City Review: Dallas

Looking at the future of America

I was in Dallas last week for my friend and ex roommate Brian¹’s wedding. It was a very good time. I used to make fun of people getting emotional at weddings, but turns out it’s one of those things that hit you differently when they’re personal, and you only find this out by experience².

I usually try to write about cities that I came in with high expectations for, and see how they are in real life and what can be learned from them. Dallas is… not that. I came in with fairly low expectations, and it surpassed them in some ways, but I didn’t come out a fan.

Still, one belief I have from both Dallas and Paris is that American cities actually aren’t that far from having the nice things about nice european cities, and can probably come to have them. You probably can’t steal the gothic cathedrals or the nice river (or the climate), but the part about european cities just being nice pleasant places to walk around and be a person in is absolutely stealable. Being a new city probably helps more than hurts with that, since you can build a lot of comfortable new housing. And Dallas has a lot of very pleasant areas with comfortable-looking housing that it’s building up.

Dallas is important because Texas (and Florida) are the future of America. They’re the places building the new housing, and the places people are moving to. And the question is - does America have a future that actually feels like a nice place to live? Or are we bound to be stuck either watching New York and San Francisco decay around us, or live in a giant parking lot?

Downtown Dallas itself is mostly optimistic on this. It has a lot of nice parks, nice new buildings, even rather pretty and comfortable-looking new houses (contrary to the “all new housing is same-looking and ugly” myth, it has quite a variety).

I liked this one, but if it’s not your style there were a whole bunch of houses in different styles down the street

And Dallas is clearly actively building - and building some downtown density, not just SFH sprawl, and has a bunch of nice human-scale outing areas for people to just hang out. And it has a lot less visible street disorder than New York³, which is nice.

I like this kind of office building. More importantly, Dallas seems to be building a lot of these (although I’m going by “seems like they’re building a lot where I look” here, which can often be misleading if there’s one batch of concentrated construction).

That’s for the upsides. The downsides are that I don’t know if this scales, and that the outer suburbs of Dallas are very, very bad.

For the first part: Dallas doesn’t have a lot of rapid transit. DART exists, and is actually kinda-alright (probably better than you’d expect based on Texas stereotypes), but despite the rising population (including at least some decent TOD) the ridership is low and not growing⁴, and the system is kind of dingy and low-frequency. Which means Dallas relies almost purely on cars and there’s little prospect of that changing. This seems to work fine now, but it does require a lot of big roads, which means walking out of downtown is a pain now. And traffic may become completely unmanageable if the city keeps growing.

Just a bit out of the downtown area. It’s… alright, mostly. But still not a nice pretty area or somewhere you could plausibly walk around.

The other bigger problem is the suburbs. Some of them are nice (old downtown Plano is perfectly nice). Then you get to places like McKinny:

I didn’t take any pictures because they’d all just be pictures of parking lots. So here’s a map.

This doesn’t look like much - it’s just a highway bypass, right? Except that’s all there is in town. If you want to go from your house the store to get food, that’s a 5-10 minute drive between each two places, even though they’re all effectively right next to each other (nothing between but roads and parking lots).

I understand people who dream of living somewhere like Dallas. Not everyone loves walkability or trains like I do, and it’s nice to imagine living somewhere where sure, you have to drive around big roads sometimes, but you drive to nice places and have a nice big not-too-expensive house. Mckinny though just seems like a nightmare. You could live your entire life there and never walk through or even see anything that wasn’t a parking lot.

So what is the future of Texas (and thus, America)? Maybe it learns to build nicer transit by doing it privately (Brightline’s been getting a good start on that in Florida) and manages to scale up the nice parts of Texas one it hits density problems. Maybe we just get a lot of self-contained downtowns like Plano and end up not having to scale that much. Maybe we figure out self-driving cars and they can make transit efficient enough to scale up downtown Dallas style places. And maybe we end up with even more of America turning into McKinnys.

Still, that’s at least three plausible alternatives. And the bottom line here is that Texas, despite the negative stereotypes, has quite a lot of perfectly nice and pleasant parts that people reasonably aspire to. So I' did come out a bit more optimistic on the future of America as a pleasant place to live. It’s not guaranteed, but it is entirely plausible if we try.

1. Writer of an upcoming guest post about Prague! Any day now.

2. Unfortunately, "some things hit different when they’re personal and can only be learned by experience” is itself a lesson that can only be learned by experience.

3. Although New York also has a lot less disorder than I saw on my last visit in December, which is pretty nice! Unfortunately the reduction in crazy subway hobos seems to have been replaced with crazy Nazi cosplayers, but you can’t win em all.

4. For context, DART’s ridership is less than twice that of the Jerusalem tram, a system with just one line to DART’s three, serving a metro area with one-sixth the population, that doesn’t even run on weekends.