Making room for visitors

Dallas boasts 5th highest number of hotel rooms under construction in U.S.

Hotels like the Marriott Uptown are springing up all over the city.

Courtesy photo

Dallas building-watchers know the city is opening the floodgates for a wave of new hotel rooms, and new survey shows just how many there are.

As of July 1, the Dallas market had 5,028 hotel rooms under construction, according to STR, a provider of analytics about the hospitality sector.

That puts the Dallas market in fifth place nationally for the number of hotel rooms under construction, behind New York City (21,878), Los Angeles (6,595), Atlanta (6,398), and Las Vegas (5,031).

Among the new Dallas hotels set to open next year are the InterContinental Dallas Uptown, JW Marriott, and Harwood Hotel.

“While the number of rooms under construction continues to decline year over year, those in final planning have actually increased for two consecutive months,” Carter Wilson, senior vice president of consulting at STR, says in a July 12 news release. “The same is true for rooms in the planning stage, although rooms in this phase are the least likely to reach fruition.”

If all 5,028 of the rooms under construction in the Dallas market were at upscale properties, that would equate to 35 hotels. That’s based on the average room count (143) for upscale hotels in the U.S. last year, according to data provider Statista.

The city of Dallas alone boasts more than 30,000 hotel rooms, according to VisitDallas, with more than 78,000 hotel rooms available throughout the area.

In the pre-pandemic year of 2019, about 8.3 million room nights were booked in Dallas, generating $1.06 billion in room revenue, according to VisitDallas. The city of Dallas attracts roughly 25 million visitors a year.

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Crime News

Dallas leaders launch initiative to ensure downtown is a safe place

Photo by Bryan Dickerson on Unsplash

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The City of Dallas and a group of public and private sector leaders led by Downtown Dallas, Inc. (DDI), and the Dallas Citizens Council have launched Safe in the City, a campaign to improve public safety and address homelessness solutions in downtown Dallas.

According to a release, the work was commissioned by DallasNews Corporation Chief Executive Officer and publisher of Dallas Morning News Grant Moise and is based largely on a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) analysis conducted in 2024.

That work organized a group of business and civic leaders and public officials to address challenges with public safety, homelessness, and vibrancy and economic development.

“My goal was to pull a group of people together who had the collective resources and passion to ensure that we put downtown on a better trajectory to ultimately make it as safe and vibrant as we all want it to be,” says Moise in a statement. “With the right leadership in the room, we immediately got to work devising and implementing an action plan.”

The BCG report recommended six measures to ensure safety and security long term, which the Safe in the City campaign combines into three categories: Visible presence, visible interest, and vibrant downtown.

The measures include:

Increased policing and presence: Surveillance cameras and other technological infrastructure will be expanded for proactive crime detection and deterrence.
Increased coordination among police and security entities: All police and security personnel will have access to a shared communication channel to improve incident response and coordination.
Continue push for rehousing:
Expand Downtown Community Court
“De-magnetize” hotspots
Address needs associated with re-entry of formerly incarcerated individuals.

The initiative is in response to public safety and homelessness challenges post-pandemic, and concerns from residents and businesses. Coalition leaders stressed that work has been underway for nearly a year, leading to decreases in crime, and an “effective end” to street homelessness downtown.

“Over the past 15 months, business, civic, and nonprofit leaders were joined by police and security officials to study our challenges and come up with a series of sustainable solutions,” says DDI President & CEO Jennifer Scripps in a statement. “Thanks to our partnership with Dallas City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert and the Dallas Police Department, we are reporting a 29 percent decrease in overall crime in Downtown this year to date, as well as substantial decreases in quality-of-life reports that the DDI security, homeless outreach, and clean teams address.”

According to BCG projections, full implementation of the six-pronged strategy could yield over $4 billion in incremental property value and generate hundreds of millions in incremental tax revenues.

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