Dallas is often accused of being little more than desirous of the glitz and glam of LA. Today, we're pitting the Victory development in Dallas (which I once described as a Potemkin Village) with LA Live in Los Angeles. Perhaps the need to describe any place still as a "development" is damning enough. It isn't part of a neighborhood. It has no life beyond its limited programming.
I'm guessing it is no coincidence the majority of online imagery of both places is comprised of shiny, computer generated renderings rather than, ya know, real pictures of the places that are both at least the majority of the way towards complete construction. The imagery that does exist is often of night shots where precise lighting can perhaps conceal flaws or lull visitors into hypnosis to loosen their wallets.
Here we have two very similar developments, both designed and constructed within the last ten years - at the height of the debt-fueled building boom, and organized around sporting venues and general entertainment. Furthermore, they are both highway and downtown adjacent, have direct transit access, and exist within polycentric 20th century, car-oriented cities. They have the same general underlying logic, very much emblematic of turn of the 21st century places...for better or worse.
Recently, we had a hot or not poll for Victory in Dallas where it currently sits at a 3 out of 10, albeit with a far lower voter turnout than Addison Circle received with the FrontBurner bump.
For more imagery of Victory, go to this link. For reviews of both, see Wick Allison's from D of Victory and LA Live's which reads as though it could describe either.
For now however, judge by the differences you see or you felt if you've visited both. Here is the pictorial showcase for LA Live: