I know the ARG folks and they are committed to Tulsa beyond Santa Fe Square. The demand just currently isn’t there to do multiple large deals at a time, which is why they are also building in DFW, Austin and looking at expanding to markets like Nashville and Colorado Springs. Beyond Santa Fe Square they like the East Village especially the south end by the NORDAM/Brickhugger properties.
That's positive to hear at least. At one point that wasn't their tune and I think there was even a few news stories out there too of Gaskow saying they had no interest in doing more projects in Tulsa and would only focus on other markets. I'd hope they would do more projects, maybe doing a few in other markets will help them tweak the Tulsa projects to be better too. From the renderings for the View, it does seem they are stepping up their game a bit and looks far better than the East Village project they did.
The ground up market has been tough in Downtown with all the historic building conversions in the last few years that added several thousand units to the market. I'm not sure there's many buildings left that'd make good candidates for conversion to apartments so if the market is going to grow more in the next 5 years it will have to be via infill on ground up construction.
I do wish they'd study a bit more on street retail design. If they don't get the visibility part right the spaces will just stay vacant. There's nothing wrong with how they've built some of it, but developers just need to understand that if you don't want to spend the money to build out the retail spaces right, you're not going to get top of market rents. There's a need for smaller office/commercial space on the ground floor for things like doctors for example that will be needed in the next few years as downtown grows, but those type of tenants aren't going to pay what In the Raw is going to pay for a rooftop bar. If you build crappy street retail spaces and someone doesn't want to rent it, doesn't mean there's no demand for retail it just means you didn't do it right or are asking too much money for the quality.
That problem isn't unique to Tulsa and there's a debate going on in much more mature markets about the same thing where developers say there's no demand for retail/commercial space, but it has more to do with the market rent they want to charge. They're generally fine with letting a few thousand street feet sit vacant than drop the market rent and get local tenants in... which is something that's never made much sense to me. That happens even in places like San Francisco, which is in the process of taxing developers who do this.