Photo by Liesbeth Powers for the Advocate
I won’t keep you in suspense. In short, no, plans for a high-rise apartment building are not underway at Northlake Shopping Center. And, no, the surrounding shops won’t be razed to make way for housing. Not now, and not anytime soon.
But I looked into a rumor, rampant since at least April, that They are planning a 23-story apartment building at the northeast corner of Ferndale and Northwest Highway in Lake Highlands.
My dad (a Lochwood resident) says he heard it, my sister (Lake Highlands) heard it, a number of us Advocate staffers heard it too. In an April discussion on Nextdoor.com an employee of one Northlake Shopping Center business posted confidently that the “rumors are true” and the former Albertsons/Sun Fresh and surrounding stores would be torn down to make way for luxury apartments.
In May a person who regularly shops the center posted in a Facebook group that store employees told her “the whole shopping center is being torn down and turned into apartments.” Another similar post appeared on Nextdoor.com earlier this month, adding that the plotted apartment building would be 23-stories tall.
But there is no evidence that owners and management of the shopping center and grocery/convenience store, two separate owners, also known as They, are planning such a move. Further, it would be close to impossible to build apartments on the land, much less tall ones, without notifying neighbors.
An LLC with a Houston address called Sand Canyon Partners owns the land at 10203 E. Northwest Highway, home to former Albertsons and later Sun Fresh by Minyard as well as the former associated convenience store. The LLC has owned the land since 2003, per Dallas CAD, and have had ground lease agreements with tenants.
Malouf Interests owns Northlake Shopping Center. Asked about a possible apartment building on the corner, Matthew Malouf says his “understanding is that there are no plans for anything like that.”
None of the land in question is zoned for residences. The ex-grocery store (10203 E. Northwest Highway) is designated as a commercial building. The other 86,050 square feet of freestanding retail at 10233 E. Northwest Highway is zoned retail.
There would have to be a rezoning case in order to add homes or apartments to this property. If an application to do so was filed, we would see a sign on the property notifying the public of the request.
I reached out to our D10 council member Kathy Stewart, who said she’d heard the rumors too. She says she already has asked former councilman Adam McGough, Plan Commission representative Tip Housewright and even the city’s office of economic development about the rumor, but she has not found much of an explanation for it.
She says that there would need to be not only a zoning change request, which requires public notification and hearings, to build any apartments, but also, a high rise of 20 or more stories would require additional approvals from the city based on the site’s proximity to single family homes.
My guess is that the “23-story” detail of the gossip could be linked to articles about a 23-floor apartment tower going up at Northwest Highway and Preston — wires likely were crossed.
The last occupant of the building at 10203 E. Northwest Highway was Sun Fresh by Minyard, which was there until 2016 when H-E-B took over and closed a number of Sun Fresh stores around Dallas.
We will continue to follow and report on happenings here. If you read this whole article, you probably are not the type to be mislead, but remind your friends and neighbors to be leery of social media scuttlebutt and read the Advocate instead.
