UPDATED JULY 28 2014: Tearing Down I-345 Idea Is Starting to Get Interest From Important Rich People ORIGINAL POST

The idea is to blow up, tear down, erase, make go away an entire elevated freeway at the eastern end of downtown Dallas. Chechen rebels couldn't do better than that. But the region's most powerful transportation planning official recently shrugged and dismissed the scheme to tear down I-345, the elevated freeway span separating Deep Ellum and downtown, as "the do-nothing option."

Do-nothing? Tearing down a freeway? Maybe. It depends on who you are and how you view the future — that's the trick in attempting to understand the tear-it-down idea. This isn't really about politics. It's more out-there than that. This is about people having visions.

Info Email the author at jim.schutze@dallasobserver.com.

Close your eyes. Relax. Try to envision the perfect place to live. No fair thinking about mountains, beaches or anything French. This is just about your block, your 'hood, the area right around you in real life. See it. Hear it.

Maybe your vision is silent. Do you see the smooth blue surface of a swimming pool, a green yard at the dead end of a vast band of bone-white concrete? Or noisy. Do you hear people calling down to friends from second-floor apartments, a trolley clanging, heels clattering on sidewalks, an outdoor tablecloth snapping in the breeze? That's what the debate over tearing down I-345 is all about. This is The War of the Visions.

If you think of visionaries as hippies, however, you won't recognize the two people coming into this coffee shop on an early morning in an old house in the State-Thomas District north of downtown. These are the two guys who first proposed tearing down this particular freeway. Brandon Hancock, 32, is a real estate developer. Patrick Kennedy, 35, owns a design firm that works mainly for mixed-use developers.

Their idea is already inspiring long-winded editorials and foghorn treatises in the daily newspaper, setting off cranky debates at obscure regional planning agencies and being treated so carefully by the mayor he could be disarming a nuclear device.

The two men seem stunned. "We never started off for glory," Hancock says. "It was just a project we were working on. The fact that it's gotten this far is beyond what we ever thought would happen."

Kennedy says they started out just talking socially about something called the "Dallas 360 Plan," a big planning document adopted by the City Council last year to spur downtown rebirth. In it they thought they saw a lot of not very smart politics and little to no market savvy.

"Basically me and Brandon were talking one night about how the 360 Plan was all basically cost and subsidy, and it wasn't using the market in a way that would make development profitable," Kennedy says.

Indeed the situation downtown is worse than that. Local politics involved in divvying up federal subsidy money has earned the city a major black mark levied last year by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, still unresolved. HUD has accused Dallas City Hall of deliberately practicing racism in its downtown development policies.

Hancock and Kennedy see another shortcoming in the 360 Plan. "The city would have to subsidize every single project," Kennedy says. "That's what we're seeing in downtown right now. Everybody's got their hands out for $50 million for a project."

Their idea is to take down the freeway, package the land with other public holdings, create an entity to hold it and then use the land as an incentive to spur mixed-use development including affordable residential, office and retail space. The resulting new community, they say, would knit together the Deep Ellum entertainment district, the Baylor medical district and the eastern end of downtown.

Invited to close their eyes and envision the area 10 years from now, they say they see tree-lined boulevards, lots of cycling, apartments, shops and office uses in low-, mid- and high-rise buildings. But they aren't really close-your-eyes guys. They began two years ago using their own business experience and technical expertise to study the market realities.

They came up with numbers to show two things. Land costs in the target area are too high to allow that kind of development without massive public subsidy, but greatly reducing land cost, even giving it away, would spur between $4 billion and $6.5 billion in investment in the area, providing a bonanza for city tax coffers instead of an endless drain.

"Why don't we drive demand?" Kennedy says. "Take out the highway, create land, and all of a sudden we've got a desirable neighborhood that everybody wants to be a part of."

Two measures of how seriously their idea is being taken and how persuasive some people have found their numbers: Neither the officials at Baylor, with a vast institutional presence in the area, nor the major investors in Deep Ellum, pouring money into the ground over the last several years for a major redevelopment initiative, have called for Hancock and Kennedy to be hanged. Instead they all want to talk to them.

Kristi Sherrill Hoyl, vice president of external and governmental affairs for Baylor Health Care System, says Baylor has met with the mayor on the idea. "There was some discussion with the mayor about a study to look at it," she says, "and I think we're very supportive of that."