Convention-Center Hotel Expert: These Schemes Don’t Work

The Dallas powers-that-be seem hell-bent on giving us a big, taxpayer-subsidized convention-center hotel, just as the economy is softening and everyone is tightening their belts. Meanwhile, City Council member Angela Hunt sensibly asks, why not a voter referendum on the scheme? And council member Mitchell Rasansky wants to bringing a dissenting expert on the subject to town to talk about it. That expert, Heywood Sanders of the University of Texas at San Antonio, calls this if-you-build-it mindset “hotel socialism.” In this eye-opening article, Sanders also says that in most other cities where these sorts of facilities have gone up, the cities either don’t gain convention business or they lose it.