A reminder that sports teams and especially their owners do not love you or your city. They simply follow the money, which they do indeed love.

Three days ago, the Dallas City Council voted on a resolution that could include the sale and redevelopment of the City Hall site downtown. On Monday, this is on the agenda for the council's Ad Hoc Committee on Professional Sports Recruitment and Retention meeting. Let the speculation commence!

More expensive than Harvard but Harvard is hard to get into so I guess this is more realistic if you like spending $300K on a degree.

To clarify, they are seeking an extremely wealthy buyer committed to preserving the property.

I have one of these goofy ergonomic chairs and every single person who comes in my office for the first time sits in it backwards.

If you feel like I spend a lot of time arguing against Dallas' public transportation projects it's because we only do dumb public transportation projects.

Dallas council can't decide between two alignments DFW-FTW HSR. One of them skips every possible downtown connection but avoids Hunt's vaporware development while the other makes these connections. Both of these options are nonsense because the DFW-ARL-FTW HSR is nonsense.

Dallas City Council members voted unanimously to move municipal elections to November instead of May. Supporters hope it increases voter turnout, reduces voter fatigue and saves money.

The Dallas police and fire pension crisis still haunting us a decade later.

Austin folks, we need to make sure this doesn’t slip away from us when the 2027 code cycle rolls around I will be periodically banging this drum and Austin WILL be getting 8-story single-stair 😤

I can't believe there's a shopping center called "World Cup Plaza" and it looks like this.

Every history of American planning and zoning:

Just checked our marketplace health insurance renewal. It'll be $30k in premiums with a $16k deductible. 🫠

Parks are for everyone and should be paid for by everyone through taxes and bonds: not special assessments on new residents. www.dallasnews.com/opinion/edit...

One bright spot in an otherwise depressing council session. oakcliff.advocatemag.com/2025/11/cw-m...

One of the most essential changes for democracy in Dallas. It took extreme state lege measures to get this done, Council had better honor that!

“Fort Worth would have never let the infrastructure of that building go to hell like it has,” he says." Fort Worth already boondoggled their city hall. www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/f...

RoboCop himself is mad that Dallas might tear down its brutalist City Hall: www.dallasobserver.com/arts-culture...

Here is the most clear-eyed rundown of the City Hall fiasco thus far, from Mark Lamster. Fantastically exaggerated costs to repair, grossly understated costs to move, with a healthy disregard to laws and wishes of the people. I am baffled why Chad West and other CMs think this is a good idea.

I wish I could be there to deliver a blistering speech to council about this most hare-brained of schemes.

If we have a half empty library and there's not enough space at City Hall for all of City Staff, it seems like there's a pretty obvious solution here. Convert some library space to offices and move services to the Library (e.g. Oak Cliff Municipal Center).

Headline makes it sound like the roundabout is causing crashes but crashes are down 50% since it was installed. They need to add traffic calming leading up to the roundabout.

Funding shall remain on the bicentennial plan.

This Wednesday, the City Council will vote on a resolution that could be the first nail in the coffin of the nearly 50-year-old I.M. Pei building. Should the city scrap the building to allow for redevelopment, or save it and plan on maintaining it?

From today’s DMN, letters to the editor. “We” and “University Park.”

For some reason I find the "TrumpRx" name and website very funny.

SB 840 already getting the goods for housing. www.dallasnews.com/opinion/comm...

After six hours of testimony and discussion, the 12 members of the City Council present -- none of whom were the mayor -- unanimously concurred with the chief that Dallas police will NOT partner with ICE. Their final act was to table the subject indefinitely so it will never reach a council agenda.

👀https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/columnists/tomlinson/article/texas-elections-republicans-democrats-2026-21129181.php

I was doing great until this house in Austin came up. Prices still have further to fall in Central Texas.

Excellent episode that really goes into the specific differences between IRC/IBC that raise costs on small projects. When we did Dallas' "8-units under the IRC" code change this year, we consulted with Memphis officials to help scale our building code to the risk level.

New working paper studying project permitting in Seattle estimates that design review as part of the development process increased review time by 4 to 5 months. Author's model estimates that design review was associated with a 3% decline in the number of units permitted.

Keep it up. Public shaming is the best tool to keep city council members from doing something stupid.

The mayor of Somerville, MA, wrote a whole op-ed about transformer costs. This comes up in city after city. If you know anybody who’d like to make research about this their day job, I have an idea for who would fund it. www.thesomervilletimes.com/archives/143...

One of the most important steps towards making Dallas a more functional democracy is improving voter turnout. That starts by moving our elections to November.

Good job Austin. Winning at the housing game. www.wfaa.com/article/mone...

Someone needs to alert the Brutalism Action Network that there's a non-zero chance Dallas city hall gets pawned off and demolished. That exists right? Or is it just @jmings.bsky.social?

Getting civic in the neighborhood!

At first I was encouraged to hear that so many other people were asking the right questions. Now, though, i'm discouraged, because Council Members and staff are smart enough to ask these same questions and they are not, which means they do not care about the merits. Something else is driving this.

Isn't our title system great? Expensive AND ineffective

I'm here at the Save City Hall public meeting. Looking around it's the same 80 people who always show up to fight obviously bad ideas from city hall (plus preservationists).

If there was an honest accounting of Eco Dev money, we'd realize we've been setting money on fire for decades but Dallas did just authorize $3.7B on a convention center, so.

Here's a comparison of a 10yr hold vs 30yr hold under the "low" repair scenario with "low amenity" lease, assuming 2% rent growth. The main thing that jumps out at me is the astounding cost assumed for security and operations at $26psf annually.

Council is letting themselves be handled by staff. Don't ask for easily gamed numbers (economic impacts), staff can make them say whatever they want. I notice they compare a 10-yr lease to a repair solution. Ofc a 10yr lease is going to be cheaper, it's only 10 years vs a 30+ year hold.

For some reason we are hearing from the Convention Center people, who operate in the absolute fantasy land of numbers and falsehoods (losing out on conventions due to poor connectivity with Southern Dallas???)

Will staff double down on the farcical numbers they've provided? Find out in 8 minutes!

Staff's numbers are inflated and should be treated as poorly informed at best. I'd put the necessary & reasonable items at $30-60M. By far the largest category of costs are things that are wildly inflated and largely unnecessary. It just doesn't pass the smell test (cont)

Updated presentation on the "State of Dallas City Hall" is not inspiring confidence in the motivations behind the recent push to sell city hall.

Final watermelon of the season