Developers’ real estate losses could be our neighborhood’s gain
During the real estate crash 20 years ago, Dallas had a variety of memorable vacant lots. My favorite was the piece of land at Lemmon and Cole, which sat empty for what seemed like a decade.
But that wasn’t the best part.
There was a huge hole on the lot, which had been dug for the foundation, and later had to be filled in because it was causing the property to sink. Talk about the excesses of Dallas real estate development.
This recession, fortunately, has not been quite so bad. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t had memorable vacant lots — or soon-to-be vacant — crop up over the past couple of years:
• Yale at Greenville. The site of the old Shamburger home improvement store is being developed by Prescott Realty, the same company that is doing the spectacularly vacant Lake Highlands Town Center. It was supposed to be mixed use residential, but has sat empty for more than two years.
• The old Steakley Chevrolet site at Northwest Highway and Abrams. The current owners have been trying to sell the corner lot, which is mostly empty, for two and a half years. Or, as one of them said more than a year ago: “We no longer want the property. We would be open to vacating the property completely.”
• The Sam’s Club at Greenville and Park Lane. It will go vacant next year when the Sam’s at Timbercreek opens. That means a choice piece of real estate — it’s near NorthPark, if nothing else — will sit empty with apparently little hope of a tenant.
• An apartment and retail development at the corner of Grand and Gaston. This has also been sitting idle for some two years, even though developer Zad Roumayo wasn’t worried when he bought the property. He thought lenders would still be willing to finance apartments, which turned out not to be true.
• The failed Signature Pointe development on Lovers near Greenville. This was supposed to be what post-modern, no car, new-style zoning Dallas looked like; instead, it’s about as close as we come to Detroit — busted and boarded up windows, mattresses in the parking lot, potholed streets, overgrown weeds and grass.
• The old Whole Foods on Greenville Avenue. Who would have thought, more than a year after the new store opened, that the old store would still be empty? Also empty — the retail and office building planned for the Arcadia theater site a couple of blocks away, which doesn’t look like it will be built anytime soon.
There is a certain wry humor in all of this, especially for those of us who keep an eye on developers and their wacky comings and goings. But more importantly, that empty land raises all sorts of questions about what we want our neighborhood to look like once the recession ends and lenders begin to do business again.
What is going to happen to these developments? What we wanted, or thought we wanted, two years ago, may not be what we want now. Will we still need those projects? If the world has truly changed, and consumers have found better things to do than throw money at retailers, what’s the point of all that retail? Is there a better use for the land than more dry cleaners, more fast food restaurants, and more yogurt shops?
Is this an opportunity to do something so completely different that we might not even know, right away, what that different is? Is it a chance to truly reexamine what we want in our neighborhood, without pressure from the city to make Dallas even more business friendly than it already is?
So far, we’ve been lucky enough so that we don’t have any lots that need to be filled in with dirt. Let’s hope that the decisions that we make over the next several years build on that good fortune.
