Scrooge-like stature

Dallas suburb gets big lump of coal on list of best Christmas cities

How could a town with a tree this pretty make the naughty list?

Photo courtesy of The City of Garland

With a made-for-the-holidays name, you’d think Garland would be one of the country’s best cities for Christmas. But by one measure, that’s not so. Garland sinks to a Grinch-level No. 93 in a new ranking of the 100 largest U.S. cities for celebrating a festive and affordable Christmas.

Personal finance website WalletHub compared the 100 cities based on 33 metrics, such as Christmas events per capita, average price for a ticket to a Christmas party, and shopping centers and outlet malls per capita.

WalletHub, which released the list December 17, loaded all of that data into five carts: traditions and fun, holiday observance, generosity, shopping, and costs. In the shopping category, Garland ranks 98th out of 100. Garland’s last-place showing in one basket — gift shops per capita — drags down its shopping score.

The city performs slightly better in the traditions and fun category (No. 96), observance category (No. 84), and costs category (No. 70). Its best position comes in the generosity category (No. 46).

To be fair, Garland isn’t a bah-humbug ’burb. For instance, Garland’s Christmas on the Square makes spirits bright with more than 100,000 holiday lights (and made CultureMap's list of must-see lights in the area), while Bass Pro Shops hosts Santa’s Wonderland, and Magic 11th Street presents the Magical Christmas Candlelight Home Tour.

Here are the overall rankings for other cities in Dallas-Fort Worth:

Dallas, No. 18
Fort Worth, No. 49
Plano, No. 59
Arlington, No. 85
Irving, No. 87

At No. 13 on the WalletHub list, Austin unwraps the gift of being the No. 1 place in Texas for celebrating Christmas. It receives a No. 8 ranking in the shopping category and a No. 16 ranking in the traditions and fun category. But it earns lower grades in the observance (No. 44) and generosity (No. 73) groupings.

Elsewhere in Texas, Houston holds the No. 23 spot overall, with San Antonio at No. 25. Among the 100 largest cities, Atlanta shines as the star atop the Christmas tree with a No. 1 ranking.

wallethub rankings lists holidays

Hotel News

Cool Dallas mid-century hotel off I-35 gets funding to become apartments

Preservation Dallas

Cabana Hotel

Developers of the historic Cabana Hotel, the distinctive mid-century Dallas lodging where the Beatles once stayed, received a $41 million go-ahead from the Dallas City Council to turn the building into apartments.

Cabana Sycamore Development Inc., a subsidiary of Sycamore Strategies, plans to transform it into a $116 million, 160-unit mixed-income apartment building.

Located at 899 Stemmons Fwy., the Cabana was built in 1962 by Las Vegas entrepreneur Jay Sarno, who several years later developed Caesars Palace hotel and the Circus Circus in Las Vegas. The Beatles stayed there on their 1964 U.S. tour, reportedly followed by other British acts including the Who, Led Zeppelin along with President Richard Nixon.

The hefty cash outlay, which will be paid through the Design District tax increment financing (TIF) district once the project is complete, is a marked increase from a $15.5 million incentive that was approved in 2019, when building owner Centurion American Development Group sought to renovate the hotel and open it as luxury lodging once again.

A TIF allows cities to subsidize developers by refunding or diverting some of their taxes.

Centurion, who renovated the similar Statler Dallas in downtown Dallas, had gone so far as to gut the building, but after four years of inaction, put it up for sale; Sycamore Strategies' lead Zachary Krochtengel put it on contract in May.

The project had few dissenters at the Dallas City Council's September 27 meeting other than former city council member Ed Oakley who was in office in the early 2000s when the Design District TIF was first created.

Oakley noted that, with the $116 million price tag, each unit will cost $725,000, and reminded the council that the current TIF board voted against it on September 11, objecting to its "higher than typical costs."

But council member Omar Narvaez said the building is needed in part to introduce housing for those working within the Design District.

“There is no workforce housing in this area and that’s something we have all committed to fixing,” Narvaez said. “This is the mixing of income levels and brackets that we have talked about.”

politics hotels