A 38-story tower that was supposed to rise on empty parking lots behind Dallas City Hall has instead sat untouched for years, and now the city has pulled the $96 million incentive package that was meant to help build it. The Newpark project, planned for Canton Street near City Hall, never broke ground, and developer Mike Hoque had filed no permits for the site as of publication.
As Dallas News reports, the city said the incentive lapsed after Hoque missed both financing and building-permit deadlines, including a December 31, 2024 deadline to obtain a building permit. The incentive had carried a 2027 deadline, and city official Kevin Spath wrote, per a city letter, that the funds were no longer pledged to Hoque because no work had advanced the project.
Dallas City Council originally approved the incentive on June 22, 2022, before voters approved convention center funding later that year. According to a City of Dallas announcement, the subsidy combined funds from the city's Public/Private Partnership Fund and the Downtown Connection Tax Increment Financing District Fund, totaling $96.1 million. A corresponding City of Dallas Legistar filing describes a development agreement for a city subsidy not to exceed $96,100,000.
A Tower That Kept Growing on Paper
The original city announcement described One Newpark as a 38-floor, 1.3 million-square-foot mixed-use and mixed-income tower, with 225,000 square feet of office space, a 245-room hotel and 268 mixed-income residential units. The city put the total project cost at approximately $380 million, while Dallas News described it elsewhere as a $400 million project — a discrepancy the available record does not resolve. By the time the incentive lapsed, Hoque was describing a larger vision: a $450 million district including a 38-story office and hotel tower and surrounding apartments, covering a 20-acre downtown footprint of currently empty parking lots.
Hoque has been buying downtown property since 2014 and has acquired a former homeless facility building near City Hall. Dallas architects identified his land in 2025 as a potential site for a new Dallas Mavericks arena. He said he still plans to build Newpark and to purchase additional land around the site, and that he had paid millions of dollars in property taxes while waiting to build an education and technology corridor there.
Hoque Points to the Convention Center
Hoque said he would not sign a construction agreement until the convention center's positioning and his project's fit were clear, and he said high interest rates made building a hotel without an active convention center impractical. The Dallas convention center was originally slated to open in 2028, but that date was pushed back to 2030; the city finalized the convention center's positioning in 2024 and reaffirmed its design in June 2026 — the same month the Newpark incentive lapsed, per the city letter.
Hoque said more certainty about nearby buildings, including the convention center, was needed before construction could begin, and he declined to provide a revised construction timeline. He said he remained open to a revised city incentive once questions about City Hall and the convention center were answered, though he did not show city officials evidence that he could finance construction. Hoque Global had assembled financing documents by 2023, according to the dossier's timeline, but that did not translate into permits or groundbreaking.
A city official, Jane Hamilton, said Newpark was a separate private project with its own agreement with the city, approved in 2022. Nearby, Lorenzo hotel operators said construction activity in southern downtown had hurt their business, a sign of how the stalled project's limbo has rippled beyond its own fence line.
A Pattern Across Hoque's Dallas Projects
The Newpark reversal follows a rockier stretch for Hoque Global's other Dallas-area ventures. University Hills drew Dallas City Council questions in October about Hoque's record of delivering projects, even as his firm said it had finished key residential infrastructure for that mixed-use development 18 months ahead of schedule. Separately, Hoque Global narrowly met a deadline to retain $35 million in city incentives tied to University Hills, according to Whatnow, which also reported that Fort Worth said in late 2023 that Hoque Global faced unacceptable delays on a separate southside project — a claim the company disputed, attributing the issue to political factors.
Hoque's dealings with the city have not been limited to Newpark and University Hills. He and partner Mike Ablon were supposed to buy Bank of America Plaza before September 30, but that acquisition instead received a 10-month extension, with a new deadline of July 30, 2027, as Dallas News reported. The extension kept the pair eligible for more than $100 million in city incentives, after Dallas City Council had already approved a $103 million payment for the Bank of America Plaza project from the Downtown Connection TIF District in late October 2025. The developers have said a capital partner and financing for that tower have been secured, though Ablon declined to provide further details.
Over the past two years, Dallas has spent its own effort on the area around Newpark, buying land, addressing utility conflicts and rerouting thoroughfares from Oak Cliff — infrastructure work proceeding on a separate track from Hoque's still-unbuilt tower. For now, the parking lots behind City Hall remain just that: parking lots, with the $96 million that was meant to transform them no longer on the table.
