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

You are driving east on the new bridge over the Trinity into Downtown Dallas. AT&T left for Plano seventeen years ago. The Discovery District closed not long after. Neiman Marcus is gone. Brides buy their dresses at Northpark. The Dallas Mavericks are in Irving, in a taxpayer financed-arena surrounded by an entertainment district that is, by all accounts, pretty nice if you enjoy driving to things. The Dallas Stars play in Plano. The American Airlines Center has been torn down. The site is now a new mixed-use development with a fading “Y’all Street” banner (a real thing that real adults called it) that no one has bothered to take down. The project is about 60 percent leased, which developer Jack Matthews calls “stabilizing.”

City Hall, in this version of events, got its renovation. The council voted to stay in 2026, called a bond election early, and began a phased-repair program that was projected to take five years and cost $800 million after the second independent review brought the number down. Eight years and $1.1 billion later, the building was finally modernized. The roof no longer leaked. The generators worked. Seven of the blocks around City Hall and the convention center are still surface parking lots.

The convention center opened on time in 2029. It is widely considered a top six convention center in North America. Conventions come. Attendees stay in the hotels. They climb in Waymos to go back to the recently-added Terminal H at DFW Airport. The deck park over I-30 was built and it is lovely. It connects Downtown to the Cedars in a way that, on paper, should have catalyzed development on both sides.

Downtown Dallas, in this version of 2046, is not a disaster.

It is something worse. It is fine.

It is a place that functions during business hours, holds events on schedule, and has a residential population that grew just enough to not be embarrassing, but not nearly enough to feel like a neighborhood.

Nothing in this scenario went wrong. That is the thing that should scare us. Every project was completed. The convention center was built. City Hall was repaired. The deck park was funded. Individual decisions, each defensible on its own terms, made by separate committees on separate timelines. The problem is that nobody ever asked them to add up to the same thing.

I have spent three weeks on City Hall. The building, the numbers. I stand by all of it.

However. (There is always a however.) I am going to do what I said I wouldn’t do, and what I told you shouldn’t do either. I am going to combine the City Hall question and the arena one. Because perhaps, the City Hall question was never the question. It was the question you had to answer first, but why tear down a building to do nothing with the 15 acres you just made available? It means we can finally ask the question I have been circling for three weeks.

What is Downtown for?

Tearing down City Hall only makes sense if you have a vision for Downtown to be on a path other than the one it is currently on. The urgency and speed at which we are making that decision only make sense if Downtown is at an inflection point. If you have not been paying attention, it is. At best, Downtown is on its way to becoming Dallas's largest opportunity cost. At worst, it becomes nothing at all.

The Ghost of Downtown Past

Downtown Dallas is in many respects, not unique. American downtowns look the way they do because of two forces, applied in sequence. The first was proximity. Before the automobile, people clustered because they had no choice. Narrow streets and tall buildings were a function of feet, not policy. The courthouse, the city hall, the department store, and the theater anchored every downtown in America for two centuries, not because someone planned it that way, but because everything had to be close to everything else.

The second force was the office. Postwar, the car and the suburb solved the proximity problem, but offices still needed to cluster. You cannot run a law firm from a ranch in Celina. Downtowns survived the suburban exodus not as neighborhoods but as commuter destinations, places you drove to in the morning and left at five. (We are still recovering from the highways they built to allow this.) For decades, it was enough. The restaurants served lunch. The city collected property taxes on towers full of desks. Nobody asked whether Downtown was a place people wanted to be, because it was a place people had to be, eight hours a day, five days a week.

The constant across both eras was that Downtown is centrally located. That has not changed. What has changed is what it makes sense to put there. Not offices, or at least not only offices. We know what COVID did, and we can only guess at what AI does after. However, the same things still benefit from being in the center of a metro area of eight million people: the seat of government, civic and cultural institutions, convention and entertainment facilities, and dare I say, arenas. Above all of it and around all of it, we will need people. The pre-war downtown was a place you walked to because you had no car. The postwar downtown was a place you drove to because you had no choice. The post-COVID downtown, if we build it right, is a place you live in because you want to.

The Ghost of Downtown Present

As I am sure you are aware, Downtown’s largest employer AT&T has announced they are leaving for Plano, taking with them six thousand employees. We were told they left because they wanted a “horizontal campus.” However, emails between AT&T CEO John Stankey and City Manager Kim Tolbert, first publicized by DMN just last night, tell a different story. Stankey’s trouble, in his own (corporate) words, was that “my concerns transcend the immediate issues and moment and extend to the ongoing and cyclical nature of our challenges with effective/sustained governance of the City and the inter-relationship of other issues and components to deliver a healthy business environment and neighborhood.” Sheesh. I can only imagine how much the consultants got paid for that sentence. I could have written it in two words — We're out. “Challenges with effective/sustained governance” is this week’s candidate for new city motto.

According to DMN, AT&T’s RFP for a new HQ that followed did not include a single site in Dallas. They were not shopping for a campus. They were leaving. When half your workforce can work from a kitchen table in Frisco, the only reason to keep 6,000 people in a single downtown tower is that Downtown offers something Frisco does not. Right now, it does not.

What Downtown still offers is the densest, most highly taxed acreage in the city, which is why cutting it out like our appendix is not an option. Downtowns all across the country are outliving their past purposes, but that is no excuse to treat it like a centrally-located vestigial organ. The question is whether we can build a new purpose before it reaches a point of no return.

The State of Play

If your image of Downtown is one from say 2021, it is out of date. Many more people live in Downtown than did ten years ago. The pandemic-era spike in unsheltered homelessness, which was a national phenomenon Dallas handled about as well as anyone (which is to say, not great), has in part subsided, especially in the tourism-heavy parts of Downtown. Whether that holds past the city’s extraordinary efforts ahead of the 2026 FIFA World Cup (or to save AT&T) is a fair question. Regardless, the Downtown you are picturing is probably worse than the one that is actually there. It is still not great.

Downtown Dallas has a residential population of roughly 13,000. For scale: that is only a bit higher than the population of The Village, the apartment complex at Greenville and Lovers where you may have lived in your twenties. The entire central business district of the ninth-largest city in America has fewer residents than fit inside the route of the Dallas St. Patrick’s Day 5K Race.

Downtown sits on just under nine hundred acres of land. It is less than half of one percent of the city’s land. By my math, it contributes over 4 percent of all property tax revenue, property taxes being a majority of Dallas’s revenue. It contributes closer to 8 percent of commercial property taxes, the ones that are not assessed on regular homeowners and which swing hard with things like homestead exemption reform and are generally speaking a regressive tax. Downtown provides over ten times more tax value per acre than the rest of the city, a higher value per acre than even the tony Park Cities.

That ratio is falling. For some real world examples, Comerica Tower has lost 11 percent of its assessed value since 2010. Bank of America Plaza (“the Pickle”) has lost 1 percent over the same period. Similarly-aged buildings just across the highway park in Uptown, The Crescent and 1845 Woodall Rodgers, have gained 156 and 204 percent over the same period. Downtown merchant sales volumes (on which we collect sales tax) fell from $1.35 billion in 2017 to 2019 to $850 million in 2021 to 2024, a thirty-seven percent drop that can only be written off due to the pandemic in part. This is not a Dallas problem. Dallas is booming. This is a Downtown problem.

Dallas needs density to maintain its tax base. The city is landlocked. The revenue has to come from building more value on the acres we already have. Even better if it comes from increasing the value of a building that was already built. If you have been to a zoning meeting anywhere for anything ever, you already know how this conversation goes.

I will not prejudice anyone by saying the angry neighbors are wrong. (They generally are). I am saying that if you do not want density in your neighborhood, you should be very excited about density being built Downtown. Downtown is perhaps the one place in Dallas where you can add twenty thousand new residential units and there will be no one to show up and complain.

Letting Downtown decline is not the fiscally conservative position. It is the opposite. It is watching the most productive, centrally-located acreage in the city lose value while the capital moves north, and deciding not to do anything about it because the intervention looks expensive in a press release. Yes, the intervention is expensive. Doing nothing will cost us more.

What the Arena Does

The tax base does not recover without residents. Not convention attendees. Not office workers who leave at five. Residents. Tens of thousands of them (or more). Enough that the streets have foot traffic at all hours, that retail can survive on neighborhood demand rather than event spillover, that “public safety” becomes a consequence of population density rather than a euphemism in Downtown’s BCG consulting report.

Convention centers do not build neighborhoods, because conventions are temporary. Parks do not build neighborhoods, because parks without people are just grass. An arena is busy 40 or 50 nights a year, which is better than a convention center but worse than a grocery store. What an arena does, if it is planned correctly, is give a developer a reason to build the housing that builds the neighborhood. The arena is not the point. The twenty-thousand apartments around the arena are the point.

San Diego already proved this. In the late 1990s, East Village was 130 blocks of warehouses, vacant lots, and social services. Roughly 70 percent of the land was empty. The city and the Padres agreed to build Petco Park there in 2004 as the catalyst of a 26-block master-planned district. The final tab was $474 million (not inflation adjusted). The city paid $301 million, mostly through hotel-tax bonds (how we financed the AAC around the same time). The Padres and private developers covered the rest, including almost all of the cost overruns.

Within ten years, the 26 blocks around the ballpark had added roughly 14,000 new housing units and 15,000 residents. The population today, twenty years on, is north of 40,000. Employment barely moved. In the decade after Petco Park opened, the area added 29 jobs. Not 29,000. Twenty-nine. The ballpark built a neighborhood.

I am using San Diego as the model. Not because it all went perfect. It did not. California eventually canceled state funding that meant local taxpayers footed more of the bill than expected. Homelessness there is still an “issue.” I am using it because San Diego’s East Village was 130 blocks of nothing in 1998, and today 40,000 people live there. People live there on Tuesday mornings. The restaurants are open because the residents are there, not because the Padres are playing. The ballpark is one building among many. The ratio is the point.

Victory Park was supposed to do what Petco Park did. Everyone in Dallas already knows how that went. The financial crisis hit. The condos sat empty. The arena worked. Everything around it did not, for well over a decade. Victory Park eventually filled in. It took twenty years to get a grocery store. However, Victory Park was never large enough in the first place, only 75 acres compared to 900 total downtown. It is a few blocks of apartments next to an arena.

Victory Park paid a price we can all now learn from. First, it was planned as a luxury destination, not as a neighborhood. Second, it was priced for a population that did not exist, instead of priced to create one. Any deal for a new arena that does not include residential density and a lot more of it, is Victory Park again. We have already run that experiment. Every version of this story that works has to end the same way. More people living Downtown. A lot more than could ever fit in Victory.

Who Pays

I spent almost a month now on the City Hall numbers. I owe you the same work on the arena.

The last five NBA arenas built in America cost between $524 million and $2 billion. Two were privately financed by mega-billionaires who wrote the check themselves. Dallas will not get that deal. (We should ask.) San Antonio is the next team to break ground on a new stadium, with a $1.3 billion dollar budget and $800 million of that being publicly funded. The budget in Dallas will start with a ‘B’.

We should expect the arena deal, whether it happens at Valley View or Downtown, has a largely publicly-funded component, paid for by our hotel occupancy taxes. Once again, San Antonio is the model. We can use a mechanism under state law called a PFZ, Project Finance Zone, which re-directs a portion of the state’s share of hotel taxes away from Austin and to specific local projects. We have already used it on the new convention center next door, and we would redraw the zone to include the arena. I cannot help but note here, we are going to be slicing the pie pretty thin to add another billion dollar pledge to the $2.2 billion in hotel-tax debt already funding the convention center.

I do not know whether the city will use hotel-tax revenue, tap into general obligation bonds, the land value at 1500 Marilla, private contribution, or some combination to finance an arena. Those are answers for questions that have not been asked yet. However, the same standard I applied to City Hall applies here. Show the numbers, make the math work, and pick who ultimately pays if the projections are wrong. If someone proposes a billion dollar project without mentioning who pays for it, the answer is usually: you.

2046, the Other Version

It is 2046 again, but different.

The convention center has been open for seventeen years. It is full most weeks. Attendees walk out the front doors and into a neighborhood. A neighborhood with a breakfast place on the corner of Marilla and Ervay that has been there eleven years because the owner lives six blocks away and her regulars live closer. The deck park connects the convention center to the Cedars, and both sides of I-30 have the kind of mid-rise residential density that makes a park feel like a park and not a green buffer between two parking lots.

City Hall was demolished in 2030. The city bought AT&T’s old campus, right as they moved to Plano. The 15 acres at 1500 Marilla became the center of a master-planned neighborhood district. There is an arena. The Dallas Mavericks play in it. We hosted NBA All Star Weekend in it twice. It is one building among many. The arena is busy 40 or 50 nights a year. The neighborhood is busy every night. The taco shop across from the park is busy at lunch on a Wednesday, which is perhaps the only measure of a neighborhood that has ever mattered.

Downtown Dallas has a residential population of 40,000. That is still modest by the standards of a major American city, but it is triple the 2026 number. The streets are not empty at 9 p.m. The restaurants are open for dinner. There is a grocery store. The tax base contributes nearly one-tenth of the City’s annual revenue, despite being only three percent of the city’s (growing again) population.

Nothing in this version of 2046 required any technology that does not exist. It required no unprecedented public expenditure. The only thing this version required that the other version did not was a decision. Downtowns aren’t just places people work any more. This is a neighborhood. Build it like one.

The version of 2046 I want to build toward still has losses. We lose a Pei building. We lose the civic plaza. The people who love that building are protecting something real, and I will not pretend otherwise.

I want to be honest about what the demolition argument actually is, because I have been making it for three weeks. I said separate the questions. The financial case is necessary but not sufficient. The argument is not about maintenance costs. It is not about the Adelsons. It is that Downtown is losing the tax base, the employers, and the foot traffic that justify its property values, and that 15 acres in the right location with the right plan might be the best chance to reverse that trajectory. That is the bet. It is not a small one.

What we are trying to win is a Downtown that works, that has people in it. The kind of place where you walk to dinner and pass other people who are also walking to dinner and nobody has to commission a study about whether the street feels safe because the answer is obvious.

The measure of whether we got it right is not whether the arena gets built. It is whether twenty-thousand more people live downtown fifteen years after it opens. That may be the only version of 2046 we can afford to choose.

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

The reactions I received to last week’s post, I think, are broadly reflective of the overall discourse about City Hall. People aren’t really talking about the arena. People are very worried however that a group of actors within the City is intentionally putting such a high price tag on City Hall to make it seem like staying is out of the question. Critics say reactions like mine are far too trusting of the “official narrative.”

Should we take the City’s numbers at face value? Is the $329 million corrective repair estimate or the $1.1 to $1.4 billion all-in figure trumped-up in order to make demolition look like the only rational option? Further, is the reason for that not incompetence or conservatism on the part of the engineers, but something worse? Should we all be worried that the fix is in?

In this version of the story, the City Manager and her staff, the Economic Development Corporation, the consulting firms they hired, and some unknown outside actors are all working toward a predetermined outcome: sentence City Hall to death by demolition, clear the site, and hand it to the Adelsons for a new arena. A majority of City Council is either in on it, or falling for it hook, line, and sinker.

That is a serious claim. And serious claims carry a burden of proof. Burdens that both sides would benefit from shouldering a little more than they have to date (myself included.)

What the Criticism Actually Says

I count four strains of skeptics.

One group points to a 2018 AECOM study that evaluated City Hall conditions from 2016 data. That study estimated about $19 million in repairs and $93 million in replacements. If the building needed $93 million eight years ago, how does it need $329 million now? There are partial explanations (narrower scope in 2018, inflation, multiple systems crossing end-of-life in the same window), but it’s a fair point. Count it.

A second group focuses on process. Council Member Adam Bazaldua called the EDC’s report a “justification memo” rather than a neutral assessment. Council Member Cara Mendelsohn said the report was “one-sided, predetermined and agenda-driven.” Bazaldua asked Linda McMahon, the EDC president, directly whether they had engaged any consultants who would not stand to benefit from a sale of 1500 Marilla Street. Her answer: “Not that I’m aware of.”

That is not a good answer. Two for two.

A third group focuses on the various assumptions baked into the billion-dollar figure. The report assumes the building must be fully vacated for five years, purportedly due to the quantity of asbestos that will be disturbed during renovations. It includes fitting out the temporary, five-year office space at a cost of up to $73 million, a move I can only describe as lighting money on fire. Critics point out the EDC also attributes $134 million in furniture, technology, ADA and moving costs entirely to the ‘stay’ scenario, as if moving into a different building somehow avoids needing desks and wheelchair ramps. Hat trick.

A fourth group landed late last week: Sixteen Former AIA Dallas Presidents (for the record, I am furious they swiped the title of my forthcoming sequel to Twelve Angry Men) released a ten-page slide deck calling the EDC’s projections “not credible.”

The deck gets many of the above points right: the shared-cost misallocation, the absence of a phased-repair alternative, and also a point no one else has raised. The Finance Committee has already voted to relocate emergency services from City Hall to a new purpose-built facility at $200 to $250 million. The EDC’s $211 million in core systems costs appears to assume those services stay in the basement. If the city is double-counting emergency systems that it already plans to move, that alone could knock tens of millions off the $329 million. Grand slam. (The deck also states the EDC failed to consider the City could apply for state and federal historic tax credits to pay for up to 45% of the renovations. I have to throw a penalty flag here. These funds are only available to private, income-producing buildings according to the Texas Historic Commission’s FAQs. They are 16 architects, not 16 tax attorneys after all.)

All of these are fair points. They are collectively more than enough to say: the city has not met its burden of proof on the billion-dollar number. But even taken together, they are not enough to meet a very different burden, which is the claim that the numbers were fabricated. Very few of these criticisms engage specifically with the findings of the report (the roof, the generators), but rather with the process, the assumptions, and the incentives of its authors. The gap between “these estimates have problems” and “this was a coordinated lie” is enormous, and right now the public conversation is collapsing the two. Sorry to be the discourse police.

What $329 Million Actually Gets Us

Before we get to the conspiracy claim, we should ask whether the $329 million number is even unusual. Even people who don’t buy the conspiracy still struggle with its size.

The original construction cost of Dallas City Hall, completed in 1978, was about $70 million. In 2026 dollars, this is roughly $350 million. The proposed corrective repair bill, before interiors or relocation, is a comparable number to what it cost to build City Hall in the first place. That by itself is not evidence of fraud. It is however a measure of how much damage 49 years of deferred maintenance can do.

In Austin, the Texas State Capitol underwent a comprehensive restoration and underground extension completed in 1995 for about $200 million. In 2026 dollars, roughly $430 million. That project restored the entire 360,000-square-foot historic building (new plumbing, electrical, HVAC, fire safety, full interior restoration to its 1888 appearance) and built a 667,000-square-foot underground extension. The Capitol restoration ran about $586 per square foot on just the historic building, not counting the additions. Dallas City Hall’s corrective repairs come in at about $439 per square foot.

Bethany Erickson at D Magazine contributed another example even closer to home. The Dallas County Records Building, actually three buildings constructed in 1915, 1928, and 1955, was renovated for $200 million, completed in 2022. In 2026 dollars, roughly $224 million, or about $784 per square foot for 286,000 square feet. That renovation is complete and those buildings are in use. There were higher per-square-foot costs than City Hall’s repairs, on buildings a fraction of the size, and nobody called it a conspiracy.

Erickson also makes the Notre Dame comparison, and it’s a fair one. (The one in Paris, not the one with a football team.) Notre Dame, 860 years old, devastated by fire, essentially rebuilt for about $760 million, although restoration work is ongoing. A near-total reconstruction of one of the most important buildings in Western civilization, using methods that included medieval carpentry and stonemasonry. It still cost less than the all-in, twenty-year figure being quoted for a brutalist office building from 1978.

If I haven’t exhausted you, there is the Federal Reserve in D.C. Its two buildings from the 1930s are currently undergoing a full renovation at a projected cost of $2.5 billion. That is roughly $2,273 per square foot. It is, by most accounts, an extraordinary boondoggle. The cost drivers? Asbestos, lead, historic preservation, blast-resistant windows, DHS-grade security, contaminated soil, and a sinkhole. Several of these sound familiar. City Hall’s corrective repairs, at $439 per square foot, look modest by comparison.

The Comparison the City Never Made

The EDC report’s most damaging mistake is not something it got wrong. It is something it never attempted.

If you are going to tell a city council and 1.3 million residents that it will cost a billion dollars to stay in our own building, you owe us a comparison. Not a vague gesture to “favorable conditions and cost-effective relocation solutions,” which is the language the report actually uses. A real comparison. Same time horizon. Same cost categories. Same financing assumptions. Our sixteen former AIA presidents point this out as well.

The city didn’t do that. So I did.

First, I built a 20-year financial model comparing three scenarios on apples-to-apples terms: stay and renovate, buy an existing office building, or sign a long-term lease. All three use the same assumptions: square footage, the same employee count, and the same financing rates. All three include the same $134 million in shared costs (furniture, technology, ADA compliance, moving, contingency) because we can assume some version of those costs exist regardless of which building you’re in.

Second, I remind you they only get to a billion dollars by drawing the analysis out over 20 years. It’s fair to say we’ve shifted the goalposts by conflating what it costs to “fix” City Hall with what it costs to “occupy” City Hall. Regardless, a dollar in 2046 is worth less than a dollar today. I accounted for the timing of the costs spread out over 20 years as well, by taking the net present value under each scenario.

The full model, with every assumption sourced, is published alongside this piece. (I know what you’re thinking. No, I do not have anything better to do.) Here is what it shows, using mid-range estimates throughout.

Stay and renovate costs approximately $1.19 billion over 20 years. That is largely in line with the City’s figure, though I get there with higher financing costs, less a credit for the residual value of the City Hall land.

Buy an existing downtown office building costs approximately $536 million over 20 years. The city owns the building free and clear at the end of the bond term.

Sign a long-term lease costs approximately $642 million over 20 years. At the end of year 20, the city owns nothing and faces a renewal at whatever the market demands.

On a net present value basis at a 5% discount rate: staying costs $855 million, buying costs $511 million, leasing costs $536 million. Buying saves $345 million in today’s dollars. Even the lease saves $319 million versus staying.

City Hall Cost Comparison Model

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We don’t have to guess about whether this kind of move works for a Texas city, because Fort Worth just did it. Fort Worth purchased the former Pier 1 Imports headquarters, a 400,000-square-foot Class A office tower, for $71.2 million. They spent $157.0 million renovating it into a new City Hall, including a purpose-built council chambers addition. Total project cost: $226.5 million, which includes a $50 million overrun. Even with the overrun, that is $553 per square foot for a fully renovated, move-in-ready, seat of government. When I run Fort Worth's actual costs through the same 20-year model that adds interest and operating costs, the total comes to $610 million. Still $576 million cheaper than staying in City Hall.

The assumptions in the model could be wrong. The purchase price could be higher. The fit-out could run over. Interest rates could rise. But the gap is so large that the assumptions would need to be very wrong, in the same direction, on every line item, for staying to beat moving. The margin is not close.

The Conspiracy Claim

I understand why people want to believe the fix is in. Dallas has a seemingly well-earned reputation for deals that get cut in private and justified in public. The Trinity toll road. The convention center hotel. When a new project shows up with a big shiny price tag, a billionaire family waiting in the wings, and a rushed public process, the pattern recognition kicks in before the report even gets read.

“Everyone that I don’t like is lying” is not an argument. And right now, that alone is doing a lot of the work.

The conspiracy claim sounds small when people say it out loud. "The numbers are cooked." Follow it one step further and it gets very big very fast. It means AECOM fabricated findings. It means the engineers who inspected the roof, the generators, the HVAC, the plumbing either lied or were told to lie. It means the EDC, the City Manager, and the facilities staff are coordinating a fraud across dozens of departments and companies. Dallas already has a conspiracy that happened downtown. We do not need to manufacture another one. If the proof exists, it is probably sitting now in someone's inbox. (I’ll even sign your petition to release the Washburne Files.)

The City’s report deserves the scrutiny it is getting. They have not yet met their burden of proof. But the critics on the other side are falling well short as well. Old public buildings cost a lot of money to maintain. They are not pointing to a specific finding of the engineers and showing it to be false. They are, in my humble opinion, working backward from a conclusion either that the building must be saved at any price or about the Adelsons. That is not skepticism. That is self-justifying belief. And it lets you skip the hard, boring work of actually engaging with what dozens of firms and engineers found when they inspected the building.

Where This Leaves Us

The conspiracy theory is not the biggest danger here. The biggest danger is that we use skepticism about the numbers as an excuse to do nothing. Calls for a second opinion, a second report are growing. They may be headed off by the fact that Mayor Johnson has called for a vote on the issue this week.

Dallas has been doing nothing about City Hall for 49 years. Every bond cycle, City Hall gets pushed to the next one. In 2012, the bond program set aside $400 million for city facilities. Flood control, streets, and economic development took priority. In 2017, the bond included $7 million for City Hall. Seven. In 2024, $61 million was initially requested, then $28 million was advanced and later reallocated to other things. They didn’t upsize the emergency backup generators in 2025 after designing and setting aside funds for them.

This is the pattern. It is always the pattern. The building needs work, the money gets moved, and the bill gets bigger. We study the study that updates the prior study.

Whether the real corrective repair number is ultimately $100 million, $200 million or $329 million, it is a lot of money. Relocating is still cheaper in every scenario tested, by a wide margin. Even if the renovation estimate comes down 25% or 50%, the gap between staying and buying still runs into the hundreds of millions. The question is not whether we can afford to move. It is whether we can afford not to.

Separate the questions. Whether to stay in City Hall is a question about the building, its condition, and the cost to fix it. What to do with the land afterward is a separate question about the future of Downtown, public benefit, and whether the Adelsons deserve a new stadium. You can believe the building should go and also believe the arena deal stinks. You can believe the numbers are fat and also believe the building is failing. That is just what governance looks like when there are no clean answers.

Ironically, and maybe this is the worst part of all of this — both sides can be right. The skeptics can be correct that the City has inflated the total in order to justify tearing down City Hall. The City can still be right that it’s the best option. The numbers can be wrong without the answer being wrong.

Is there a conspiracy to tear down City Hall? Sure. Maybe. Could it still be the best thing for the City? I can think of a billion reasons why.

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

It’s tempting to think that the right question to ask is: “How did we get here in the first place?” That, however, may be the only question not worth dwelling on. Dallas made a series of choices, year after year, budget after budget, to skip planned maintenance and pay for it later. It’s later.

The right question is much simpler and far more uncomfortable: What do you do when there are no good options?

Dallas City Hall is a 49-year-old building where nearly every major part of the building is past its useful life. Water leaks through the facilities so badly that someone installed a gutter system inside the building to catch it. The building’s air conditioning is so old it relies on refrigerant now banned by the EPA for causing holes in the ozone layer. In the floors, walls, ceilings, insulation and pipes, there is asbestos in nearly every place the engineers looked (and likely too in the places they didn’t). The total bill to stay at City Hall now starts at $906 million and in all likelihood, would eventually climb past a billion. And unfortunately, the tab is so large that it has opened the door to messier questions about who benefits from what comes next.

Where We Are

If you’re reading this at all, you already know our City Hall is designed by famed architect I.M. Pei (also of Fountain Place fame), championed by Mayor Erik Jonsson (also of Central Library fame), and was built in an era in which Dallas was by all accounts struggling to move on from being the place where they killed JFK (also of Airport fame). Dallas City Hall opened in 1978. It is, by most accounts, a significant piece of civic architecture. The Brutalist style it embodies made the building a natural stand-in for the headquarters of the evil OmniCorp in 1987’s Robocop, despite the film being set in Detroit. It is also, by every engineering account available, a building where nearly everything that can wear out has worn out.

According to the Facility Condition Assessment from AECOM, nearly every major system in City Hall has exceeded its useful life. The roof has a standard useful life of 25 years. City Hall’s roof is 29 years old. The HVAC systems have a standard life of 20 to 30 years. Like the building itself, they are 49. The emergency power generation system has a standard life of 20 to 25 years. Again, parts of it are 49.

Here is the closest I got to being angry in writing this piece (though I’m not mad, I’m just disappointed). The city actually designed a replacement for the emergency generator system. The engineering was done. The plans were drawn. Then the city paused implementation and moved the funding to something else. The old, undersized generators are still running. They are powering the building that houses Dallas PD dispatch, 911 call operations, and even the city’s Emergency Operations Center.

Read that again. The systems keeping the lights on for Dallas’s Emergency Operations Center are running on generators the city itself determined needed to be replaced, then chose not to replace.

This is the pattern. The presentation from Assistant City Manager Donzell Gipson to the Finance Committee on February 23, 2026, includes a line that I can only imagine will be in the running for our new city motto: “The majority of repairs done to date have been reactive to system failures.”

We don’t fix things when they wear out. We fix things when they break. The difference between those two philosophies, compounded over 49 years, is the difference between a manageable annual budget and a $329 million repair bill.

That’s just the repair number. Keep reading.

Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

The number you will (may) hear most often is $329 million. That is the estimated cost for corrective repairs to City Hall’s building systems and infrastructure. It is a large number. It is also deeply misleading, because it assumes conditions that do not exist.

The $329 million estimate assumes the building is unoccupied during construction. You cannot rewire the electrical system, tear out and replace all the HVAC equipment, strip the roof, rehabilitate the parking garage structure, and abate asbestos throughout a building while nearly 2,000 city employees are working inside it. AECOM’s assessment says “in-place” renovation is not recommended due to increased construction cost, extended timelines, operational disruptions, and environmental considerations.

The full report breaks down the true costs of repair in a 20-year table, and it is worth walking through every line because each one represents a cost that was created by pretending an earlier cost didn't exist.

Start with corrective repairs: $329 million. That covers restoring the building systems to functional condition. It does not include modernizing anything. It does not include reconfiguring the space. It does not include new technology. Just getting the pipes, wires, chillers, generators, roof, windows, fire suppression, and structure back to working order.

Next, you have to actually make the building usable again after those repairs. Interior buildout runs around $100 million. Furniture, fixtures, and equipment: $20 to $45 million. Technology: $15 to $31 million. ADA compliance upgrades: $33 million. Soft costs and moving: $20 million. Contingency: $23 to $28 million. Call it roughly $165 million at the low end to make City Hall move-in ready after $329 million in repairs.

But remember, nobody can be in the building while this work happens. So you need to lease temporary space for five years. The lease itself runs $100 to $112 million. Fitting out that temporary space costs another (wide-ranging) $13 to $73 million.

And because the city does not have $329 million (plus everything else) in cash sitting around, it will need to finance the project through bonds, as we do for most large city expenditures. Interest expense over 20 years: $299 to $360 million. Layer on 20 years of what the engineers estimate the go-forward operating expenses will be to stay in City Hall, and you have yet another $277 million.

Add it up. The total costs to remain in City Hall until around its seventieth birthday range from $1.1 to $1.4 billion.

Also, the $329 million corrective repair estimate does not include cost contingency. It’s a government job. Things will cost more and take longer than we think. The real number will be higher. We just don’t yet know how much.

Let’s Talk About the Building

Before we get to the arena question, we should talk honestly about what we are being asked to save.

I have been to Dallas City Hall dozens of times. City Council meetings. City Plan Commission hearings. Meetings with staff in the offices upstairs. I can tell you from direct, repeated, personal experience that the building is miserable to navigate and miserable to access.

If you have never been, picture this. You are a Dallas resident. Maybe you need to attend a public hearing regarding a zoning case on your street. Maybe you need to deal with a permit or pay a water bill in person. You drive to a giant concrete structure off Young Street that looks, from the outside, less like a civic building and more like a nuclear power plant. You enter a building whose layout is at best, color-coded. “Ah, you took the green elevator. You need to go back down and take the red elevator to this floor,” a helpful staffer may tell you. You try to find the right floor, the right wing, the right office. The wayfinding is confusing. The space has been piecemealed and reconfigured over decades into something that the city’s own consultants describe politely as “challenges related to wayfinding and security.” Less politely: nobody can find anything and the building fights you the whole way.

I could wax poetic about how a City Hall is supposed to be the physical expression of the relationship between a city and its people. The ability for the public to come and be heard or be served. I even mostly believe it. Dallas City Hall is a literal concrete bunker. It communicates the opposite of every one of those values. The inverted pyramid looms over dark, castle-like columns at exactly the place where a civic building should feel most welcoming. The plaza is a soulless concrete expanse, with its heat bordering on hostile in the summer months. It competes for the title of most deadly public space in a downtown that already boasts the site of a presidential assassination.

Now, about I.M. Pei.

I am told I.M. Pei was one of the greatest architects of the 20th century. The Louvre Pyramid. The East Building of the National Gallery. The Bank of China Tower. These are places on his Wikipedia page. His body of work locally includes the Meyerson Symphony Center, Fountain Place, Energy Square and One Dallas Center. However, quoting former councilman Philip Kingston, every architect, no matter how brilliant, has a worst building. Dallas City Hall might be his.

The preservation argument leans heavily on the Pei name, and yes, that name carries real weight. We should still be honest about what we are preserving. We are not preserving the Louvre Pyramid. We are preserving a brutalist office building from the 1970s that the architect himself admitted was, “perhaps stronger than I would have liked; it's got more strength than finesse". Sure. There is a conversation to be had about historic preservation, about whether the Pei name alone justifies spending over a billion dollars to keep the shell, about what adaptive reuse might look like. But we should not confuse architectural celebrity with architectural success. A building can be designed by a famous architect and still be bad at its job. Both of those things can be true at the same time. That is what a tradeoff looks like.

So if not renovation, then what?

As anyone who has made it this far in the article is surely aware, the most prominent public plan for the City Hall site involves demolishing the building, making way for a new Dallas Mavericks arena. Their current home, American Airlines Center, opened in only 2001, but the Mavericks’ ownership has been making the case for a new stadium even to the point of litigation with current AAC roommates, Dallas Stars. The City Hall site, adjacent to the new (and old) Convention Center at the south end of downtown, is no doubt 15 acres of attractive real estate.

People hate this idea.

The Mavericks are now owned by the casino-magnate Adelson family, who are the single largest financial supporters of Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns. Further, they are major spenders in Texas politics due to our state’s long prohibition on casino gambling, having spent over $10 million so far this year (yes, it’s February) to back candidates in Texas House and Senate primary races. And even if you can look past all that, they’re still the family that traded future hall of famer Luka Doncic for checks notes Max Christie, Marvin Bagley III, and Khris Middleton.

In a city that voted overwhelmingly for the other guy girl, this all matters to people. Perhaps the Luka component above all. You have a privately-owned NBA franchise asking for public cooperation from a people that are not feeling especially cooperative. The Adelsons are looking to cash in on sympathy they have not banked. It creates an unavoidable dynamic where a billion-dollar public decision looks, to a significant portion of the electorate, like it primarily benefits politically questionable (at best) billionaires who couldn’t possibly need any more money.

So, the political frame becomes: tear down I.M. Pei’s building so that Trump-supporting billionaires and the other wealthy real estate developers in downtown can profit from the land your tax dollars paid for. That is a hard sell, and everyone involved knows it. The Robocop comparison is too on the nose at this point, that this building once served in a movie as the fictional headquarters of a corporation scheming to demolish a city for private real estate development is now, in real life, potentially being demolished so that real estate and casino billionaires can develop the land. I digress.

Tradeoffs

The building is failing regardless of whether anyone wants to build an arena on the site. The $329 million repair bill exists whether the Mavericks are involved or not. The leaking garage, the corroded piping, the asbestos, the generators running on borrowed time. All of that is true independent of any arena proposal. If the Adelson family sold the team tomorrow or moved to Irving, Dallas would still have a City Hall that costs over a billion dollars to renovate and occupy for the next 20 years.

The arena question is a question about what happens to the land after City Hall moves. It is not, or should not be, the question that determines whether City Hall moves. Those are two separate decisions, and conflating them is how we end up making the next billion-dollar choice for the wrong reasons.

Should the city negotiate hard on the terms of any arena deal? Obviously. Should public land generate substantial public benefit? Absolutely. Should the politics of who owns the Mavericks determine whether Dallas spends a billion dollars renovating a failing building? There is not a more expensive way to make a point.

The danger here is that (legitimate) anger at the arena deal’s primary beneficiaries becomes the reason Dallas talks itself into pouring a billion dollars into a building that doesn’t work, never really worked for the public, and will cost more to fix than to just leave. That we would spite-fix City Hall. This is not the progressive outcome. The people who would pay for it are not the Adelsons. It is us, the Dallas taxpayers.

We do not get to pick an option that has no downside. There is no version of this where nobody benefits who we wish wouldn’t, and nothing is lost that we wish we could keep. That is what it means to have no good options. The question is which bad option we can live with, and whether we can be honest about what each one actually costs.

Where Do We Go From Here

The commercial real estate market in Downtown Dallas right now is, for a tenant the size of the City of Dallas, very favorable. Multiple office properties Downtown (somewhat famously) have more than 500,000 square feet of excess space, enough to consolidate city facilities that are currently scattered across separate leased and owned buildings. The preliminary financial analysis found that moving to an existing office building (or buying it) is by far the least costly option. (I note, this is a move that the City of Fort Worth has recently very successfully employed itself to take a large vacant office building out of the market. Run, don’t walk, to see their new City Hall if you haven’t been.)

This crossroads also offers a chance to rethink how Dallas delivers city services. The city could consolidate the building permit center, currently in Oak Cliff, into the main campus, relocate 911 and Emergency Dispatch to a purpose-built, hardened facility (instead of a leaking building running on de-funded generators), and free up surplus properties like the Oak Cliff Municipal Center for redevelopment. For once, the city could occupy a building that is actually designed to welcome the people it serves. A City Hall with natural light, floors and elevators that make sense, ground-floor access, and maybe even less water intrusion.

The City should look hard at buying or leasing new space Downtown. Other cities have done it well, notably our neighbor to the west. Further, it at least kills two birds with one stone and takes at least some vacant office space off the market, at a time when it seems like Downtown is at a turning point, if not a full on crisis. There are serious benefits to leasing vs owning that should be considered for a City which has a penchant to underspend on maintenance.

The Choice

The question we are all asking, “how did we get here?,” is perhaps the easier one to answer. The harder question is, what are we going to learn from this? Worse, are we going to learn from this at all?

None of it works if the governance does not change. If Dallas leases or buys a building and then runs the same pay-as-you-go playbook for another 30 years, we will be right back here. Different address, same billion-dollar conversation. The disease is not the building on Marilla Street. The disease is a politics that ignores tradeoffs. That cuts maintenance whenever something more urgent (or more politically attractive) comes along. Every time a council votes to lower property taxes while the building they sit in crumbles around them, they are making a choice that has a cost. The cost is just quiet enough to ignore until it isn’t.

There are only around 500,000 households in the City of Dallas. We let this problem build up to the point it will take $2,000 or $3,000 from every family in the City to fix.

Back in October 2025, staff presented three options. Option 1: maintain the status quo. Option 2: plan and fund repairs. Option 3: explore alternatives.

Option 1 is already dead. The status quo is what created the $329 million repair bill, the corroded piping, the leaking garage, the generators that were designed for replacement and then defunded. The status quo is not an option. It is the thing that killed all the cheap options.

The real question for Dallas is not “new building or old building.” It is not “Pei or no Pei.” It is not even “arena or no arena.” Those are all downstream questions, and treating any one of them as the whole debate is how we avoid the harder conversation.

The upstream question is whether we are willing to fund the maintenance of whatever we choose next. Are we willing to start accepting tradeoffs? Because the billion-dollar bill at City Hall is not a surprise. It is the entirely predictable result of treating a building the way we treated it, every year, for 49 years. The only surprise is that anyone is surprised.

Dallas City Hall should go. Not because the Mavericks want the land. Not because Brutalism is ugly. Because the building has failed, the math to fix it doesn’t work, and the money it would take to renovate it would be better spent on almost anything else. The arena question, the Pei question, the political question. Those all matter. But none of them change the number.

There are no good options. There are only honest ones and dishonest ones. The honest ones require us to name what we are gaining and what we are giving up, who benefits and who pays, and to make the choice with our eyes open. The dishonest ones let us pretend that someone else will pick up the tab, or that we can have it all if we just fight hard enough for our side.

Dallas, the next building is only as good as the budget. Whatever we build, buy, or lease. Whatever happens to the land on Marilla Street. Are we ready to actually take care of it this time? Are we ready to have nice things?

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