Highland House Rezoning Tabled ‘Til October, Pending Land Use Study for Preston Center, Laura Miller Theatrics

Last Thursday, the Dallas Plan Commission voted to postpone a decision on rezoning for 6215 Westchester, proposed site of the Highland House luxury apartments a Dallas developer wants to build in the center of Preston Center. The reason: to provide time for a land-use study of the area.

Laura Miller was there in full theatrics, trying her very best to urge the plan commission to deny the zoning change and stop the building.

As we have reported here extensively, the Crosland Group wants to build what originally started as a 29 story  luxury apartment tower at 8215 Westchester Drive, replacing the old brick Doctors Office three story medical complex. (I may have called it stucco before; today I drove by, it’s painted brick.)  Anything over nine stories above a garage or over 120 feet at the medical office site requires rezoning approval from the city of Dallas. After hearing concerns from neighbors, Crosland lowered the apartment height to 22 stories. The complex calls for a maximum of 210 units over 16 stories, is designed to cater to older, baby boomer residents, will have abundant underground and concealed parking of six levels below and above ground. Apartments would average about 1,300 square feet, with rental rates in a range of $4,000 to $5,000 per month. That, by the way, is considered luxury.

The amenities would also include a private dog park, fitness center, lap pool, private dinner club, library, rooftop gardens, valet parking, and driving range and wine storage. The developer is also planning on including air conditioned storage space for every tenant in the building. Among other projects, Crosland developed ilume and ilume Park, two very successful and highly amenitized Oak Lawn multifamily communities.

The request to change the current zoning of the building has drawn scrutiny from SOME residents of both the Park Cities and Preston Hollow, but not all. University Park residents are concerned about school over-crowding, if any of the residents should utilize Highland Park public schools.  Preston Hollow residents are concerned about traffic, which is currently pretty bad around in Preston Center. Laura Miller, who lives a couple miles away in the honeypot of Preston Hollow in a $4 million dollar home on Dentwood and owns a high rise condo on Northwest Highway in the Athena building (height – 300 feet), seems to be the most vocal critic over height. During a recent neighborhood meeting called by City Councilwoman Jennifer Gates, Miller said the apartment building would be as tall as Reunion Tower.

“This project is big. To put enough people in the building to have an impact, you have to make it big,” said Rick Williamson, President of The Crosland Group. “This is upscale, and it’s supposed to make an impression, supposed to have a view.”

To compare, Harwood International’s new Bleu Ciel is 33 stories tall and will deliver 158 luxury condominiums in Uptown. 22 stories tall is not an unusual height for a residential apartment building.

Laura Miller is also hyper-focused on traffic. Yet she doesn’t say what will happen if Crosland walks away from the purchase, the current owners sell, and a 120 foot tall medical office building is built. That is exactly what can be built — 120 feet –without talking to anyone at City Hall or one zoning change.

At last week’s meeting, she appeared to think the plan commission had some control over the developer’s financial processes. She pressed about Crosland’s “option period”, wanting to know who is next on the list to buy the development should the “Option period” run out. I think she was trying to urge the city to deny or delay the re-zoning because if the delay stretched beyond July 1, perhaps Crosland would no longer be interested in the purchase.

Miller also said she called the seller of the property, who did not disclose the next buyer if Crosland’s option period runs out. (They told her to call back after July 1.) Then she asked Rick Williamson, who declined to give an answer. The Plan Committee told Miller in essence that they had no jurisdiction to compel Williamson to respond to the question of when options run out or who other buyers are as the Plan Commission’s job is to decide land use issues, only.

“The financial expectations are beyond the scope of this meeting,” Gloria Tarpley told her.

She was not the only nay sayer. A group of commercial property owners, the Preston Center West Corporation, share in the management of the double-decked parking garage in Preston Center.  They voiced their concerns over the Crosland development in it’s current form, saying it sets a new precedent for the entire area of “spot zoning”. They urged a study of the area and recommended the plan committee deny with prejudice which would keep the property from being able to apply for a zoning change for a two year period.

John Pritchard, president of the Preston Hollow South Home Owner’s Association, spoke and said he believed the existing zoning and height is sufficient: deny. Next up was Preston Hollow homeowner Susan Cox, the woman who had planted herself at the Doctors Building for days to count how many people actually walked in and out, and said it was closer to 172 people per day, missing all the people who walked in from the second and third floors of the garage and not quite getting the notion that each person is two trips – one coming and one going. She said the developer’s claim that the apartment will actually reduce traffic is not plausible. Of course, she was basing that on the present day scenario. If a 9 story office complex is built, there will be much more traffic — those are the real numbers to compare traffic apples to apples. The issue isn’t what’s there currently, it’s what will BE there.

But Susan echoed a familiar refrain heard from residents across the city: fear of growth, a more congested city,  and what that means to our quality of life.

“There’s the new shopping center at Walnut Hill and Central, the Buckner House High Rise, the end of the Wright Amendment and a development wanting rezoning at Northwest Highway and Preston, ” she said, her voice shaking. ” The city needs to safeguard the safety and welfare of the public -deny this zoning request.”

Then Rick Williamson spoke, pleading his case for the rezoning, making the same points he has repeatedly – the City has accepted the Traffic Impact Analysis, the impact of this development on overall area traffic is miniscule and positive, the building is no taller than other buildings currently in Preston Center, it will have the same number of stories as the Shelton.  Also, their zoning would require off street loading and unloading, more parking per unit than currently required and garage parked cars screened from street view.

Imagine if all of Preston Center required that!

Margot Murphy, a plan commissioner who was appointed by Jennifer Staubach Gates, said that Preston Center has been an important part of the city for decades yet it has not changed much over the years. The Highland House proposal to add a residential impact for Preston Hollow west was significant — she proposed a broader study of the entire Preston Center area to see what and where broader development could take place. Councilwoman Jennifer Gates apparently wants a qualified land-use study of the entire area to make the best development decisions. This was very much along the lines of what Laura Miller had suggested at the Town Hall meeting, although the plan would deal with land use, not zoning, and the area would be expanded beyond Preston Center.

Would the developer agree to hold the request until the outcome of that study is known?

“Yes,” said Rick Williamson. And he indicated that The Crosland Group, as a major stakeholder, currently, in Preston Center would actively participate in the study.  Mr. Williamson, himself, is a Planning and Zoning Commissioner in Frisco.

Later, I asked him why he had been so eager to shelve the zoning and wait out the study.

“Because I’m confident it will support our project,” he said. “More than support it. We’ll wait until  Oct 2 to re-open the public hearing progress against the land use plan. And I don’t want a Dallas firm to run this. We should bring someone from outside, like from San Francisco or the Toronto area.”

Let’s do what’s right for Preston Center, he said. The biggest issue Rick hears from the neighbors is frustration over people cutting through residential streets and neighborhoods.

“They are frustrated and nobody is paying attention,” he said. “They asked me, what I can do to solve the problem of people cutting through the neighborhood”

And he says traffic on Northwest Highway and Preston Road around Preston Center  is no different today than it was 25 years ago per the city’s own traffic counts.

“In 25 years since the current zoning took place, four buildings were put up and all they did was make things worse,” says Rick.

One other plan commissioner asked a question that baffled me: Betty Culbreath, appointee of Dwaine Carraway, asked the city staff, when you are driving in University Park, is the only way to get out of University Park by using Preston Road and Northwest Highway?

For awhile we were all kind of scratching our heads. There are many ways to leave University Park and Highland Park, Mockingbird, Hillcrest, Inwood, it just depends on where you ARE.

At first I thought, maybe she just is not at all familiar with the roads in Preston Hollow and University Park. But then, in 40 years she has served as director of Dallas County Health and Human Services; chair of the Dallas Housing Authority; a member of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport board; and a member of the Dallas County Hospital District board. She was also once a top aide to John Wiley Price.

Then I thought, ye gads: is Betty plotting to charge Park Cities resident a toll for using Dallas street!

As for Laura Miller’s “need to know” about the ownership status of 8215 Westchester, the developer is operating under a letter of intent from the current building owner, a common practice in commercial real estate. In all likelihood, Crosland may NOT be the owner of the building until the existing building is cleared and the high rise is completed.

Williamson said the company wants to change the perception of Preston Center and bring it in line with competing suburban projects.

“This is an incredible mixed-use development. The one thing it’s missing is a residential element,” Williamson said. “We want to provide housing for the people who are using Preston Center now. We want to give them a place to downsize and still have all the luxury amenities they’re used to.

This is the start of the retooling of Preston Center into what we think it could be, said Williamson.

Luke Crosland did not show up to the Plan Committee hearing upon the advice of his attorney. The night prior to the meeting, KXAS-TV released news that he was involved in an ugly divorce and lawsuit against Dr. Rod Rohrich, chair of the plastic surgery department at UT Southwestern Medical Center, who had recently written a book with Mary Crosland, Luke’s now estranged wife.