AIA 10 Presidents White Paper 4: Dallas doesn’t have to choose between City Hall and the Mavericks

This piece was originally published in Dallas Morning News on 5/18/26.

Our proposal gives team 47 acres near convention center and DART, without rushing City Hall decision.

Many of Dallas’ citizens, elected officials, business groups and this newspaper, are engaged in two questions of generational importance to our city. The citizens and leaders on each side of these questions care deeply about Dallas and are passionate in their advocacy.

The first question is how to keep the Dallas Mavericks in Dallas and, more specifically, downtown. Given that there are only five years remaining on the Mavericks’ lease at the American Airlines Center, it is understandable that they need to promptly plan for their future with a location that responds to the needs of an NBA franchise that seeks to be elite.

The second question concerns whether city government should continue to occupy our iconic 50-year-old City Hall. This is also a reasonable question. Given the expense of addressing deferred maintenance and providing badly needed updates, the taxpayers deserve careful analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of staying in the building versus leaving. 

Dallas should aggressively seek the vibrant economic activity that professional sports can bring to downtown. At the same time, it needs to ask hard questions about how to best deliver city government within the limits of an ever-tightening city budget.

Here is where the public discussion has gone off track. We have listened to and considered many points of view on these questions, but the loudest voices continue to say, “We need to keep the Mavericks in order to save downtown, so let’s tear down City Hall.” How did we arrive at the point where two important questions have only one answer? And how can that one answer be put forth with no vision and no plan? The only justification we have heard is something like, “We did it at Victory Park. We need to run that same playbook again.”

Many will recall that Victory was built on a brownfield site occupied by a decommissioned power plant, a railroad yard and a meatpacking plant. It is hard to see the parallels to our City Hall.

All of us look forward to the release of the 418 submissions to the city’s “Open Call for Concepts and Ideas.” Maybe when the Mavericks’ proposal is released it will provide some clarity as to why we need to scrape the southern side of downtown and start over.

We were part of a group of Dallas architects, known as the 10 Presidents, that partnered with very talented students from the University of Texas at Arlington College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs to create our own proposal, which we submitted in response to the city’s call for ideas.  

Our collaborative design and planning team listened to the Mavericks' numerous statements that they are seeking approximately 50 acres for a sports-oriented mixed-use development. Our proposal responds by showing that there are 47 acres of city-owned land available today between the convention center and City Hall to accommodate the Mavericks — without tearing down City Hall.

Keeping City Hall in its current location creates a third institutional anchor to the new district, one that brings 2,200 workers to City Hall daily, plus visitors. The convention center district and arena development would be more vibrant and successful with one anchor that operates every weekday throughout the year, not just occasionally.

Keeping City Hall in a convenient location is good governance as it makes government more accessible to citizens.

Lastly, our plan shows that building an arena where City Hall stands today would be a poor decision because the site is not served by DART rail. As thousands do today, Mavericks fans need to be able to take DART to games to avoid traffic and parking hassles. The best arena site is much closer to the new convention center, not only because of proximity to DART’s Convention Center Station, but also because it offers great synergy in the programming of convention events.

Much due diligence has already been carried out to identify the cost of deferred maintenance and updates to City Hall, but much more work still needs to be done to prove that abandoning City Hall is in the best interest of taxpayers. There are big and potentially flawed assumptions in the completed due diligence that need to be challenged.

One often-repeated idea is for the city to abandon the building it owns and rent office space. But as business owners ourselves, we have learned that renting office space in no way shields a tenant from ever-escalating rent and occupancy costs.

And we maintain that there is much more to be evaluated and compared than just the relative costs. Each proposal for relocation should be evaluated qualitatively regarding how it meets the criteria for what makes a great city hall. Can a council chamber with 300 seats be accommodated? Is there an adjacent outdoor gathering space to host celebrations and civic discourse? Is there adequate parking, security and accessibility? Does it express the aspirations of our citizens?

Our proposal is unabashedly pro-downtown and pro-Mavericks. Why not get to work immediately on a deal with the Mavericks to create a 47-acre arena and mixed-use district on currently available land and process the complex decision about city hall separately? The Mavericks have a real deadline. Deadlines around the City Hall decision are artificial.

Finally, we should consider a few questions about how we see ourselves as a city. Do we think so little of our city government that it can be relegated to anonymous space designed for commercial businesses? Are we a purely transactional city where everything is reduced to financial considerations? When our business leaders use the term “highest and best use,” why is it confined to purely economic outcomes without regard to the highest and best civic meaning, care for our history and bold expression of our aspirations?

We believe J. Erik Jonsson would have insisted that a great city must honor both its economic vitality and its civic soul, and Dallas still can.

Tipton Housewright, Zaida Basora and Myriam Camargo are architects and members of the 10 Presidents, a group of former presidents of AIA Dallas.