The Domain and 'Mixed Use'

$50/sq ft is bare bones for building materials and labor only, at cost. if you have an in with a builder, you can get bare bones for about $80/sqft. and of course, all of these numbers vary from area to area, market to market, and time of year (seasonally and market time as well).
 
For those that are interested in mixed-use and urban development projects, check out the Urban Land Institute,The Link I'm a member and there is a wealth of information there.

One of the differences you see in a place like Texas as compared to other cities with a significant amount of urban development and high-rise living is that our culture (in Texas) views this differently. People who live here tend to prefer their "space" (their house with a front and back yard, for example) more so than say, people in a place like Boston or NYC (where community space, as opposed to private space is more accepted). That's not necessarily bad, just different. But we aren't going to see tons of "mixed-use" or tremendous amounts of densification until the people who live here get comfortable with having less "space" around them.
 
The problem is trying to provide affordable housing units in new construction. New construction is by nature expensive and there's nothing that can be done to profitably overcome that. Affordable housing has changed...you used to find affordable units in large family homes chopped up into three apartments, carriage houses, alley houses, garage apartments. We don't build like that anymore, partly because we've regulated ourselves out of the ability to do it through overly strict building codes and planning policies, but also because old housing close to the core fetches a premium price based on location, and new construction out in the burbs is located too far from anything to live without a car. The family home that would have been chopped up for apartments in 1950 is now located on a cul-de-sac 20 miles from downtown, ie not useful to a zero or one car family. The result: An affordable housing crunch.
 
$50/sf is not bare bones at all in a volume production housing set up. I work for a large homebuilder and we build nice single family houses all day long for $50. Insurance companies use $100 because that's what it costs to build one house. I can't build 1 for $50, but I can build 200 for $50.

On the high rise question, once you get into steel/masonry, your cost per sf goes down as you go higher. That's why most new buildings you see are either 5-6 stories, or 40.
 
This is an interesting topic. I work in one of the offices at the Domain but don't live here. I'd gladly move in if it were about 3 miles closer to downtown.
 
It's incidental to the topic, but I see and hear about more catastrophic type failures in custom homes than I do in high volume production homes. Maybe it's anecdotal, but I speculate that this is due to:

1) The "captive" nature of the subcontractors
2) Repeated designs and cuts
3) More rigorous QC
4) Deeper customer service budgets/staffing
 
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