ULI Presentation: July 22, 2010

Instead of having traditional class tonight we went over to Dallas to hear a presentation regarding the Trinity Trust Project. Once upon a time the Trinity River was a clean river, but the settlement of Dallas is where that all changed. Also the river used to contain lots of limestone, but has been removed. The whole thing with this project is that the vision is to turn it into a big urban wetland park. Dallas believes that if they can sell the water they can sell the land. Basically there will be no income producing propperties for this project. It is completely a public project. He did show us one concept for the project and it looked like a bunch of lilly pads but all I gathered was that it was for aesthetic purposes. During this whole presentation I kept wondering how this project was going to be funded. I just see it being very expensive and don't see any incentive for investment from private players. The only way I see it happening is being completely publicly funded by raising tax dollars and such etc. I don't see the citizens of Dallas being too happy about taxes being raised for a project most of them will never utilize anyway.