Preston Center News

New report on Dallas' Preston Center parking garage offers some slim hope

Almost everyone wants a park. Almost.

Courtesy rendering

Preston Center is as out of place in Preston Hollow as a Hershey's Kiss on a Ritz-Carlton pillow.

The Preston Center parking garage, which sits on land owned by the city of Dallas, is the city's biggest chance to fix that. A 2016 plan recommended an underground garage with a park on top, and Dallas City Council member Jennifer Gates has been working with the neighborhood, North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG), and local landowners to move that vision forward.

But any momentum has been dashed due to the Preston Center West Corporation (PCWC), made up of the landowners who own the neighboring businesses and property.

To refresh, the garage is a textbook bad agreement worked out decades ago and reaffirmed by legal battles between the city and PCWC, who have veto power on everything. Any plan put forth by either party requires 100 percent buy-in – so it always ends in a stalemate.

In March, NCTCOG and Walker Consultants put together a new 145-page report for the city on the existing (deteriorating) conditions, with two options for redevelopment.

Two options
Option one is what everyone but PCWC wants – a fully underground garage with a park on top.

Option two is sorta what PCWC wants – an apartment tower on part of the land with a smaller park on top.

I say sorta, because the last time we saw Robert Dozier, PCWC representative and presumed developer of the apartment tower, he wanted to cover the entire lot with parking and a high-rise with zero green space outside a pair of earmuff parkettes on two corners of the 3.15-acre parcel.

The PCWC plan was developed by people who think trees are useless without actual cash falling from them. That is, unless it's their own home. Dozier’s 7,700-square-foot home on a half-acre lot in University Park has five mature trees in the front yard.

New concessions
The new plan offers a possible compromise by conceding half the block for an apartment building. I think that's a mistake. As we saw two weeks ago, there are two residential high-rises, by Leland Burk and by Rosebriar, proposed for the Hopdoddy corner of the garage. Combined, they will bring 360 housing units and 245 hotel rooms to Preston Center – and 39 trees.

Should they face Dozier's high-rise or overlook a park? Mercurially, the garage tower is competition to Leland Burk's apartment tower, while Rosebriar's hotel and condos on the corner get blocked views and no benefit from more apartments.

Were I Burk or Rosebriar and members of the PCWC, I'd vote against the garage high-rise, killing it cold. Did Burk, a Preston Center task force representative for Preston Center's Zone One, know that the park written into the plan didn't have the support of PCWC?

Interesting tidbits
Most of the information in the 145-page report has been hashed before, but there were some interesting tidbits:

Regardless of whether option one or two is selected, the construction time is the same: 23 months.
Both options require the entire parking garage be closed for the duration of construction. They'll need to find alternate parking.

Whether it's a full-park or half-park, it'll require the same timetable and the same inconvenience.

Money
The other big consideration is money.

The estimated cost for the full park is between $38.5 and $41.2 million.
The estimated cost for the half park is between $38.1 and $39.7 million.

The potential savings by building a half-park are between $400,000 and 1.5 million (less for the half-park). Opperations and maintenance costs are identical.

With no time savings, no inconvenience savings, and virtually no money savings, why not be bold and go for the fully underground option with its full park?

The PCWC’s veto, that’s why.

City should wait it out
The PCWC doesn't seem to have ever wanted the full park – they're probably squeamish about the half-park. But the city is not on the hook for the crumbling garage's maintenance. PCWC is. Sitting on the land and waiting for the garage to die doesn't hurt the city, except for any insurance needed in case a chunk falls off.

Those wanting to breathe life into moldering Preston Center feel cursed by the PCWC's veto, but the option to do nothing is just as powerful. If those landowners are okay with their lower-rent tenants operating in a slum, so be it. Time is on their side. What can't be controlled is whatever the next D13 council person does. Gates is on her final term.

Her successor may believe in the PCWC's aesthetic wasteland vision. But I remind City Hall, nowhere on earth is there a city complaining about too much green space.

This assumes Dozier still wants that original plan of a single high-rise. But as we'll share in part 2 tomorrow, he's been hard at work to fully develop an ugliness that lines pockets at the neighborhood’s expense and the city’s dime.

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A version of this story appeared on Candy's Dirt.

urban-renewal

Rent Report

Here's how many Texans are paying too much for rent, report reveals

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Millions of Texas renters, both current residents and new arrivals, suffer from wallet whiplash.

A new report from the Texas Affiliation of Affordable Housing Providers shows 45 percent of the state’s renters spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing. Renters occupy more than 4.2 million Texas households, representing nearly half of the state’s residents.

Worse yet, 81 percent of extremely low-income households in Texas spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing, the report says. For that income group, Texas has a shortage of 864,000 affordable homes.

Thirty percent is the standard financial benchmark for spending too much income on rent, while 50 percent puts a renter in the “severely cost-burdened” bucket.

“To sustain growth and secure future prosperity, Texas will need more than 320,000 additional affordable homes [rented and owned] to address workforce housing affordability and meet the demands of a growing population,” says the report.

“Today, the state is creating thousands of new jobs,” the report adds, “but housing supply has not kept pace with demand, driving up housing costs and constraining continued economic growth.”

Not surprisingly, people who live in or move to three of Texas’ biggest metro areas get hit with the state’s highest apartment rental rates. Here’s Apartments.com’s list of the 10 most expensive places for renters in Texas, based on apartments whose average size ranges from 713 square feet in Austin to 771 square feet in Plano:

1. Frisco — $1,477 per month
2. Plano — $1,461 per month
3. Austin — $1,417 per month
4. Dallas — $1,413 per month
5. McKinney — $1,363 per month
6. Grand Prairie — $1,327 per month
7. Irving — $1,318 per month
8. Garland — $1,237 per month
9. Fort Worth — $1,217 per month
10. Houston — $1,183 per month

San Antonio boasts some of the lowest average rent among Texas’ 10 most affordable markets: $1,075 per month. Mesquite, a Dallas-Fort Worth suburb, also fits into that category, with average monthly rent of $1,052.

Earlier this month, Gov. Greg Abbott announced more than $114 million in grants to help develop or rehabilitate properties, providing more than 4,400 affordable rental units.

“As our state grows, we must ensure that Texans have access to the affordable housing they need to thrive,” Abbott says.

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