Back Talk Far North Dallas

Easing credit crunch puts the convention center hotel back on track

Good news for fans of the taxpayer-owned downtown convention center hotel, as well as for the pending DISD bond issue: The credit market, at least for public works projects, appears to be easing enough to allow AA-rated and above public entities to obtain financing. A DMN story indicates the city of Dallas intends to close on $253.3 million in water improvement project bonds this week; a few weeks ago, this and just about every other bond project in the country were frozen due to lack of capital or political will or lenders — take your pick. The $550 million convention center hotel, which Mayor Tom Leppert and many city councilmen have vowed to fund in January, requires issuance of municipal revenue bonds to generate the cash, so now that the market is coming back, lack of available funding shouldn't hold back Leppert or the council. I guess we'll see if the May referendum on the project causes the council members any heartburn when it comes time to approve the bonds in January.

Dallas home resale price drop is minimal compared with other U.S. cities

Another of the many stories in the good news/bad news vein these days: The DMN headlines its latest residential real estate story "U.S. home resale prices dive 16.6% as Dallas' dip 2.7%." Further good news for our area from the story: Among the 20 major U.S. cities tracked in this particular study, our area had the smallest decline in home prices compared with sales in August 2007, while Phoenix and Las Vegas both reported drops exceeding 30%. More bad news nationally was that the results from 13 of the 20 markets surveyed had worsened from the month before, including the Dallas-Fort Worth area (but by a pretty negligible 0.2%). Bottom line: Things aren't great in the rest of the country, but we're doing pretty well here on a relative basis. I couldn't find the DMN link for its story, but if you want to look at the actual study, click here and then download the August study pdf.

Now what's going to happen to those retail banks on every corner?

Quick quiz: You see construction at a key neighborhood retail corner, and you wonder what's being built.

For the past few years, the answer would have simple: Another bank! But those days are over now, thanks to the multi-billion-dollar bailout of the banking industry, which has been leading to mergers galore the past few weeks.

The credit crunch, the economy and neighborhood development

Yes, things don’t seem as bad here as in the rest of the country –- check out this headline from southern California -– but that doesn’t mean we don’t have some concerns. Specifically, what’s going to happen to all of the residential, retail, and mixed used developments that have been announced in this neighborhood over the past 18 months?

A variety of projects have made news over the past 18 months. Will developers be able to finance these projects, or any of the others that they want to build? So I talked to Misty Willcox, an attorney with Thompson & Knight in Dallas who handles real estate deals. We talked generically, and didn’t discuss any specific projects. Her take: If someone doesn’t have the money now, they may have a very difficult time getting it later. “The number of term sheets we’ve received recently has dropped dramatically,” she says.

'Go-Hotel' kickoff pep rally Wednesday at City Hall

Even as the "No-Hotel" people are out trying to gather 20,000 signatures to bring the city council's taxpayer-owned convention center hotel to a vote, the "Go-Hotel" people are gathering Wednesday in the city hall flag room to stage a pep rally for the $550 million project. If you're inclined to attend, the event starts at 11:30 a.m. at city hall, 1500 Marilla.

One disappointing aspect of what's happening right now: Assuming the "No-Hotel" people get enough signatures to require a referendum on the project, and assuming the council respects voters/taxpayers enough not to break ground on the project before a possible "no" vote, there's a 50/50 chance there will be absolutely no hotel, which would be unfortunate for the city.

My concern: We really do need a hotel at the convention center in order to attract the big conventions here. But thanks to the way Mayor Tom Leppert played his hand on this deal, voters could be facing a choice between spending $550 million on a hotel we don't want to own, or spending nothing and ensuring a hotel won't be built. The referendum language (click here to Download 0916petition.pdf and read the proposed charter amendment) seems to preclude the city from putting any seed money into a hotel deal, which is the way this deal should have been structured in the first place —  a minority ownership with a real return on our investment as opposed to outright ownership with all of the associated risk.

Convention center hotel: The 'Vote No' PR campaign begins

The public campaign against the taxpayer-owned downtown convention center hotel has begun: At the end of this post is a copy of the promotional flyer I received in my mailbox today. (Click here to download convention_center_9.21.pdf)

Under the headline "Did You Approve This?" — knowing full well that we didn't — the piece shows a check from "Every Dallas Taxpayer" to the City of Dallas for $400 million, actually listing what I think is a lowball estimate of the taxpayer's share of the project. The 11-by-17-inch color flyer includes a list of "risks" purportedly associated with building a taxpayer-owned hotel ("higher taxes, cuts in public services, spiraling costs, bigger deficits"), complaints about no public input and then the debatable "no public benefit" along with a tear-off return postcard (you have to supply your own postage) saying the NoTaxpayerHotel.com people can count on you.

Downtown's convention center hotel: Iconic, signature or just a boondoggle?

We're in the process of expanding the Advocate's office space, and our landlord was kind enough — after extracting our company's written guarantee on a couple of really thick legal documents — to give us a substantial sum of money to make our current office more attractive and inviting. We told the architect we wanted something iconic, a signature office space. And we told him our budget.

He drew up the plans and sent them to three contractors. I kid you not: The lowest of the three bids was 40 percent over the money we had set aside for construction. And that lowest bid price didn't include half of the stuff we really wanted.

Don't tear down Reunion: blow it up instead

Why just tear down Reunion Arena when we could blow it up? That's a question the Dallas Film Commission is asking city leaders to consider. Spokeswoman Janis Burkland says (and this will be my official "quote of the day"), "blowing things up can be attractive" and she thinks we should peddle Reunion, as well as Texas Stadium when the time comes, to "filmmakers who are in search of a supersized structure to destroy". Not only would it immortalize said structures, she argues, but it would be a financial win for the Metroplex to boot.

As pointed out in this morning's NBC5 piece, a Chicago candy factory explosion was financed by the makers of Batman: The Dark Knight. Watch that video ... yeah, Burkland is right on: blowing things up is cool.

Real estate prices: Checking the national numbers

Two big pieces of news -- foreclosure rates and and median sales prices for single family homes. Neither is especially encouraging, but keep in mind that even the local numbers that are being reported are for the entire Dallas-Fort Worth area. As noted in our Advocate Home Price Snapshot, values in the four neighborhoods that we tracked are holding up much better.

Nationally, RealtyTrac reported that home foreclosures nationwide are up 55 percent over July 2007 and up eight percent from June of this year. Texas had the sixth most filings in the country, but the Dallas-Fort Worth area was not among the 50 cities with the highest foreclosure rates. One disquieting piece of information about foreclosures from the National Association of Realtors: Foreclosures and short sales are accounting for about one-third of home transactions nationally.

Home prices nationally fell 7.6 percent in the second quarter this year, said the Realtors trade group. Home prices in the Dallas area, which includes Fort Worth and the Mid-Cities, dropped 3.5 percent. According to the group's index, home prices in DFW are back to where they were at the end of 2007.

Technorati Tags: home prices,foreclosure rates,Advocate Home Price Snapshot

Industrial to Ross to Chavez: This is going to get messy

There was some discussion here yesterday about the whole Industrial Boulevard-Cesar Chavez-Ross Avenue controversy, and — even though it rarely happens here because we like to believe our readers are a more civilized, level-headed lot than those who post on some other blogs around town — the discussion took a bit of a nasty, name-calling turn.

Suffice it to say that Mayor Tom Leppert has really screwed this issue up big-time, and he's going to take a lot of people down with him — including his likely aspirations for higher political office — if he doesn't get out in front of this thing immediately.

A quick review of the situation to date: A few council members decided to have a little fun promoting the idea of renaming Industrial Boulevard to something more reflective of the grand Trinity vision, so they set up a vote-online and by-telephone survey asking Dallas residents to vote for prospective new names for Industrial. Then, in what I imagine was a clear bow to being "inclusive", one of the possible names listed was Cesar Chavez, the late California migrant worker organizer whose Dallas and Texas links are imaginary, at best. Clearly, the council members had a couple of new names for Industrial in mind, figured their opinion was representative of anyone who would vote in their little poll, and didn't even contemplate the fact that a vote might not go their way.