Lotis Charles Qualls, 63, looked upon the remodeled brick building that used to be a church in southeast Dallas’ Mill City neighborhood with a smile of nostalgia. Fresh white paint coated the bricks of what was once a small red-brick church where Qualls met his first wife.
As a young boy, he rode his bicycle in the neighborhood and attended Julia C. Frazier Elementary School across the street from where the church congregated. When a 15-year-old Qualls rode by one day, he saw a young girl in the parking lot of the church, where service was about to start.
“She said, ‘Hey boy, come over here,’ ” Qualls recalls. “So I rode my bike over there. And she said, “Would you help me put these chairs up?’ ” The couple fell in love and married in 1980.
When Qualls saw the building again on a cool day last month, the renovation was a night-and-day transformation from the decaying structure that had sat vacant for several decades, its roof near collapsing.
D-FW Real Estate News
“It’s been a long time,” he said, voice echoing inside the empty space. “This was my church.”
Lotis Charles Qualls stands in front of Zan Wesley Holmes, Jr. Community Outreach Center, a newly remodeled space that was once his first church in Dallas’ Mill City neighborhood, on Jan. 12, 2026.
Leah Waters
After years of underuse sitting in the Texas sun, the former space where St. Luke Community United Methodist Church once congregated was tapped in May 2024 for renewed life. Inside the space that symbolized community for decades, the Zan Wesley Holmes, Jr. Community Outreach Center found a permanent home. The Rev. Zan Wesley Holmes, Jr., a prominent civil rights and faith leader, retired as pastor of St. Luke in 2002.
By renovating the old church for the center’s operations, which already serves clients out of Dallas ISD’s Frazier Elementary School across the street, the local nonprofit is expanding its opportunities to serve the community. The center helps create self-sustaining pathways out of poverty by training residents on trade skills, helping with job placement and providing financial and reading literacy services.
The project was a piece of a three-year, $1 million commitment from The Real Estate Council Community Investors, the real estate trade group’s philanthropic arm, and TREC members to revitalize Mill City. The center’s transformation is part of TREC CI’s second Dallas Catalyst Project, an initiative focused on place-based economic development projects.
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When St. Luke Community United Methodist Church was founded in 1933, it wasn’t a coincidence that community was in its name, said Senior Pastor Richie Butler, who has led the congregation since 2020.
“Those who live around the church, and if we’re not in relationship, if we’re not engaged with our neighbors, why do we exist?” Butler told The Dallas Morning News. That’s why St. Luke held on to the real estate, even after moving its congregation years later to East Dallas off Interstate 30.
“The Black church has been more than just a Sunday gathering place,” Butler said, adding that faith leaders have often helped communities navigate complex social issues. “In the need to feed those who are hungry and clothe those who need social services, the church has always been open and available. That’s been part of St. Luke’s DNA since inception.”
Workforce training
Inside the walls of where St. Luke’s believers once worshipped, Zan Wesley Holmes, Jr. Community Outreach Center will fill a critical role in the community, said Frances Smith-Dean, its executive director. The nonprofit’s reclaiming of a community space is a full-circle dream for her, one that Rev. Holmes held, too.
One day years ago, the financial educator and curriculum designer was inside Frazier Elementary, working on the center’s strategic plan. From the second floor, she could see out the window to the decaying building across the street, a more than 2,000-square-foot brick building that had seen better days.
“I said, ‘Who owns that property across the street?’ ” Smith-Dean recalls asking people at the time. She learned it was a beloved community church, many folks’ first, that had been vacant for decades. Through the window that day, Smith-Dean saw a potential gold mine for the community, where many who passed by on Spring Avenue saw only a dilapidated structure.
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While the center’s programming used space inside of Frazier, Smith-Dean found the nonprofit’s partnership with Dallas ISD had its limits when the school was closed. She couldn’t open its doors consistently during the afternoons, evenings and weekends, often when her clients were most able to participate because of work obligations. She dreamed of a space that could be open into the night, where people could learn technical and entrepreneurial skills to help lift themselves into higher-paying jobs.
Frances Dean-Smith (right) with Zan Wesley Holmes, Jr. Community Outreach Center, hugs Jessica Stroud, Associate Leadership Council Class of 2024 project manager ahead of the ribbon cutting to celebrate the completion of the Associate Leadership Council Class of 2024 project, the renovation of the former St. Luke Community United Methodist Church building into a permanent home, on Friday, Dec. 12, 2025 in East Dallas.
Shafkat Anowar / Staff Photographer
“A part of our mission is creating self-sustaining pathways out of poverty,” Smith-Dean said. “We have an economic stability model. We don’t give any subsidies.”
The center, along with its partners, provides construction certification classes to mostly low- to moderate-income individuals, as well as classes on low-voltage, asset-building and cryptocurrency. The remodeled space will provide much-needed staff workspace, training and meeting rooms, an internet cafe and coworking space.
When they come into the center, they may not have a job. When they leave, Smith-Dean said they’ll have a light electrical certification, should they want it, assets they’ve built up through precious metals stocks, relationships with banks, and a business license, should they seek it.
The center encourages people to have some form of active income while taking classes to build their own business and prove its sustainability.
The rebuild
Transforming a dilapidated building into a functional office space took years of planning and coordination among a team of people, including real estate trade professionals from TREC Community Investors.
Jeff Matthews, chairman and CEO of Texas-based Winstead law firm, helped lead the 2024 class of the Associate Leadership Council, TREC’s premier professional leadership development program.
When he heard of Smith-Dean’s dream to reimagine the space, he understood the desire to preserve a place with such rich history, despite the building’s decayed state.
“We got to know the people down there,” he said. “We got to listen to their stories. And these people have tremendous hearts and tremendous passion about their community.”
The cheaper real estate solution would typically be to tear down a deteriorated structure, Matthews told The News. “But this was not a teardown,” Matthews said. “This was a former church. People got married here.”
On the first day the TREC team toured the area, an older gentleman came up and told Matthews the space was his first church. “When he found out what we were doing, he said, ‘How can he help?’ He wasn’t the only person to do that. This wasn’t just [TREC] doing this. This was the community coming together, like we would hope, to revitalize something that was once at the core of the community, and transition it into something that will change lives going forward.”
A group of current and aspiring leaders in Texas real estate toured the site to get a picture of the kind of work it would take to bring it new life. A team of developers, contractors, bankers and lawyers, among others, evaluated the old church, a once enlivened space that faded to ruin, and developed a plan to keep its foundation of history.
Matthews told The News he deserved little credit for the transformation and instead praised the work of the TREC Associated Leadership Council class, including its project managers Ryan Daniel and Jessica Stroud.
People gather outside of the Associate Leadership Council Class of 2024 project, the renovation of the former St. Luke Community United Methodist Church building into a permanent home for the Zan Wesley Holmes, Jr. Community Outreach Center, on Friday, Dec. 12, 2025 in East Dallas.
Shafkat Anowar / Staff Photographer
In order to transform the old shell into what the center looks like today, the TREC team had to construct a building inside a building. On the outside, the old red brick building was so degraded that it could no longer support the roof.
“Everything was starting to crumble,” Matthews said. The severely dilapidated building had water penetration and required careful asbestos removal.
Instead of tearing down the brick, crews constructed internal walls to keep the outside brick facade through historical preservation techniques. They added new framing and a new roof through a highly technical rehabilitation. The team pickaxed a trench around the structure, excavated around the foundation and applied waterproofing on the brick.
“You had people whose day job it is to shuffle papers swinging pickaxes,” Matthews said with a laugh. “And no one got hurt.”
About a year and a half after accepting the project – and more than $600,000 in renovations later – the center renovation wrapped in December.
Smith-Dean said she’s waiting on her final certificate of occupancy from the city before she can begin using the space on nights and weekends. She already knows how full the space will feel once it’s open.
“They brought something so nostalgic to the community, back to life,” she said of the TREC team’s renovation. “That’s powerful.”
Butler said St. Luke’s old roots have a great opportunity to help the Mill City community grow into a thriving one.
“It’s reminiscent of Jesus… when he raised Lazarus from the dead,” Butler said. “It is alive, and the community is going to benefit from this resurrection.”
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