62 percent of its general fund on police and fire. Crime is real. The pension liability is real. Proposition U binds our hands here somewhat. However, the same people who (narrowly) voted for Prop U in November 2024 also voted for the library bond six months earlier. They were not voting for a city without libraries. They were voting, in two separate elections, for two things that cannot both be fully funded under the budget structure that results.

That is the conversation Dallas refuses to have. Not whether four libraries stay open, but whether the city is willing to raise revenue, or stop building things it will not maintain, or make much deeper cuts than closing four libraries (including to police and fire — sorry). Each of those is harder than closing a library. Any of them would actually make a difference.

Dallas has cut its tax rate ten years running. Every penny of rate on the Dallas tax roll generates roughly $23 million in annual revenue. Restoring two cents of the 8.37-cent reduction since 2016 would generate $46 million a year. That is more than the entire library operating budget. It is more than enough to keep libraries open after 5 p.m. or keep them open seven days a week. The council has not seriously discussed raising the rate, or even pausing tax cuts. A tax cut is the one thing every councilmember wants on a campaign mailer.

Dallas approved $2 billion in bond packages in the past seven years without a plan for paying for what we build. The parks bond alone will generate hundreds of millions in new maintenance costs. Nobody has proposed pausing the bond cycle until the city can demonstrate we will fund what we already approved. Bonds are popular. Ribbon cuttings are popular. Maintenance is invisible until things fall apart. In fact, the Kleberg-Rylie library branch closed itself indefinitely last month after a pipe burst. The building made the decision for us.

If the city cannot find $2.6 million in a $2 billion annual budget without closing things people clearly care about, the question is not about libraries. It is about the other $1.99 billion. What else is in there that nobody is willing to cut? Why are we cutting libraries which people clearly care about, and worse, why do we already keep the twenty-nine libraries we already paid to build open only two nights a week after work?

We should stop calling this austerity. A city that cuts its tax rate every year, passes billion-dollar bond packages, and increases its public safety budget by $63 million is not a city living under austerity. It is a city that has chosen its priorities and lacks the honesty to say so. The library closures are not the hard choice. They are the easy choice, the one that saves a fraction of a percent while generating enough controversy to make everyone feel like something difficult happened.

What You Can Do About It

The 2027 budget process is going on right now. The annual resident survey launched February 18 and is still open. The City’s Quality of Life Committee will hear an update today from the library director. I suspect the closures will come up. Budget town halls, hosted by councilmembers in every district, run this week from March 23 through March 26. The District 12 town hall on March 26 is being held at Renner Frankford Branch Library. Yes, one of the four branches proposed for closure. The city manager will present a revised proposed budget this summer. A second round of town halls follows in August. Council votes in September. The fiscal year starts October 1.

The budget is not an act of God. It is a document written by people who work for you, revised by people you elected, and adopted on an annual schedule you can find at dallascityhall.com. Show up to your Spring Town Hall. Send the email to the council person. They are the ones who made these choices. Not the library director.

I said at the jump there could be good reasons to close a library. There are also bad ones. One of them was providentially gifted to me yesterday by the editorial board of the Morning News in a piece titled, “Is Dallas prepared to make tough budget choices?”

“Dallas City Council members need to be prepared for hard choices during the budget cycle this year. When the time comes to trim back services, there will be abundant pushback from some residents. Council members must think about the long-term fiscal health of Dallas.”

“We need to close four libraries” is not an argument that logically follows from “we need to make hard choices.” Making choices that do not reflect the will of the voters does not retroactively make those choices good in their having been difficult. We cannot difficulty-launder all of our bad decisions. Trading Luka becomes a good idea when this is your grading system.

Being a fiscal conservative is not thinking the City should never spend money on anything. The right amount of money for the City of Dallas to spend on libraries is not zero. Being a fake fiscal conservative is thinking the City shouldn’t spend money on things you don’t like, or need, or use. I fear we have too many people who want to don the cape of being fiscal hawks, without remembering that the City still has a job to do in providing services that make people’s lives better, libraries being among them.

This was a week off from four consecutive pieces about City Hall. (I was sick of it too.) However, if you have been following closely — the same cycles of tradeoffs, incentives, and decisions that led us to having (at least) a nine-figure tab on 1500 Marilla are all at work here. They are symptoms of the same problem, not the disease itself. As I said in week one, “There are no good options. There are only honest ones and dishonest ones.” We can raise taxes (or cut elsewhere) and have libraries open at times when people might actually want to use them. We can cut taxes and have fewer libraries. There is no world where we get to eat our cake and have it too.

The harder choices are not closing libraries. Sorry DMN. They’re telling your council person you don’t want a tax cut this year, or to stop future bond programs. They’re looking for ways to trim public safety spending, including further reforms to the police and fire pensions. They would be either funding what we built, or telling voters the truth: we will cut ribbons on buildings we have no intention of keeping open.

love/hate/other to: onemansdallas@gmail.com

In May of last year, the CEO of AT&T, Dallas's largest private downtown employer, wrote to our city manager and told her that his concerns about Dallas extended to "foundational issues" with "effective/sustained governance of the City." He was not talking about crime, or homelessness, or the parking, or the panhandlers, or any one problem you could fix with a task force and a press release. He was talking about the foundation. He was questioning, really, whether the city can govern anything at all, let alone our downtown. Whether you can count on it to follow through on any decision it makes.

That email sat in the city's files for nearly a year. Nobody quoted it at a council meeting. Nobody cited it in the debate over City Hall, or the debate over the future of downtown, or the debate over the arena. It surfaced only because over 5,000 pages of internal communications have slowly dripped out over the past two weeks via the Morning News.

This is not quite the Epstein files. There are fewer presidents involved. The reveals have come one at a time, some a little worse than the last, and all uniquely damning in the way that only Dallas could manage.

What the emails have not yet shown matters as much as what they have. There is no smoking gun with the Adelsons. There is no back and forth that shows the City Hall report is knowingly inflated. People are upset that tours of potential replacement City Halls were conducted, however, the council voted in November to start exploring options. The site tours only came after that vote, not before it.

What they also do not show, is a City prepared to make the right decision about City Hall. They show a web of half-truths, over-reactions a day late and a dollar short, and a chronically-missing mayor. They show I fear, process that is designed to deliver an outcome, not one that is designed to build consensus around it.

Writing about the City Hall debate, I have asked you to name your tradeoffs, shown you the math, and laid out the vision of a Downtown yet to come. Those pieces were about City Hall, the building. This one is going to be about City Hall, the institution. The way the City has been revealed to be handling the City Hall question through these email leaks has done more damage to my position than any critic could. When the process looks this bad, it does not matter if the answer is right. Nobody trusts the answer because nobody trusts the people giving it.

What the Emails Show

The CEO of the largest employer in Downtown could have simply come out and said, Plano has cheaper land. He could have left it there. Instead, John Stankey told our city manager he had worked in central Dallas for eighteen of the past twenty-five years and had watched the city run the same cycle over and over: a problem emerges, a campaign is mounted, progress is made, attention drifts, the problem returns.

The emails show City Manager Kim Tolbert followed up three months later in August with an update on the new "Safe In The City" campaign. Crime was down more than 25 percent downtown due to a new task force and enhanced rehousing efforts. She promised this was "not just a one-time initiative."

Please tell me you caught the pattern.

Stankey thanked her for the progress. Then he noted that he could already see the problems shifting to other areas of the city. He had seen this movie before. He was telling her, as clearly as a Fortune 500 CEO will ever tell a city manager, that he did not believe the improvement would last.

Eight months later he moved six thousand jobs to Plano. The city told the public it was about wanting a horizontal campus. That is not what the emails say.

Stankey's diagnosis is the one no one in Dallas wants to say out loud, because saying it out loud means the problem is not the building, or the arena, or the parking, or the panhandlers. The problem is us. The way we run the city. The cycle he described, the one where we surge resources at a crisis and then lose interest, is not a failure of one administration. It is a pattern, and it is the pattern that the rest of the emails make visible.

Consider WFAA. The city filed eminent domain proceedings against the land owner of the news station's parking lot for our convention center expansion. WFAA, understandably, started looking at leaving downtown, given their building would no longer have parking. The emails then show officials, including the City’s Economic Developer Corporation CEO Linda McMahon, scrambling to keep WFAA from relocating. We are now presumably going to offer tax incentives or concessions to retain a company that wants to leave because of something we did to them. The city condemned their parking lot and then panicked when they reacted like any rational actor would. That is the cycle. Create the problem, react to the problem, claim credit for managing the problem.

Consider the mayor. The emails show Travis Machen, the CEO of Scotiabank, a company Dallas had just approved an incentive package for, unable to get Mayor Eric Johnson to return a phone call. McMahon wrote to Tolbert that Machen "has talked to everyone involved from the Governor on down" and wanted to know why the mayor would not call him back. When the EDC organized a meeting of CEOs to discuss the city's technology future, McMahon noted that she had extended an invitation to the mayor. He declined. When Scotiabank's ribbon-cutting was scheduled, city staff had to notify organizers the mayor might not attend and asked whether the mayor pro tem could fill in.

Johnson ultimately showed up to the ribbon-cutting. He later celebrated it in his newsletter. The Dallas Morning News and D Magazine have taken to calling him "the Mayor of Somewhere Else." The nickname is cruel. Also, it is earned. In a city manager form of government, the mayor has a limited operational role. However, the one irreplaceable thing the mayor can do is be the mayor. Show up. Take the call. Convey to an executive deciding between Dallas and Plano that someone in charge gives a damn. Johnson could not be bothered. There must have been a lot going on in Somewhere Else that day.

What the Emails Do Not Show

The emails do not show a conspiracy yet. I want to be precise about this, because the temptation to find a villain is strong and the evidence does not support it. If they do, I pray the Morning News is not still sitting on it three weeks in.

As far as we know, there are no renderings of the Adelson’s new arena in the City Manager’s inbox. There is no email directing the engineers to inflate the City Hall repair costs. The site tours that have seemingly generated so much outrage happened only after the council voted in November to start exploring options. That vote was 12-3. The tours were within the scope of what was authorized, even if the way they were conducted, selectively, without disclosure to the full council, was sloppy and corrosive to trust.

However, the glaring absence in the heart of the emails is something worse than a conspiracy. A conspiracy requires a plan. What I fear we have is a series of over-reactions dressed up as conspiracy. This is the third option, and it’s the category for which we lack a good name when it is so tempting to label anything we don’t like as corruption. I would humbly propose we use a word that EDC CEO McMahon used in a email January of this year regarding a mishap involving the proposed new Dallas NASDAQ Texas office: cluster. You fill in the four-letter word that goes after it.

Something happens, the city lurches in response, and the response creates the next problem. The convention center needs WFAA's parking lot. WFAA wants to leave. We need to keep WFAA. Downtown is losing tenants. The Mavericks want to move. We need an arena to save downtown. The arena needs the City Hall site. City Hall is too expensive to fix. We need to move City Hall. Where do we move it? We don't know yet, but we toured fifteen buildings and a handful of members got private tours of fifteen sites while their colleagues learn about it from the newspaper.

This is the cluster-f. This is what Stankey saw. Everybody is reacting. The emails do not show anyone steering.

They do not even show key players at the City getting along with each other. Something of a pre-requisite, if you ask me, for a conspiracy.

Drilling in on the January “cluster” emails from McMahon, in this note the EDC CEO outlined her displeasure with how some communications with large employers are routed through the Economic Development Department, a branch of the City government reporting to the City Manager, while some are left to McMahon’s Economic Development Corporation, a quasi-governmental entity sponsored by the City, but not directly one of its constituent parts.

Her frustration seems pointed specifically at a miscommunication between top city leaders that led to the Regional Chamber of Commerce telling mayors of other Metroplex cities they should reach out to NASDAQ to discuss relocation incentives. (Yes, we are losing employers to the suburbs that haven’t even moved here yet.) McMahon needed the City Manager to hear that everyone: the Regional Chamber, the mayors of somewheres else, and everyone at the City, needed to know this was not an “auction.” This was a “Dallas deal” on which she had personally worked for over a year. She alluded to the staff members by name which she believed were responsible for the miscommunication.

What follows is, by my estimation, one of the most interesting windows into the City Hall process. Remember, it is McMahon’s EDC that actually hired most of the consultants engaged in the City Hall study. I am quoting her at length because her words, frankly, speak for themselves. She wrote, emphasis added:

“I am not copying my board chair and Alan [on this email] because I have several of the board ready to resign - including my board chair, Alan and Jeanne and probably at least half of them will follow....which as you can imagine - will cause every thing to collapse. And I will unwind the EDC as soon as that happens.

“I have expressed my displeasure and frustration directly to Robin this evening - as I did with you - I am not holding back. This is not sustainable. I have kept you out of the sausage making for a year and a half but I will not risk the reputation of the good people on my board and as my last chapter in my career - my reputation.

“I sincerely apologize because the issues facing the city does not need your attention diverted to this - unfortunately - I cannot see another path forward except through your decisive action - either way.”

Do these seem like co-conspirators to you? This reads to me like two people who could barely stand to be in a room with one another, let alone orchestrate a plot to tear down City Hall.

What I see here is not evidence of conspiracy, but only more of Stankey’s “foundational issues” with “effective/sustained governance.” We have an understandably frustrated, private sector executive running our EDC, who cannot even get the City to get out of its own way when it comes to attracting and retaining jobs in the City. This is the cluster, not the conspiracy.

The Cracks

This is not the article I want to write about the City Hall debate, because it is the one that makes “my side” look bad. But the version of this article where I don’t talk about the credibility of the people making these decisions is the dishonest version. If nothing else, I have spent three weeks here arguing against dishonesty. I would rather lose this argument in a transparent process than win it in this one.

I can no longer make that argument without saying this: the people currently managing this process have not demonstrated, through their actions, that this process is going to result in what’s best for the City. They have yet to prove that City Hall is not simply our next over-reaction. I want to be clear that is not a claim about motives. I have no reason to believe the city manager, Councilmembers like Chad West, or Linda McMahon are acting in bad faith. I am saying that the judgment on display in these emails, the selective briefings, the repair estimates initially presented without alternatives, the private tours, the in-fighting, and the inability to keep the full council informed, does not inspire confidence that a billion-dollar decision about the future of downtown Dallas is currently on the right path. We don’t set ourselves up to make the right decision when the process is a cluster-fuck.

Perhaps this is just the effect of having your emails leaked. There is a level of scrutiny at play here from which it would be hard for anyone to come out clean. However, nearly every email the city manager sends is public information. That is not a leak. That is the law. If the way you conduct business cannot survive being read by the people you work for, the problem is not the disclosure. The problem is the conduct.

All of our actions have consequences. Running the city well entails knowing and naming those consequences before we act, not scrambling to clean them up after. That is all I have been asking for in this newsletter for the past month. It is what the people who want to save City Hall are asking for. It is, if you read carefully, what John Stankey was asking for too.

I am asking for the people making these decisions to do the hard part and name these consequences out loud, in public, and still make the case that you are making the right decision. Tell us what we are losing and why we should give it up. Don’t rely on inflated numbers and selective tours. If you cannot do that, then you are not governing. You are just winning.

Somewhere in the next ten years, the next CEO is going to sit across the next table from the next city manager. They will have watched us handle this decision. If what they watched us do was another cycle, another task force, another independent review, another set of selective briefings, all followed by a scramble when the emails come out, they will see the same cracks in the foundation that Stankey did. They will come to the same answer. Plano has land too.

love/hate/other to: onemansdallas@gmail.com