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Downtown core coming to Southlake — at last

By Edmund Mander

Southlake uses promotional material, such as this, to entice retailers.

Most cities begin with a commercial center, and grow outward, but Southlake, Texas, is doing things the other way around. Having developed about three-quarters of its residential area, it now is building a downtown, from scratch.

An array of leading U.S. retailers has already opened stores in Southlake — including The Gap, Victoria’s Secret, Banana Republic, Bath & Body Works and Williams-Sonoma — but the city has created a park, and is building a new city hall/court complex, a post office and a cinema.

Citizens who for years have gotten no closer than a car’s length from their neighbors are suddenly meeting each other at concerts in the band shell and at celebrations in the park. They are mingling in newly opened restaurants and on sidewalks in front of bustling shopfronts. In short, Southlake, which lies between Dallas and Fort Worth, has received a heart transplant that is providing the city with a social and economic life it never had before.

“It’s a town that grew so fast it never had time to have a downtown,” said Brian Stebbins, CEO of Cooper & Stebbins, the Southlake-based development firm that is undertaking the project. The city, benefiting from an employment boom in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, has more than tripled its population over the past seven years.

“We’ve had people say they’ve had better conversations with their neighbors in the town square than they have living on the same street for three or four years.”

“It’s a tremendous asset to the community,” agreed Greg Last, the city’s director of economic development, describing a city with a flourishing economy but an arrested social development. “It provides a focal point that we did not have.”

Southlake’s problem was one shared by many suburban communities that were founded or expanded after World War II: They offered plenty of room for homes, but residents had to go elsewhere for their work, shopping and entertainment.

But just as neglected city centers have attracted more attention in recent years, these suburban towns across the country have built traditional downtowns and Main Streets where none existed before. Examples include the new $100 million Town Center Drive, in Valencia, Calif., and Town Square, built on a 29-acre lot in Schaumburg, Ill., a post-World War II suburb of Chicago.

News of Southlake’s success has carried far, sparking inquiries from other suburban communities deprived of downtowns.

“They’re coming from all over the country to look at this project,” said Mayor Rick Stacy, who has lived in the town since it was chartered in 1956, and remembers when its population barely exceeded 100. “It’s phenomenal.”

Southlake — its name comes from Lake Grapevine, created by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1952 — underwent a growth spurt with the opening of the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport in 1974. The arrival and expansion of rapidly growing businesses to the area since then has fueled further dramatic growth, bringing its population to more than 21,000 today. Just this year, Sabre, the electronic travel and information firm, with 1998 revenues of $2.3 billion, announced it was building a campus on a 156-acre site in town.

Fortunately for Southlake, development did not overrun the entire town, and it maintained a large vacant plot of land at its center that, at one time, had been considered a likely site for a mall.

Southlake also was favored by having an affluent, and rapidly growing potential customer base for retailers — the 1999 average income for households within 15 minutes of the center is $75,800 — coupled with an absence of any nearby shopping. Residents now shop at The Galleria in Dallas, according to Mickey Ashmore, president and CEO of Dallas-based United Commercial Realty, which is handling Southlake’s leasing. “We went after lifestyle tenants,’’ Ashmore said, noting these included apparel, children’s clothing and home furnishings stores as well as entertainment and restaurant venues.

When completed, in about 15 years, the new downtown will consist of three connected squares, containing, respectively, the town hall and post office, a park, and an area with fountains and benches. This area will be surrounded by blocks of two-story buildings, with retailers at ground level and offices above, covering a total of 130 acres.

The project’s first phase, consisting of 275,000 feet of retail and office space on 45 acres, opened with a parade and celebration in March, after about 14 months of construction. Work now is proceeding on the town hall complex and the post office, with another 100,000 square feet of retail scheduled for completion by the last quarter of next year or the first quarter of 2001.

The total cost of the project is estimated at $350 million, with the first phase costing about $60 million, according to Stebbins. The cost of infrastructure improvements and the town hall building, amounting to about $30 million, will be borne by the city and county. Cooper & Stebbins will retain ownership of the shops and office buildings, while handing over the newly built streets between them to the city.

When all is done, this brand new downtown will look entirely natural, as though it has been there for a century or more. By varying the size and appearance of each storefront, Stebbins and the project’s architect, Michael Swartz, of Washington D.C.-based David M. Schwarz/Architectural Services, have made the area appear as though it was built over time.

Retailers are thriving at Southlake, according to Bob Ginsburg, a vice president for the commercial real estate firm, CB Richard Ellis, in Texas.

And that raises a question, Ginsburg said: Will Southlake’s new downtown upset plans by General Growth Properties and Ross Perot Jr.’s Hillwood Development Corp. to build a mall five miles away in Westlake, on the site of a former ranch called Circle T?

“It will be interesting to see,” he noted.

So far the downtown has not put the future mall out of business. But Larry Howard, General Growth’s senior development director, acknowledged that it has taken many of the tenants targeted for his project. However, those tenants will come nevertheless, attracted by the mall’s department stores and its location in a rapidly growing area, he said.

“They more than likely will want to have two stores in that area,” Howard said. Plans call for an approximately 1.5 million-square-foot gross leasable area mall, tentatively scheduled to open in 2003.

As for Southlake, Ginsburg said it is certainly cutting edge. “They have built a very lovely project.”