I try to report on new development in the district as I learn of it because it is the most common request I hear. However, I want to make sure residents know that great development is occurring across the city, and I'll report on several of those projects soon. An area that I've mentioned on this site and stressed many times publicly is Downtown. (Here is an earlier post.) It has been a passion of mine for ten years.

It is still hard to imagine but this New Year's Eve, when you hold a celebratory glass to your lips at midnight, take a second sip for Downtown, for at that moment you can look at the Old Downtown and know that it has passed, that a New Downtown will arrive with the New Year, exactly like the bearded old man making way for the new baby.

The city-sponsored project across from the Granville Performing Arts Center with High Street Residential, a division of Trammell Crow, should break ground in January. After that, the new Dowtown will have started. New Year's Eve is the perfect symbolic transition from the old to the new.

At the DART Citizens Advisory Committee meeting tonight that is held quarterly by Angie Chen Button, our DART Board representative and a District 1 resident, I learned that Downtown Garland was a featured story at the Reconnecting America website, a site that promotes Transit Oriented Development.

Turns out the story originated at the Dallas Morning News but I missed it and the link seems to be missing. Thankfully, Reconnecting America captured the article. Here is the story but I also encourage you to explore Reconnecting America's site to learn more about the concepts behind Transit Oriented Development:

Downtown Garland gets makeover

08:45 AM CDT on Friday, July 27, 2007

 

Garland was born out of a rivalry between two neighboring towns—created by competing railroads—that wanted to be the most important town in the area. Duck Creek and Embree finally gave up the fight in 1887 when the U.S. Congress moved the post office between the towns to a place it named Garland that had not existed before.

 

Now the 235,000-resident inner suburb of Dallas—one of the largest cities in Texas—is reinventing itself again, creating a concentration of people, shops, schools and businesses in a downtown adjacent to the Garland Dallas Area Rapid Transit station.

 

Garland has turned to Art Lomenick, one of the premier developers of transit-oriented developments. As the managing director of High Street Residential, a wholly owned subsidiary of Trammell Crow Co., Mr. Lomenick was one of the architects of Uptown, Addison Circle and Legacy Town Center—all projects that have created concentrations of people. High Street Residential is redesigning communities, mostly around new transit stations, in cities from Reno, Nev., to Washington, D.C.

 

"These communities are so much fun," Mr. Lomenick says. "They attract very creative people."

 

High Street and the city of Garland in a public-private partnership are turning 3 1/2 acres of an old surface parking lot into 15,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor of a new building across the street from the downtown DART station, which serves more than 2,000 riders a day.

 

Mr. Lomenick, who tends to see things as they will be, not as they are, predicts in about a year Garland DART riders will be able to buy a Starbucks' Frappuccino from one of the stores before boarding the train.

 

Above the retail stores will be 206 one- and two-bedroom apartments overlooking the Patty Granville Arts Center.

 

This is a catalyst for the Garland downtown makeover. Across Walnut Street at an extended Sixth Street will be a new community college campus. The city is renovating other parts of downtown to create places where people want to be. Houses in older neighborhoods near downtown are being renovated. And expectations are that developers will soon build new townhomes.

 

"It is our belief that people would like to live in downtown Garland," Mr. Lomenick says.

 

He praises Garland officials for their foresight in capitalizing on the change that DART is bringing to the area.

 

"Cities that are proactive about the impact transit brings will be the big winners," he says.

 

Mr. Lomenick should know. High Street is working in cities across the country and particularly in suburbs where transit is relatively new.

 

"The great frontier is the suburbs for redevelopment," Mr. Lomenick says, noting that about 80 percent of the country's population now lives in suburbs.

 

Mr. Lomenick, who grew up in such extremes as Fairbanks, Alaska, and Key Biscayne, Fla., started his career of redesigning communities working with real estate developers Robert Shaw and Roger Staubach to develop Uptown from "a blighted area to a thriving urban area of shops, residences, offices and engaging public spaces," Mr. Lomenick's biography states.

 

That experience, followed closely by the development of Addison Circle—where he chose to live—and Legacy Town Center, has made him a national expert on transit-oriented developments.

 

High Street is converting the historic Columbia Hospital for Women in Washington, D.C., to condominiums, building a mixed-use development as a gateway to Washington's Howard University, developing a mixed-use transit-oriented development on the west side of Atlanta and nurturing three transit-related projects in Denver. High Street is also converting a DeSoto shopping center to a mixed-use town center.

 

The challenges for Mr. Lomenick's brand of development are that most of these projects are on infill tracts, land that is largely under-utilized and have a variety of issues from environmental to zoning that make them difficult for other development.

 

High Street's projects are often ahead of their time. And they frequently need the participation of government agencies, including part-time city council members who may not be able to see—as Mr. Lomenick can—what the property could be.

 

As a result, High Street has to build consensus among a lot of diverse interests—a time-consuming effort. And these projects often require a great deal of risk.

 

"We don't really think about it; we have been doing it so long. It is part of our culture," Mr. Lomenick says.

 

But it helps, he concedes, that the 6-year-old High Street is part of the vast Trammell Crow family.

 

Stewart Lytle
E-mail: slytle@dallasnews.com

 

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