A generated rendering of a proposed $800M mixed-use development at the southwest corner of Preston Road and Royal Lane.
Courtesy of GFF
Dallas needs growth and an economic base that supports its police, schools and hospitals. Unfortunately, a proposed skyscraper with luxury condos in Preston Hollow won’t deliver those benefits. Worse, it risks saddling the city with yet another failed real estate development, enriching inexperienced land speculators and harming the qualities that make our neighborhood special.
Let’s start with the facts. The developer, Leland Burk, and his partners, Gerald Stool, former council member Mitchell Rasansky and Mitchell Fonberg, want the city to rezone a 7-acre vacant lot at the Southwest quadrant of Preston Road and Royal Lane. Over the objections of more than 4,000 people who signed a petition against his proposal, Burk is lobbying the city to allow for the construction of an $800 million, 530,000-square-foot, multi-building development, including a 19-story skyscraper complete with multi-million-dollar condominiums, a five-star hotel and a backyard-size patch of grass.
Burk claims that his luxury condos will free up housing stock for young families and generate tax revenue for needed city services. According to his supporters, the neighbors of Preston Hollow need to accept this or any other development to save the city from its own mismanagement. By that logic, we’d zone new concrete batch plants or shingle factories next to kindergartens.
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The reality is that Burk has no history of building luxury hotels in this part of town or anywhere else. Approving his plan would repeat City Hall’s folly of accepting at face value the claims of well-resourced but inexperienced developers.
It wouldn’t be the first time we made this mistake. The National, a downtown redevelopment project, recently with $230 million in debt. The urban restoration project featured luxury condos, a five-star hotel, buzzy restaurant, retail and offices. It even had rail lines in front, compared to our single bus route. Todd Interests had invested more than $460 million, and it still didn’t work.
Such a failure would have huge implications for Preston Hollow, not to mention the nearby retail at the other three corners.
Fortunately, there’s a better way to grow our city’s tax base and still generate plenty of money for Burk and his partners. Preserve Preston Hollow has proposed an adjustment to the project to more closely conform to the model of Preston Hollow Village at the northwest corner of Walnut Hill and Central Expressway.
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Apartments or condos, restaurants, retail and offices could easily blend into the existing area under current zoning rules with little to no opposition. It would still generate tax revenue. Based on tax revenue from Preston Hollow Village, it could bring in as much as $8.4 million per year for the city and Dallas ISD.
A village model would also provide our city with “missing-middle” housing.
Residents have been skeptical of Burk’s plan from the start, and they have reason to be. The Traffic Impact Assessment conducted by Burk’s team seems dubious. Even under the rosiest scenarios, traffic would go from a D rating to an E on an A to F scale. The analysis doesn’t consider spillover traffic, which is critical.
Nor did the city study emergency response times. Fire trucks from Station 41 often fight to exit onto Royal in traffic.
The traffic lights that were supposed to ensure safety in the original submission disappeared from the second series of plans the developers’ sent to the city on June 12. That should concern any resident of District 13 who reads The Dallas Morning News. In 2021, when Burk was a candidate for City Council, the paper’s editorial board said he played fast and loose with the facts, “because he didn’t give the public all of the relevant facts, but selectively used material” when running against our now Council Woman Gay Donnell Willis.
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Burk has a selective approach when it comes to neighborhood quality of life. In 2013, he sided with neighbors who protested plans by Ursuline Academy to install field lights so students could play games at night. They argued the lights would cause additional traffic and “intrusive noise” that would “have a profound impact on the quality of life in the area” and diminish his neighborhood’s property values.
Dallas needs economic growth. But it needs to be done right and by someone who has experience. City Hall should send Burk’s plan back to the drawing board.
Doug Hazelbaker is a real estate developer, principal of District Investments, a former Plano City Planning Commissioner and a member of Preserve Preston Hollow.
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