Today I was making my usual internet rounds, looking for new building permits, sales, project applications and photos. And after coming upon about a dozen new items of interest it dawned on me: OKC has turned a corner.

There have been a million steps, probably starting with the first MAPS which was about 20 years ago now. But with everything going on in Deep Deuce which will soon make it OKC's first fully realized urban neighborhood, it also seems Midtown and Auto Alley are poised to make the same move. There are scores of projects in all three of those areas and it seems the scale has finally tipped and everything is starting to roll down hill (sorry for the mixed metaphor!). You can almost lump the 23rd Street corridor into this category as well, and there are a bunch of others that are all drastically improving.

It seems the financial markets are finally loosening up, the local economy is still darn strong and there is now enough in place or in serious process that it seems more and more developers are starting to pull the trigger.


This is how cities become legitimate boom towns and is similar the psychology of the stock market: momentum feeds off of momentum and suddenly people shift from worrying about investing to worrying about being left on the sidelines. I think we are just starting to witness this shift.


I've felt this coming for a while but in my mind, the change of mentality has definitely happened and I think we are just now seeing the tip of what could be a very large iceberg.