Former D11 Councilman Lee Kleinman Wants Pepper Square to be a Planned Development District

It’s his old district, that’s for sure.

At the southeast corner of Beltline and Preston Roads where a smattering of shuttered stores — from the old Stein Mart (once a Tom Thumb) to restaurants in a shopping center called Pepper Square — lie vacant, former District 11 Dallas City Councilman Lee Kleinman is working with Masterplan to rezone the parcel called Pepper Square.

Pepper Square to Planned Development District?

The owner of the tract wants to change Pepper Square’s zoning to a planned development district that could allow a mixed-use development with a multi-family component. Masterplan and Kleinman have applied to obtain entitlements from the city to make the land more valuable and more buildable, according to zoning documents from Dallas City Hall.

Kleinman, who was term-limited out of his Dallas City Council seat in 2021, now does consulting work for Masterplan, a development consulting firm that is considered the best in town when it comes to getting projects green-lighted from the city, from the city staff, the plan commission, and of course, the Dallas City Council. Dallas Cothrum wrote an Op/Ed in yesterday’s Dallas Morning News on how Dallas’ dysfunction is driving developers away.

Even more concerning, our clients specifically and purposefully do not look at projects or properties in the city limits of Dallas. One veteran Dallas developer swears (and he did swear), “I’m never [redacted] doing anything in Dallas again!” Many of my best clients now prefer to do work in Denver or Phoenix.

More on Masterplan

Masterplan is so good at what they do, in fact, the firm sold last year to New York-based Milrose Consultants, which provides commercial property consulting services in several major U.S. cities including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Philadelphia. The CEO is Dallas Cothrum, who told the Dallas Morning News last August:

“These guys have bought up other people like us very strategically,” Masterplan CEO Dallas Cothrum said. “As we have grown and this business has gotten more complicated, we have had a steady stream of offers over the last five years.”

Cothrum told me the merger will allow Masterplan to expand considerably across the country, though his firm already covers most of Texas with offices in Dallas, Fort Worth, Frisco, Houston, and Austin.

The firm is deeply rooted in Dallas: Masterplan was founded by Cothrum’s father, former Dallas City Council member William Cothrum who held the honor of being the youngest CM at age 25. Not only has the family been in the local real estate business for almost a century, but Masterplan has also worked on the most significant projects in Dallas-Fort Worth including The Union Dallas, Rosewood Court, The Katy Trail Icehouse, the Texas Motor Speedway in North Fort Worth, and more than 100 Dallas ISD campuses as well as apartments and master-planned communities.