If you haven’t checked out D Magazine’s great new commercial real estate blog, RealPoints, go do it. It is not just for square foot junkies. Urban anesthetists like to wax on about the future mobility in the city; the need for streetcars or rapid bus transit; our desire to have dense, walkable neighborhoods while weaning off the automobile; or even the fanciful notions of dismantling the highways infrastructure that are the products of a profit model that favors growth via the transformation of empty space into urban space (which is also a root cause of a city without any physical heart, a slackened sense of community and communal space, and demoralized sense of itself). Real estate leaders, however, continue to view the problem through antiquated goggles.

Case in point: Hillwood Properties Mike Berry writes a piece this morning on RealPoints which argues that the Texas Legislature needs to find ways to continue to divert funding to expanding “critical projects, such as the North Tarrant Express, DFW Connector, LBJ Express, and sections of State Highway 183 and Interstate-35E.”

While I recognize that traffic congestion and strangled movability can have a detrimental effect on economic growth, what is implicit in the piece is that future growth and development in the region will continue to generate in the same patterns that is has over the last fifty years, namely clusters of office pods in former cornfields stung together by a web of interlacing interstates. It is a pattern that has proven unsustainable. One indication of that is the fact that Legislature can no longer fund such projects – even if real estate developers believe the state should forgo other priorities to continue to feed the glut.

If urban advocates want to have a real effect on the future of Dallas, they need to take the battle to the corner offices of this city’s real estate corporations. They need to convince those who are pushing for highway and development business-as-usual that there is another way to view their business, a way that embraces both human scale and an adequate profit margin.

Photo via wikicommons.