102-YEAR-OLD OAK CLIFF PUMP HOUSE HAS BEEN TORN DOWN TO MAKE WAY FOR OFFICES, APARTMENTS

Original Story: dallasnews.com

Another century-old Dallas building is no more.

This week Cienda Partners introduced the wrecking ball to the Oak Cliff Pump Station that in 1913 began providing drinking water to folks living in that part of the city. Thirty years later it became part of the Oak Farms Dairy complex along the the Trinity River levee on the Oak Cliff side, visible from the Boulevard Boulevard Viaduct. Today, it’s rubble as Cienda preps the site for offices and residential units somewhere on the horizon. The demand for Dallas apartments is on the rise. And the landmark Oak Farms sign that once sat on the old pump station greeting visitors to Oak Cliff now rests on the ground.

So far, at least, the pump station is the sole building on the property that has been demolished.

“Oak Cliff has lost two historic buildings in a short period of time,” says council member Scott Griggs: the Humble Oil Service Station, which was razed last year, and now the pump house.

“This underscores the need for us as a city to move forward with rules on demolition delays,” he says. “This also underscores the need and urgency for North Oak Cliff to be included” in the mayor’s Downtown Historic Preservation Task Force’s recommendations, which aim to preserve what’s left of Dallas’ unprotected history. “We’re going to continue to see demolition in Oak Cliff until the city council comes up with an ordinance that allows for delays and incentivizes rehabilitation. In some cases good buildings have gone through years of neglect, but we still value their character and contributions.” Grapevine apartments are located in the Dallas area and all of the big city fun is within reach.

The Old Oak Cliff Conservation League had been hoping the pump station would be spared like its siblings along and near White Rock Lake, Turtle Creek and Bachman Lake — all three of which still stand. The Turtle Creek pump house is a city-designated historic landmark known today as the Sammons Center for the Arts; Bachman’s a maintenance facility; White Rock, the city’s Water Operations Control Center. The OOCCL listed the pump house among its most-endangered structures just last year, hoping to spare it from the very fate it endured this week.

“It’s sad,” says Michael Amonett, Griggs’ appointee to the city’s Landmark commission and a former OOCCL president. It was Amonett who unearthed the pump house’s history buried beneath white paint and dairy tanks and brought it to the attention of architect Larry Good, who was working with Cienda on a development plan for the property between the Houston and Jefferson viaducts.

Last year, in an email exchange with Amonett, Good wrote that “will attempt to see if we can ‘extract’ it” from the surrounding buildings. “Wouldn’t it make a cool restaurant.” Good now says he found about the pump house’s demolition only yesterday.

“There was very little left of what made the building interesting,” he says. “It had been totally encrusted and changed by Oak Farms. I never saw anything other than what you could sort of discern from the outside.” Good referred further questions about development plans and timing to Cienda.

Barry Hancock, Cienda’s founding partner, says via email that once Oak Farms left, “we determined that leaving these gutted and functionally obsolete industrial buildings vacant would be a magnet for vagrants and would decrease security in the neighborhood and the surrounding parks. Additionally, several of the buildings were determined by our engineers to be structurally unsound, which further increased the potential risk to others.”

We’ve asked specifically about the pump house in follow-up emails and phone messages, but have yet to hear back. Hancock says only that Cienda is “in the very early stages of working on a master development plan that will bring a variety of uses to this area which we hope to have in first draft form sometime toward the end of the year.” These uses may include an influx in Dallas apartments.

Amonett says it’s not clear what kind of shape the pump house was in, as OOCCL was never given the chance to tour the property despite repeated requests.

“They would never let us on site to verify that for ourselves so how do we know they’re not lying to us?” says Amonett. It’s unfortunate. And it’s a loss.”

In recent months alone Dallas has lost a century-old block of downtown, a historic residential apartment building on Oak Lawn and a Kip’s Big Boy in Oak Cliff.

Says Landmark Commission chair Katherine Seale, who led the Downtown Historic Preservation Task Force, Dallas’ zeal to raze its historic structures is “unending.”

HIGH-RISE CONDOS AHEAD FOR PLANO’S LEGACY WEST DEVELOPMENT

Original Story: dallasnews.com

A 30-story condominium tower will bring luxury living to the $2 billion Legacy West development in West Plano.

The high-rise residential building is planned for a block between Toyota and Liberty Mutual Insurance’s new office campuses and near the Dallas North Tollway.

And it’s just across the street from the $400 million Legacy West urban village, which is under construction with shops, restaurants, apartments and offices. The demand for Dallas apartments is on the rise.

The addition of a luxury condo tower will add to the appeal of the Legacy West project and provide high-end housing for the thousands of professional workers who will soon be located in the project, said developer Fehmi Karahan, one of the partners in the West Plano development.

“Since Toyota announced its headquarters was moving here, people have bombarded us with interest in a condo building as part of the development,” Karahan said. “There are people who have big homes in Plano and Frisco that are ready to sell but don’t want to leave this area.

“And the amenities that we are providing in Legacy West are plentiful.”

Legacy West has selected a development partnership of Plano’s Duggan Realty Advisors — headed by Jim Duggan — and Ted and Mark Bradford of Brentfield Investments and Bradford Putnam Realty. Ron Gafford, a retired top executive with construction firm Austin Industries, is also part of the building team for the high-rise.

GDA Architects of Dallas has designed the condo tower.

“It’s modern and timeless and matches everything we are doing at Legacy West,” Karahan said.

Called Windrose at Legacy West, the tower will be on Headquarters Drive, next door to Liberty Mutual’s new buildings.

“They already have purchase reservations for about 25 of the 150 condos planned in the building,” Karahan said. “People have been calling about it.”

The residential units will range from around 900 square feet for the smallest one-bedroom to more than 2,800 square feet for the penthouse.

The smallest units start at more than $500,000.

Karahan said work should begin on the building early next year.

The condo tower will join a 300-room, $82 million Renaissance Hotel, 280,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, hundreds of apartments and about 240,000 square feet of offices being built along the west side of the tollway, south of State Highway 121.

Boston-based Liberty Mutual Insurance is building almost 1 million square feet in its two-tower office complex to house as many as 5,000 workers. There are hundreds of Dallas apartments available for immediate rental with a variety of amenities to choose from.

Toyota’s $350 million North American headquarters and a new head office for FedEx Office are also under construction in the same area.

Two years from now about 13,000 jobs will be located in the 240-acre Legacy West development.

It’s being built by a development partnership that includes Karahan, KDC, Columbus Realty and J.C. Penney.

Dallas’ Al Coker & Associates — longtime sales agents for luxury housing — is handling marketing for the condo project.

Coker said the employment densities in the Legacy business park area and residential values in surrounding neighborhoods support a luxury high-rise.

“The house prices out north are now much closer to the cost of high-rise living,” he said.

Coker said residents in west Collin County previously had to go to Dallas’ Turtle Creek or Uptown neighborhoods for high-rise housing.

“Their country clubs are up there and churches are there and a lot of their friends,” he said. “They don’t want to leave.”

Legacy West already has hundreds of apartments and high-density single-family homes being built just north of Legacy Drive. The increase in employment opportunities in the area demonstrates the need for available Grapvine apartments.

The overall development is Texas’ largest new mixed-use project and will start opening in about a year.

Dallas-Fort Worth Home Sales Surge 27 Percent in April

The Dallas News

 

 

North Texas home sales surged 27 percent in April from a year earlier.

Texas apartment and condominium sales rose even higher – up 49 percent.

Median home sales prices also rose a solid 7 percent in last month's report, one of the best recent year-over-year gains.

The jump in pre-owned home sales was fueled by the federal homebuying tax credits that just expired.

The April increase and an 11 percent rise in March were enough to put home sales ahead 9 percent so far this year in North Texas.

Local real estate agents sold 7,017 pre-owned single-family homes last month, according to statistics released Friday by the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University and North Texas Real Estate Information Systems Inc.

It was the highest one-month sales total since last July and the second highest since mid-2008.

The rebound in home sales in North Texas will provide a boost to the overall economy, analysts say.

"Home sales generate revenues for service providers such as Realtors, lenders, title companies, appraisers, surveyors and attorneys, among others," said David Brown, who heads the Dallas office of housing analyst Metrostudy Inc.

"A big problem for the economy over much of the last year has been that the consumer has been on the sideline.

"Homebuyers tend to spend a significant amount of money on things like new refrigerators, washing machines, televisions and furniture," Brown said. "Many will make repairs and upgrades to the home. ... Thus, the home purchase will continue to have a positive impact on the economy over the next several months."

This year's increases in home sales look particularly large because housing transactions were almost at a standstill a year ago.

"Although much of the sales gain is likely due to the tax credit, other factors are at play as well," said D'Ann Petersen, a business economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. "Mortgage rates remain relatively low, prices appear to have bottomed nationally, and job growth is edging up.

"Most indicators suggest the local economy is moving in the right direction, even if the recovery remains fragile."

Through the first four months of 2010, area home resale prices are up 5 percent from the same period last year.

And April's substantial increase in pre-owned home sales isn't likely to fade right away.

The number of pending home sales in North Texas – properties under contract but not yet closed – is up 40 percent.

As sales go up, the number of houses on the market in the area has fallen about 7 percent from a year ago to just over 37,000 homes. That's the lowest April home sales inventory in more than two years.

Currently, there's just over a six-month supply of pre-owned Dallas apartments and homes for sale in the North Texas market, which includes 24 counties. That's considered a balanced market.

"Certainly, it's great to see the market starting to clear the excess inventory of existing homes," said Dr. Bernard Weinstein, an economist with Southern Methodist University. "The rebound in home sales reflects confidence that both the national and local economies are on the mend.

"Low interest rates, the tax credit and an abundance of competitively priced foreclosure properties have also helped push up sales of existing homes and Fort Worth apartments."

Students Create Entrepreneurial Apartment Hunting Website

Daily Skiff

 

 

A thin layer of debris that included energy drinks and chip bags was strewn about his room. An unmade bed sat next to him as he typed away.

Most college students are familiar with this setting, and for Ryan Fleisch, a junior entrepreneurial management and marketing major, it became a typical scene, even though he wasn't like most students. He was starting his own Web-based business.

Fleisch said he got the idea for his business, Purplerenter.com, last year while apartment hunting with a friend.

"I heard from a lot of students who were in a similar situation as us that were having trouble finding a place near Texas Christian." Fleisch said. "There wasn't a site around here to help see what was available."

The website works by sorting through a list of apartments based on criteria selected on the site's search engine, Fleisch said. Users can search for apartments based on the number of rooms and bathrooms they want or even on their distance from campus.

Fleisch's partner, Chris Sterling, a junior finance and accounting major, said the website localizes the listings by inputting the user's current address and then uses GPS coordinates to find the apartments that best fit the search criteria.

"Most apartment listing sites just give you a large area, and you end up with listings way out in north Fort Worth apartments," Sterling said. "We centralize everything and make it real easy for the students to figure out what they want."

The duo got the first website up in a month but then couldn't get much further, Fleisch said. Apartments were hesitant to sign up with his company because the Web traffic was unproved.

However, he couldn't get people to view his site without apartments advertising on it. Something had to give, Fleisch said. He decided to let apartments post listings on his site for free for a few months until the Web traffic started gaining more hits.

Fleisch said he and Sterling plan on charging Dallas apartments to advertise on the site after the free period is over.

Brandon Tyler, a representative for Sky Rock condominiums, said Purple Renter focused on a more specific audience than anything Sky Rock had used in the past.

"I think it's a very strategic place to put marketing dollars," Tyler said. "They've got a great business plan and structure. I feel they're filling a gap (at TCU) that hasn't been filled by anybody."

The website hasn't been around long enough, Tyler said, to track the benefits.

Tyler recalled the first day he met Fleisch and Sterling and said he knew the idea was something special.

"They came and approached me on a Thursday and had a sample website up Friday night for me to look at," Tyler said. "They're very prompt and professional."

Fleisch said he worked 30 to 40 hours a week in addition to his school work when the site first started. However, the website started to become self-sufficient once he and Sterling began tracking hits, which Fleisch said allowed him to regain his social life.

The website now uses Google analytics and Joomla application software to track the hits, Sterling said.

Brad Hancock, director of the Neeley Entrepreneurship Center, said Sterling and Fleisch proved to be a hard workers in and out of the classroom.

Hancock said he originally thought the website had great potential but the concept for Purple Renter would be more valuable in a bigger market such as Austin apartments or Lubbock.

"Initially I thought the market might be crowded," Hancock said. "But then I realized they were a little bit different because they're helping people who already have space that needs to be filled. So the better I understood their business proposal, the better I liked their idea."

Fleisch said the guidance Hancock and the entrepreneurship program provided him with was invaluable.

"I never would have known that a business like this could exist," he said. "Without the (entrepreneurship) program, I never would have had the connections to make this happen."

Talking to people who already started their own businesses would be a great starting point for future entrepreneurs, Fleisch said.

Sterling said he wants to expand the listings to include houses in the area and not just Texas apartments. The website recently began negotiating with realtors, though nothing has been finalized yet, he said.

Purple Renter will soon allow students to fill out a questionnaire on what they want, he said. That information will then be compared with available listings realtors have.

Inquiries have already been made about starting a similar website in the Southern Methodist University area, Sterling said. In the next three years, the duo hopes to have sites for Texas Tech University and other universities outside of the state.

Stimulus Analysis Offers Up Confusing Numbers

USA Today

The federal government sent Bob Bray $26,174 in stimulus aid to fix a fence and replace the roofs on public Dallas apartments near Blooming Grove, Texas, a town of fewer than 900 people outside Dallas. He hired five roofers and an inspector to do the job.

But the number of jobs he reported to the government looked very different — 450 jobs.

"Oh, no," said Bray, who runs the local public housing authority part-time with his wife, Linda, when asked about the discrepancy. He said that he told the government that he had created six jobs but that a federal official told him that wasn't right. So he reported the number of hours the roofers worked instead. The Department of Housing and Urban Development caught the mistake, but he couldn't fix it before the jobs figures were published. "The money was great, but the reports are really confusing," he said. "I've been fighting with it for over a month and a half."

The administration reported Friday that stimulus recipients reported having created or saved 640,329 jobs this year, a figure it said buttressed its contention that the $787 billion package has had a significant economic impact. The jobs total is based on reports of more than 130,000 recipients of stimulus grants and contracts filed with the federal government.

Obama's senior adviser for the stimulus, Ed DeSeve, said last week that officials had "scrubbed" those reports for three weeks before they were released Friday, though he said some would still have errors.

USA TODAY reviewed the reports to determine the number of jobs created or saved per stimulus dollar. The review found 14 recipients that reported saving or creating more than 100 jobs for less than $1,500 per job — suggesting they overreported the number of jobs. Those included:

•The police department in Plymouth, Conn., claimed in its report that a $15,355 grant used to buy new computers had created or saved 108 jobs. The department had 22 law enforcement officers last year, according to the FBI. Mayor Vincent Festa said that the town has resorted to "counting paper clips" to save money but that it had no plans to lay off any of its police officers, even without the stimulus. He said he could not explain the report, and the town's police chief did not return telephone calls Monday.

•The Southwest Georgia Community Action Council, which employs about 500 people in its Head Start preschool program, reported creating or saving 935 jobs with about $1.3 million in funding. Beverly Wise, the group's fiscal officer, said she followed the advice of federal officials to come up with the number. "I thought it was high," Wise said of the number she reported, adding that the process was confusing. The group is using its stimulus money to give a 1.84% pay raise to its employees and pay for other needs such as playground equipment and training for the teachers who serve 2,300 low-income children.

•Teach for America, which helps place recent graduates in teaching jobs in urban and rural districts, reported that a $2 million grant created or saved 1,425 jobs. Spokeswoman Kerci Marcello Stroud said officials used that money to pay part of the salaries of 125 employees; a separate $6 million allowed it to expand the training program to include 1,300 more graduates.

Liz Oxhorn, a spokeswoman for the White House stimulus effort, said the reports give "the American people one of the best looks ever at real-time information about a major initiative" and the reporting "allows people to find any mistakes, as it should — which will help us correct them promptly."