City Hall is Not the Problem

But it is emblematic of THE problem.

The image above is Boston’s city hall, not Dallas’s as you know, but it is similarly iconic in its brutalist aesthetic and rather barren adjacent plaza. Similarly uncomfortable to be in for different reasons in different seasons.

I am showing Boston city hall because I was curious what their operations, maintenance, and capital costs might look like in comparison. Running city services costs money. Operating city facilities cost money. Surely, every city in America is looking to offload their portfolio and find cheap rent in a new empty downtown office building, right?

Office vacancy in downtown Boston is half that of downtown Dallas and their average commercial office rent is double. More like triple if we are talking about office space south of San Jacinto Street. Not exactly a cheap relocation for the city of Boston to consider.

We have been told that the cost to keep City Hall standing exceeds $1 billion. That strikes me as a fabricated number concocted for a pre-determined solution. I can believe the costs could in the ballpark of $600 million over the scale of the next twenty years.

The best I can gather is that Boston spends about $20 million per year on facility operations and maintenance for its city hall. Over twenty years that is $400 million. It looks like they have another $100 million programmed in the budget for capital improvements. Surely over twenty years they will have other capital investments to make into the building. All of a sudden we are at $600 billion.

Assuming Dallas isn’t factoring in inflation over the next twenty years to get to that $1 billion number, it looks like we are at a similar cost to keep a building standing. And yet they do. And we don’t want to. And their land has value.

Boston data from the Atlas of Inner City Highway Impacts

Dallas data from the Atlas of Inner City Highway Impacts

From my Atlas of Inner City Highway Impacts report, the City of Dallas has 3x the amount of highway right-of-way within a 1-mile radius and 2x the amount of highway right-of-way within a 3-mile radius of the center of downtown. This should be the most valuable land in any city and we actively devalued it through our infrastructure decisions.

This is valuable land that should be contributing to public coffers by way of property tax revenue, but it isn’t. (note: the cost of parking in each city)

The city of Dallas is forgoing an estimated 14.83% of its property tax revenue with this highway land (calculating how much value is indirectly loss due to highway agency is too difficult to ascertain, but be certain it exists and is a large number) whereas Boston is losing only 5.16% of its property tax revenue (forgive the typo in the report).

This is the fundamental problem: the tax base to tax burden ratio.

We can’t maintain our roads let alone our other facilities because we lack the density to do so. There are too many lane miles of roads to get to too few houses that pay the property taxes to maintain them.

We lack density (for a variety of political reasons) but the primary underlying reason is that we have allowed car-centric infrastructure to devalue our real estate (particularly in downtown) in the name of high speed, long distance vehicle commutes that effectively subsidizes growth at the edge.

We can blame the state for capping revenue all we want, but ultimately the decisions we have made for decades are what has halted growth in Dallas and prevents more inward and upward growth. We can’t grow inward and upward if we can’t even fill our own buildings.

The ‘dilemma’ or controversy around city hall is just the latest in a long line of trinkets the city has assembled that it can’t adequately maintain. The real and perceived failings of DART as a useful form of public transit are not much different. Job density in the city center is too low, parking costs are too low, and the residential density throughout the city (but particularly around the station areas) remain too low. Each of these are drivers of transit ridership and revenue through increased land productivity, fares, and sales tax via increased rooftops that generate revenue for both the city and the transit agency, like a flywheel.

Selling off city land cannot possibly be the answer. All of the land around city hall remains un- or under-developed meaning the land is not viable for investment. The city also has plenty of land to give away if that is what is called for and the unspoken goal is to keep the Mavs or Stars. What about the City Service yards in Deep Ellum? What about Fair Park? What about the land where the Convention Center is getting demolished.

The city needs an actual plan people can believe in. For city hall. And for the city, writ large. Every decision should be about rethinking our streets, blocks, and infrastructure to be more livable, more walkable, more mixed, and safer…for people, and for investment.

Until there is greater understanding that demand for real estate drives density and is derived from accessibility created by infrastructure, and a car-centric infrastructure undermines density and mix of uses necessary for the convenience of proximity, agglomeration, and accessibility, we will continue in stagnation at best.

All we seem to care about when discussing infrastructure is making the life of the 30-mile commuter easier, when we should be trying to attract more people to live within a 3-mile radius. Those are the same hypothetical future people that NCTCOG plans and budgets tens of billions for in their future plan with infrastructure extending towards Oklahoma.

I don’t believe they want to get run over by a car or breathe the exhaust from the inner highway loop. Why not plan for, invest in, and build a city to attract them back towards the city center. Then we can have a tax base to support our trinkets.

Will this be the city’s tombstone?