Downtown Real Estate Rumblings

Dallas Arts District high-rise tower brings major tenant on board

Park District office tower in downtown Dallas has signed up a major office tenant.

Courtesy rendering

Park District Tower, the new Arts District office tower, has signed an anchor office tenant: PwC, a typographically challenged firm that does quality assurance, tax, and advisory services.

The tower is part of the Park District, the mixed-use project that will be across the street from Klyde Warren Park. The project is from Trammell Crow Co. and Metropolitan Life Insurance, and is being built on the site of the Chase Bank drive-through at Woodall Rodgers and Pearl Street. Construction is slated to begin not in 2015 as originally forecast, but in 2016. Projected complete date is the fourth quarter of 2017.

The lucky employees of PwC will occupy floors 12 through 19 of the office building, where they can look down on the park in a kind of masters-of-the-universe way.

"Our people are our greatest asset, so it is important for our firm to provide an environment that aligns with the way our partners and staff want to live and work," says Scott Moore, PwC's managing partner, in a release.

In addition to office space, Park District Tower will feature 7,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, plus an executive lounge, fitness facility, collaborative workspaces, onsite restaurants, outdoor amenity spaces, onsite banking, and valet.

The Park District will also include a 34-story, 253-unit luxury residential tower with 13,000 square feet of retail space built by TCC's residential subsidiary, High Street Residential.

The two towers will be connected via a plaza designed by the Office of James Burnett, the landscape architecture firm that designed Klyde Warren Park.

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GP News

Grand Prairie expands to the south with new master-planned community

Rendering courtesy of Provident

Goodland Grand Prairie

The City of Grand Prairie is growing fast and expanding to make way for a new master-planned development south of US Highway 287 and along Tollway 360, in Ellis and Johnson counties.

The community development, called Goodland, is the result of Grand Prairie’s recent 1,500-acre annexation extending its southern border toward Mansfield. Overall, with the added land, Goodland will be a 5,000-acre site featuring 15,000 residences including townhomes, custom homes, and gated communities for 50,000 residents.

According to a release, it will be a “city within a city” and a 45-minute drive from Dallas-Fort Worth. Beyond housing, there will be shops, restaurants, schools, public and private event venues, regional sports fields and complexes, dance halls, churches, trail systems, city parks, ponds, and preserved green spaces.

“This is a significant step in our city’s development,” says Grand Prairie Mayor Ron Jensen in a statement. “Unlike many of our neighboring cities, we have the unique advantage of new development opportunities to our south that will drive the growth and prosperity of our city. We recognized the opportunity and took decisive action.”

Leading the development is Provident, a Dallas-based real estate firm that has created other master-planned communities across Dallas-Fort Worth, such as Preston Hollow Village and Hillstead in Collin County. Provident has plans to work nature into the space design with more than 1,600 acres of creek corridors and floodplain land.

Plans are ongoing for a centralized mixed-use walkable Town Center, complete with civic buildings and other commercial development. Further south on the property near Highway 67, light industrial uses and other private employment campuses are already underway, projects that will contribute vital tax dollars for city growth and future expansions.

“This level of placemaking is quite rare, and certainly not easy to execute, especially in a brand-new community," says Provident Managing Director Rylan Yowell in a statement. "We are committed to a long-term vision with a desire to be good stewards of the land."

A new four-lane road called Goodland Parkway will link Goodland to Grand Prairie at Tollway 360 and US Highway 287. It's set to open by December 2025.

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