Tax Increment Finance (TIF) district<\/a>. Only Ablon and Oakley believed in the dream. It came to fruition, growing the Dallas tax base significantly.<\/p>\nNow, Ablon wants the city to back his plans to redevelop the Bank of America and provide a TIF. In the inside baseball world of municipal funding, TIF arrangements amount to developers receiving their own tax money back once they\u2019ve increased the taxable amount of their property. If Ablon and Hoque win, they get paid. If they don\u2019t, then the city is not out any money. The pair plans to invest $409 million into the hotel and garage in hopes of obtaining about $98 million in TIF funds \u2014 call it a rebate of their own tax money.<\/p>\n
Some critics want more information on where the team is getting their funding. I never worry about that. It is a problem for closing and not for public debate. Ablon has plenty of proof that he can close big deals.<\/p>\n
Detractors have concerns that Hoque lacks the requisite track record on successful projects of this scale. They think he\u2019s just assembled land and is a speculator. <\/p>\n
Ray Washburne, a noted local developer and one of the owners of the Highland Park Village, owns property adjacent to proposed redevelopment. \u201cMy concern is it being properly urban planned to integrate into the future of the neighborhood,\u201d Washburne said. He is concerned that the new parking garage will create a \u201cgiant block\u201d for pedestrians from the new convention center.<\/p>\n
Others I spoke with don\u2019t believe anything will be built on top of the garage. This has happened before with the abandoned Reunion Arena garage that is sandwiched between Houston Street and Jefferson Boulevard viaducts. <\/p>\n
Ablon thinks the doubters are \u201clooking backwards. \u201cI\u2019m looking forward,\u201d he told me. \u201cIf I don\u2019t do this, and the city doesn\u2019t do this, how do we expect people to want to be in downtown Dallas?\u201d <\/p>\n
That\u2019s the right question. How do you get people to go back downtown? For 15 years, I had an office in Founders Square that overlooked Bank of America. I rarely ventured over because there wasn\u2019t anything drawing me there. Since then, I\u2019ve moved my business to Oak Lawn. My employees were thrilled.<\/p>\n
The cost of construction for the building in 1985 was $146 million. It would cost more than a billion to build today. These older buildings have tremendous value, if they get into the hands of someone who can do something with them. We will not see buildings of this scale built downtown; they are simply too expensive. As such, we need them to be revitalized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michael Hogue The city of Dallas will soon evaluate partnering with local developers Mike Ablon and Mike Hoque…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":267909,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5135],"tags":[5229,11890,64684,1596,14840,358,3187,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":{"0":"post-285895","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dallas","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-commentary","10":"tag-contributing-columnists","11":"tag-dallas","12":"tag-dallas-city-council","13":"tag-texas","14":"tag-tx","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-united-states-of-america","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","19":"tag-us","20":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115337264360620792","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=285895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/285895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267909"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=285895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=285895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=285895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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