Hey, city council, it’s not 2005
Drive east on Lovers Lane, just past the Central Market, and you’ll see something that the real estate wise guys and the City Hall bureaucrats don’t want to acknowledge. It’s prime retail real estate that isn’t going to be retail. Instead, it’s going to be a retirement community. Which is hardly the hot-shot, cutting-edge, oh-so-hip urban development that it was supposed to be four years ago.
In this, the transformation of the old Signature Pointe apartment buildings into something no one had envisioned before the recession began speaks volumes about how the world has changed and — sadly, and once again — how slow the city has been to adapt to those changes. We’re living in a postmodern world with less retail, more sensible consumer spending, and businesses that are smarter and savvier about how they add locations. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, and could actually turn out to be a very good thing in the long run.
But we’ve got a city council and city staff that thinks it’s still 2005, and that builds a budget and sets spending priorities around the idea that retail spending and the sales tax that comes from it will give us more money than we can imagine. And if we don’t have it, it will soon be here — so let’s spend it anyway.
Because that was the rationale behind Signature Pointe. Its developers wanted to tear down outdated apartments and replace them with four stories of upscale apartments (roughly 430 units), about two dozen townhomes, and two stories of retail and restaurants, some 70,000 square feet. This was to be firmly part of the city’s updated zoning blueprint, the infamous forwardDallas! and its plan to make the city look like like Manhattan by increasing density and then increasing it some more.
The plan was controversial; much of the neighborhood was worried that stacking so many people and businesses in what was already a busy intersection would make traffic and congestion that much worse. The plan finally approved by the council (which included public bickering between former Far North Dallas councilman Ron Natinsky and the M Streets’ Angela Hunt, who represents the area) gave the developers much of what they wanted.
And then, as so often happens in Dallas (anyone remember the four CityPlace towers that were supposed to be built?), the economy eliminated the controversy. The developers lost the property in foreclosure, and the new developers were more than happy with what the council gave them in zoning changes to get the new project done — 17,500 square feet of retail, a 75 percent reduction.
In other words, no more mixed use. We’re replacing an apartment complex with another apartment complex (albeit more upscale and with more units). Yet I wonder if anyone downtown realizes the significance of this.
Nothing changed. We’re exactly where we were four years ago. Real estate that should be prime retail space — it’s next to one of the most successful grocery stores in the country, near a DART station and just blocks away from the high demographic Park Cities — is going to be a retirement community.
What this says is that it’s not 2005 anymore. You can build a retirement community anywhere, and it ended up here. That’s because no one wants to build that sort of mixed use retail any more. No one wants to lend money for it. And, if the empty storefronts up and down Greenville Avenue mean anything, no one wants to shop in them, either.
Most important, it means we need to change the way we approach zoning and development, and that sustainability is more important than density. It means the council and city staff need to change their approach, and to understand we’re in a new era, and that the old assumptions are irrelevant.
I just hope someone Downtown is paying attention.
