More Apartments Slated For West Dallas as Trammell Crow Residential Buys Old Mission Motel Lot on West Commerce Street

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Mission Courts

Photo: Flickr user Christian Spencer Anderson

First, let’s disambiguate: Trammell Crow Residential is not the same Trammell Crow Co. that is looking to build the Sam’s Club in Uptown East/East Village/Cityplace, which is a subsidiary of commercial development firm CBRE. Trammell Crow Residential is owned by Crow Holdings, and has no connection to Trammell Crow Co., but is actually owned by the Crow family.

Now that we’ve got the name game out of the way, let’s talk dirt: TCR has purchased the old Mission Motel — an old Route 66-era motor inn on West Commerce street just down the road from Sylvan | Thirty, which was once an old motel (Alamo Plaza Hotel Courts), too. They are both just down the way from the beautifully restored Belmont Hotel, which is also home to the award-winning restaurant from sausage-preneur Tim Byres called Smoke.

As for the Mission Motel, one of the last surviving old motor court motels on West Commerce, TCR is planning to build 300 or so rental units, as well as 14,000 square feet of retail, on the site and an adjoining lot. The motel, which has fallen into disrepair over the years, will most likely be torn down. I have to wonder, of course, if preservationists will throw a fit over its demolition as they did with the Alamo Plaza Hotel Courts. Sylvan | Thirty developer Oaxaca Interests has pledged to include the old Alamo Plaza sign into their plans, a conciliatory gesture to those up in arms over the old motel’s razing.

Mission Motel by Dallas Photographer Scott Dorn

Mission Motel by Dallas Photographer Scott Dorn

This new project from TCR is another in a boom of multifamily development in West Dallas, which is seeing an explosion in new construction after the construction of the new Calatrava Bridge. No longer called the “bridge to nowhere,” the designer overpass spanning the Trinity River has spurned new investment from big names in Dallas business and real estate.

According to Steve Brown, TCR is bullish about West Dallas and North Oak Cliff, as are other developers building and leasing in this quickly transitioning area:

“Each one of our deals has gotten well above what we expected in rental rates,” Bancroft said.

Crow Residential’s planned Commerce Street development is one of several apartment projects in the works for that neighborhood.

Along with the Sylvan Thirty and Wood Partners projects, Henry S. Miller Co. is working on another rental community near the Belmont Hotel.

And developers Robert Shaw and Roger Staubach have announced plans for hundreds of apartments to be built in the Trinity Groves development on Singleton Boulevard.

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Joanna England is the Executive Editor at CandysDirt.com and covers the North Texas housing market.

3 Comments

  1. Patrick on July 8, 2014 at 6:22 pm

    Proudly put me in the column of “Preservationists throwing a Fit”!

    For those of you who think it’s a good thing to destroy the very fabric that makes West Dallas and North Oak Cliff cool and the place yall all want to come visit and live (re: NOT the same gentrified cookie-cutter crap thats proliferating all over the Metroplex), this place can actually be saved, at least the entry portal – I know, I drive by it every day.

    Keep tearing down our history and replace it with apartments that are meant to be torn down in 25-30 years and what do we have? The Slums of tomorrow.

  2. DGirl2 on July 9, 2014 at 9:49 am

    Why not at least keep the main “mission style” building from the old motel and build the new development around it? Such a shame that developers in Dallas have a singular focus on ROI vs respecting each neighborhood’s history and enhancing it.

  3. Cynthia Whitehorn on July 21, 2023 at 2:09 pm

    I am looking for anyone that knows information on my great grandfather HH Miller construction company. In the 1970s he owned the mission motor lodge in Dallas Texas and I keep running into dead ends. I was curious who he sold it to why etc. thank you very much for name is Cynthia.

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