Owners of Dallas' Reunion Tower plan to develop long-vacant land nearby

More than 15 years after Reunion Arena in downtown Dallas closed, the owners of the surrounding property are plotting a massive development on the land.

Hunt Realty Investments, which owns Reunion Tower and more than 20 acres surrounding it, tells the DMN in a subscription-only story that it's planning to build a dozen new high-rises, with apartments, offices, retail, a convention hotel with 600 to 1,000 rooms, and a park.

Phase one will comprise hotel, retail, dining, and entertainment. The project will include up to 3,000 apartments, some of which they say will be set aside as "affordable" workforce housing for nurses, firemen, and such.

They also have aspirations to redevelop Union Station, a train stop for DART, the TRE, and Amtrak which opened in 1916.

Reunion Arena was razed in 2009. Hunt has owned the property since the '70s and let it sit vacant all that time, despite offers from others willing to develop it.

"I cannot tell you how many inquiries we have received to buy 2 acres or buy this or that," Hunt Investment Holdings CEO Chris Kleinert says to the DMN. “We’ve heard more than once, you guys haven’t done anything down there in decades. ... We think the timing is right with what’s happening at the convention center."

They say they've brought the city millions, with the Reunion development contributing $350 million in taxes to local governments, and predicting millions more over the next 20 years.

"Hunt has owned that land for 50 years," says Hunt Realty Investments president Colin Fitzgibbons. "They waited patiently for something to come around to accelerate redevelopment, and here comes the convention center."

The project would join other convention-center-profiteering developments in the area such as the former Dallas Morning News building being redeveloped by Ray Washburne.

Construction on the new convention center is supposed to start next year and be complete by 2028. A deck park connected to the convention center and extending over I-30 is scheduled to open by 2030.

Other Hunt Realty projects include the NorthEnd project on Field Street north of Woodall Rodgers Freeway consisting of an office campus for Goldman Sachs, high-rise residences, a hotel, and retail; and the Fields development in Frisco with 10,000 homes and apartments, commercial districts, and the Universal theme park, being built around the PGA headquarters and golf resort.