It’s not often that a major Dallas developer and an East Dallas neighborhood group get together to talk about a project without each side expecting the worst.

But that is apparently what Lincoln Property, best known as the behemoth behind The Village apartment complex, and the Greenland Hills Neighborhood Association are doing.

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Representatives from Lincoln met with Greenland Hills members last month to sound out the neighborhood about a proposal to construct an upscale apartment complex in the Greenland Hills area.

Supposedly, Lincoln is considering building something similar to the half-dozen or so high-rise projects that are either completed or underway in Oak Lawn.

That’s the consensus among a number of people who attended the meeting, including Lincoln senior vice-president and partner J. Blake Pogue. He emphasized no definite plans have been made and that it is too soon to discuss the project.

“I just wanted to see how the neighborhood felt,” he said.

Lincoln has its eyes on an area bounded by Glencoe Park, Mockingbird Lane, North Central Expressway and Matilda, which is just behind the strip shopping center across from the old Dr Pepper plant.

Location, in fact, seems to be what has attracted Lincoln’s attention. The Mockingbird DART station – set for a chunk of land across the street from the strip center – will begin service in a couple of years.

Meanwhile, the units will be just a bridge over North Central away from SMU, whose students probably won’t balk at paying $800 a month for a one-bedroom apartment.

Currently, the several square blocks are home to a couple of dozen duplexes, a hotel that’s on its third owner in the last decade and a Lone Star Gas service facility.

The hotel, which sat vacant for a couple of years, probably won’t present a problem, and most of the duplexes are owned by the same person.

So what was a multi-million dollar real estate giant doing sharing these plans with a neighborhood group?

Two things are important. First, Greenland Hills is no ordinary neighborhood group, as any developer will testify (cursing under their breath all the while). Little gets done in around the Greenland Hills area and the M Streets without the residents’ approval, and this is as it should be.

Kroger, which thought it could build a grocery store on the old Dr Pepper site without consulting its new neighbors, learned that lesson the hard way.

The second reason is related to the first: Most of that land will require a zoning change if Lincoln wants to build apartments on it, and the zoning won’t be changed unless the Greenland Hills residents want it changed. Lincoln didn’t get to be a multi-million dollar real estate giant (and then survive the 1980s) by being stupid.

It’s not only good manners to check with Greenland Hills first, but good business. Why waste time and money putting the land together only to learn that the neighborhood – a powerful, take-no-prisonsers kind of neighborhood – doesn’t want the project?

Greenland Hills, for its part, is keeping an open mind. Upscale apartments done correctly are certainly an improvement over an empty hotel. Several residents said they welcomed the opportunity to work with a big-league developer to come up with a project that will benefit the developers and the neighborhood.

The catch, of course, is whether Lincoln really wants to work with the neighborhood.