Developer: Downtown Dallas needs new office space to attract business

A week after one of downtown Dallas’ largest office occupiers announced plans to leave, one of the area’s top developers says the city’s core needs a new generation of office space.

Multiple businesses have migrated from downtown to newer buildings in Uptown in the past decade. Bank of America plans to leave its longtime location on Main Street for a 30-story tower to be built just north of downtown.

“Downtown needs new office space,” said Lucy Burns, partner in Dallas-based Billingsley Co., one of North Texas’ most successful office builders. “Uptown is getting a lot of it.

“Downtown needs some to continue to attract business – particularly groups that are moving here from other parts of the country,” Burns said at a Thursday meeting of the economic development group Downtown Dallas Inc.

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While downtown has more than 7 million square feet of empty office space, much of it is in decades-old buildings.

“A lot of office that exists there today is old and becoming more and more irrelevant,” Burns said.

Only two major multitenant office projects – 300 S. Pearl in the East Quarter and the Luminary in the West End – have been built downtown in recent years. More than 2 million square feet of new offices are now on the way in the Uptown area.

Several developers are working to repurpose older downtown buildings into new rental housing.

“A big pipeline of housing is slated for a lot of these older buildings downtown – the last number I saw was 4 million square feet,” Burns said. “That’s big. It can make a real difference.”

Downtown Dallas Inc. president Jennifer Scripps said the construction of new housing downtown is filling empty offices in the center city and growing the residential base.

“This has been our secret sauce in downtown,” Scripps said. “We have major conversions currently. And we also have more new apartments coming out of the ground.”

Scripps also pointed to the development of four new downtown parks as attracting residents and workers to Dallas’ core. She pointed to downtown’s new Harwood Park, which opened its doors just last week not far from the Farmers Market.

“We are so lucky to have added 20 acres of green space in just a decade in our urban core,” she said. “We truly are the envy of cities across the country.”

While downtown Dallas has added thousands of new rental units in the last two decades, most of the apartments aren’t designed as affordable units.

Developers also just announced plans to convert the landmark Cabana Hotel on the edge of downtown into an affordable rental community.

The city needs to secure more funding for affordable housing in the area, said Peter Brodsky, who’s chairman of Dallas’ Housing Forward group.

“We can’t have a city where people can’t afford to live here,” said Brodsky, who is also redeveloping the former Redbird Mall in southwest Dallas. “With the housing inflation that has happened in the region and the city in the last couple of years, we are going to continue to lose the people who teach our children, protect our streets, put out fires and provide nursing care if we can’t provide housing that is affordable for them.”

Brodsky said the city needs to continue investing in downtown’s revitalization.

“The region can’t thrive unless the core is thriving,” he said. “And downtown is the core of the city.”