High spectral efficiency distributed antenna systems (DAS) require vertical Bell-Labs layered space-time (V-BLAST) like spatial multiplexing schemes. However, unlike normal point-to-point multiple input multiple output (MIMO) channels, DAS channels have different large-scale fadings from different transmit antennas, thus making equal power and rate transmission that is feasible in MIMO channels unrealistic in DAS channels. This paper proposes a novel transmit antenna selection scheme with power and rate allocation. The scheme is based on large-scale fading (shadow fading and path loss) and is suitable for V-BLAST structures with zero-forcing and successive interference cancellation (ZF-SIC) receivers, ensuring balanced average symbol error rate (SER) performance in each layer. On the receiver side, a fixed detection order is used, which is obtained in the transmit antenna selection process. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme gives good performance gains over equal power and rate transmission systems without antenna selection.