Mavs to Valley View - Immediate Thoughts

On the outcome we can all be slightly unhappy with

The Mavs made it official Monday: they have signed purchase agreements or options for the site of the former Valley View Mall, totaling 104 acres at the corner of I-635 and the Tollway in North Dallas, and are planning an arena and an entertainment district there, doors opening in 2031.

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

Gut reaction

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

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

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

Remember, an arena alone was never the point

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

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

“We kept them in Dallas”

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

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

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

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

Now comes the outstretched hands

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

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

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

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

The TIF

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

They announced this backwards

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

The Stars

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

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

Public Opinion

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

Traffic is the laziest reason to oppose anything + DART

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

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

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

Existing Rail Lines (includes DART). Source: TxDOT Open Data Portal (link)

So, City Hall?

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

Will we still talk about tearing down City Hall? I have to imagine at least a member or two of the 9-vote coalition that was advancing the plan was counting on a Mavericks arena as the real impetus. I don’t know that we have 8 votes to relocate City Hall now absent a clear, catalytic use for the land. The plan now seems dead, unless it was truly never about the Mavericks, and only about the massive expenses of remaining, or how the land could be put to better use as part of the convention center and surrounding development.

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

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

The casino objection that was never about casinos

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

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

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

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

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

An AI generated image, I know, it’s gross.

1. 80 acres * 2 FAR * $400 per foot * 43,560 sq.feet in an acre = $2.7 billion. I’m being deliberately conservative on the FAR to account for roads and parks and other public space. Anything taller than say 5 stories will really help juice the FAR, which large portions of this development will likely be. Expect to see some 5-story multifamily, likely around the perimeter.