Texas Stadium implosion video marks the end; what's next?

The Texas Stadium implosion video marks the end of Texas Stadium; what's next? The site is on 78-acres in Irving, Texas, and not far from the planned community called Las Colinas. When this blogger was a City Planning student at UTA, Las Colinas was brand new and at its center was a small "downtown" set of high-rise developments connected by a people mover system. Today, Las Colinas has expanded to include more residential developments. 78 acres of land, almost the size of the Magic Kingdom at Disneyland, is just about enough to build another new town with the right design.

There's a student contest that could offer a set of development plans for the future, if only the North Texas chapter of the Commercial Real Estate Development Association takes what they do seriously. The "Texas Shoot-Out Real Estate Challenge" is a fifth annual contest where students from six Texas colleges come up with development concepts, and this year, the land that was Texas Stadium is the focus. But the Dallas Morning News reports that the plans will not "likely" be used, and the contest is just to give scholarship money to the students.

That's great, but don't waste the students time and energy by having them come up with an unrelistic plan. In this terrible economy, developers and economic development officials need to take on innovative approaches. Hopefully, the students come up with concepts that focus on manufacturing industry, like an auto plant, something missing from the Dallas / Ft. Worth economic scene.

Texas Stadium presents a great opportunity to do more than the normal offices and eateries combination. Let's hope the student work is taken seriously for a change.

Stay tuned.