More Cedar Springs Parcels Up For Grabs. More To Come?

A trio of parcels (red) located at Cedar Springs Road and Hood Street have come to market — owned by the late Ralph Cutshall and now seemingly being sold by his heirs. 

If the Cutshall name rings a bell, I noted their holdings on the other side of Cedar Springs back in July (more later). 

The corner parcel is known as Dragon Park Gardens with a low-rise office building to the south and an original home housing Dwell with Dignity since 2012.

Shorthanding Dwell with Dignity’s mission, they’re a 501(c)(3) sorta like Habitat for Humanity. But instead of constructing houses, they concentrate on furnishing and outfitting homes for the poor and homeless. Now I suppose they will be shortly finding themselves looking for new housing or being a homeless organization themselves.

I’d say they could setup a tent in neighboring Dragon Park Gardens, but that’s going, too.

The three parcels are listed with Edge commercial real estate (terrible website) and contain 24,947 square feet or 0.57 acres. The asking price is $4.15 million, placing the area’s per-acre rate at roughly $7.246 million.

Assembling a Larger Parcel for Development

The question becomes what happens to the neighboring parcels to the south. Housing Swift Property Company, 3506 Cedar Springs contains 17,828 square feet of land (light green on map) that would be valued roughly at $2.966 million or about $700,000 more than its DCAD valuation.

The darker green parcel in the map above contains seven condo units built in 1980 on 13,460 square feet of land. Dividing that out, they’re sitting on $2.239 million – divided equally nets roughly $320,000 per unit or close to DCAD valuations (so not very enticing).

The most controversial parcel of the two in this potential assemblage would be the 1905 vintage home on the corner housing Swift Property. Surely that would raise a stink were a demolition permit applied for.

Or course, that said, do the owners of these properties want to remain next to whatever will be built next door?  They’re already blocked-in on two sides. Across Sale Street lies The Renaissance high-rise condos. To the east is the mid-rise Belmont Village retirement home. When something of height is built on Hood Street, any open feeling will be gone. Even across Cedar Springs there are two new-ish, tacky mid-rise apartment buildings.

Personally, if I owned that land, I’d sell and run. Maybe include the cost to relocate the historic home into the deal. Being boxed-in limits your options and your enjoyment of the property.

Other Cutshall Properties

I suspect this is just the beginning. As I wrote before, Ralph Cutshall owned at least eight parcels in Mansion Park, across Cedar Springs Road.  If the heirs are selling, it’s only a matter of time before the other parcels are sold for redevelopment. Adding up the square footage of the Cutshall-owned parcels under Winhavir LP in Mansion Park we get 76,241 square feet or 1.75 acres. At the rate of the current listings, that’s roughly $12.7 million.

Stay tuned.

Welborn & Fairmount Streets

A non-sequitur to this story, but a useful add-on. At the corner of Welborn and Fairmount Streets are a pair of properties – the Roughton Galleries next to the Roughton home.

The properties had been listed with Allie Beth Allman for some time and were taken by the brokerage to auction earlier this year. In a sigh of relief, we’re told the buyers weren’t developers, but a law firm that plans to operate their practice out of the gallery space while living in the residential side.

UPDATE: The original version of this story incorrectly thought the property hadn’t sold at auction (because CBRE hadn’t updated their website and removed the listing that still appeared active). As noted in the comments below, the sale closed on November 30th.

The combined lots encompass 13,782 square feet that appear to have been saved from the wrecking ball.

There’s no end in sight for the transformation of Uptown and Oak Lawn into a very dense neighborhood filled with a mix of high-rises and mid-rise residential — a high percentage of which will be of the cheap, tacky, quick-buck variety.

Yippee!