The questions continue to roll in about the Lake Highlands Town Center, and we still don’t have any specific answers. We spent some time last week at the new LHTC park with Dave Dierkes, a Prescott Realty Group director. The park is beautiful, and is now officially owned by the City of Dallas and tentatively named “Watercrest Park” after the road running along the east side of the property.
Dierkes, an Old Lake Highlands resident, was a great tour guide and showed us all of the detail in the roughly 20-acre park, created by TBG, Pacheco Koch and Valley Crest, which, between them, have worked on projects such as the NorthPark Center expansion and Town Lake Park in Austin. Willis Winters, the city’s Park Department assistant director for planning, design and construction, was visibly impressed. “Probably the closest equivalent to this greenbelt is Lakeside Drive in Highland Park,” he says.
Most of our discussion revolved around the park (more posts on that coming in the future), but of course the topic of when “vertical construction” on the Lake Highlands Town Center property would begin came up as well. “Hopefully soon,” was Dierkes’ response, similar to what Prescott executives have been telling us for some time, and though he was a great sport about it, I can tell that he — along with everyone at Prescott — is frustrated with this answer.
“It hurts us as much as anyone,” Dierkes says. “It’s a pretty expensive piece of dirt to be sitting undeveloped.”
Speaking of, if you listened to this week’s Lake Highlands podcast, you heard Kathy Stewart mention an idea to temporarily use all of that undeveloped dirt — neighborhood resident Jana Boswell has proposed that the land be a site for airstream trailers hawking food. Mini mobile restaurants and retailers is a trend that we’ve recently covered in Lakewood/East Dallas and Oak Cliff as projects along Lower Greenville and Fort Worth Avenue are getting off the ground.
Fun idea. As Stewart says, “We’re dying to go, and this would give us a reason to be there.”