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For 2 million bucks I can get fifteen thousand feet downtown with parking for fifty cars. Renovated newer building, easy freeway access, nicely appointed, and there's a tenant. What in the heck is this guy smoking? Will he give me some? Where are people getting some of these valuations? It sure as heck isn't an income based appraisal, I can tell you that.

Thank heavens! That site really needed to be a branch bank! In the future, maybe someone, someone with vision beyond mine, will find a place to put in a Walgreens. Dare I dream someday of a Sonic too? The possibilities are limitless. Eventually maybe we can tear down broad swaths of West Magnolia and put in a Jiffy-Lube, PetSmart, Pier One, and maybe even a Vietnamese day spa. That'll be sweet. I'll see who's working on an assemblage and ask them if they want to partner up!

I'm actually right there with you. I think that its shameful, really, for us to embark on that kind of public project while failing to maintain streets, keep our schools in a condition where the roof isn't fixed via a bake sale, and otherwise cut public services while maintaining a ridiculously high tax rate. Of course, I am not one who cheerleads what I am told to cheerlead. I also don't think we'll make a go of economically justifying all of the new projects coming online, much less fill out the TRV, if we don't get some new blood in this town, and quickly. Hard to lure people, though, when we can't even keep a Cafe Express open and if it were, a person could lose their fillings driving to get to it. But hey, at least we can keep ourselves busy thinking of all the things we hate about Dallas while our town collapses around us.

Yea, I was kind of wondering who was laughing myself. Dallas has kind of come out, way the heck ahead, by most reasonable measures. More businesses, higher home values, more restaurants, better public transportation, vastly higher tax base, a museum district that is rapidly eclipsing ours, and so on and so forth. I'm here, but because I want to make a difference in a city of which I have grown fond.

The TRV is not necessarily the best thing in the world, in my opinion, but once Dallas catches on to the whole concept of the Riverwalk, which they basically have done, it will get developed much more quickly, and with far greater transparency, than here. The problem with this is that there are finite dollars for retail in a given DMA.

What worries me is that we've a lot of square footage to fill, and that square footage thus far is being filled with tenants from Dallas. Once they realize that we can't keep a restaurant open past nine, that we're just going to keep on shopping where we always shopped because that's where daddy took us, and that we continue to refer to buildings by names that changed decades before we were born, that too will change. At that point we'll go back to having a handful of home grown tenants, and a few national credit ones that service our demo, which on paper is Target.

You want to fill out that kind of new acreage? Abandon the xenophobia and useless nostalgia for a time hardly anyone on this board can remember clearly. Otherwise, welcome to Branson. Maybe we can get Andy Williams to agree to open up shop along the Trinity. He can rock the crowd every night by knowingly changing the words to Moon River and Our Town. That'll be the day!

The usual rule of thumb used to be an 80/20 split, which still makes sense in the lower priced sub-markets, but recently we've been seeing even up to a 60/40. It really all depends on your banker.