One of my favorite dining places may be shoved out by high rents

[ellen_datlow]

Just got this alert from a friend:
Florent and greedy landlords

I'm really depressed about this. It's the last bastion of reasonable prices and a fun, relaxed atmosphere in a neighborhood that has been drowned by greed and real estate lust. This absolutely sucks if it's true.

Comments

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

If I've learned anything from watching the situation in Dallas, it's that economic downturns fire up real estate booms. In most cases, it's because the developers know that they'll probably lose the money on existing loans if they don't do anything with it, so they rush to spend it all before the bank can take it back. As for the property once it's finished, well, that's someone else's responsibility, and they'll either let the bank claim it or sell it to a sucker at what seems to be a great price. Meanwhile, since the general public sees so much activity, other greedheads figure "Hey, this is a great idea! I want to get in on this, too!" and jump in. Not only is the area flooded with more high-end retail and restaurant space than it'll ever need, but the owners get more of a tax writeoff by leaving it empty than they'd ever get by lowering rents to fill it up. In the long run, any ecomonic recovery is actually stalled by the real estate booms, because new businesses can't find spaces for anything less than what "some guy" told the owners the space is worth, and they can't attract business in retail areas that are otherwise empty and abandoned. Welp, time to demolish it all and build fresh!

As for the shells, the Dallas Hard Rock Cafe, one of the enduring symbols of the last Dallas real estate rush, was demolished last weekend by the same developer who swore he was going to preserve it. Even worse, the original building was a 106-year-old church, and the developer deliberately tore it down before anyone could register it as a historic space. I'll bet $10 right now that the space will remain empty for years, because said developer won't be able to find anyone crazy enough to pay his price. (And it gets worse: the Twenties-era Arcadia Theater burned down two years ago, amazingly coincidentally right after the owner was told he couldn't demolish it, and the old space is still empty. The worst, though, had to have been the "restoration" of the historic Knox-Henderson plaza in the early Nineties, where the developer was told that he would have to preserve the original facades of the plaza stores. He followed the letter of the law, propping up the facades with posts while tearing out everything behind them, and then pretended to look surprised when those posts "accidentally" gave way one night and caused the entire two-block stretch to crash into the street. Within three days, he'd bulldozed out the wreckage and put in the chain restaurants he'd wanted to build in the first place.)