The Battle for Preston Hollow's Soul
Acrimony aside, Crosland thought he'd come up with a project in Highland House that he could get built. A handsome, 29-story tower, it would contain 260 spacious, $4,000-per-month apartments catering to aging Baby Boomers like himself who, suddenly kid-free, find their 10,000-square-foot nests uncomfortably empty. There would be a dog park, rooftop gardens, a driving range and wine storage. He'd taken pains to head off every conceivable objection. There would be ample parking -- seven floors of it, serviced by a valet -- and an off-street loading dock to keep moving vans from blocking the street. A traffic study commissioned by his firm predicted a net decrease in traffic compared to the three-story medical building Highland House would replace.
The Crosland Group filed to rezone the property in the summer of 2013. Crosland and Rick Williamson, the firm's president, spent months meeting with Preston Center property owners and clearing the project with Highland Park Independent School District, into which the apartments would feed, and they say they encountered no significant opposition. They'd even convinced Willingham and a few other neighbors to write letters of support.
Claire Stanard, a condo owner behind the pink wall, arrived at an April meeting at the Preston Center Hilton Hotel as a skeptic. Williamson remembers the date -- April 14 -- because Miller gave him hell for scheduling it on the first day of Passover.
"When it was over, I grilled [traffic planners], I grilled Luke Crosland and Jennifer Gates with probably 30 pointed questions," Stanard recalls. When they were all answered, she was satisfied. Crosland had thought of everything. "What about housekeepers and caretakers? He'd provided basically a whole floor of parking."
The momentum shifted the moment Kleinman told Miller about Highland House. "I went over there the next day to get the case number off the sign so I could call the city," Miller says. City code requires anyone seeking a zoning change to post official red-and-white rezoning signs on their property. Arriving, she found a lone placard lying face down in the dirt beneath a crepe myrtle flanking the front door. Turning it over, she saw that the space reserved for the zoning case number was blank.
Miller was "so deeply offended that there was no sign there" and troubled by what she saw as Crosland's lack of respect for the zoning process that she decided Highland House must be stopped.
Stanard, who has been attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings across the street for 30 years, says she had seen the sign posted properly for months. But Miller began collecting evidence. She snapped several pictures of the sign lying face down in the ground. She came back the next morning and took several more and repeated the exercise six additional times over the next three weeks.
By the time the Plan Commission took up the Highland House case in May, she had compiled her photographs and observations into a notarized affidavit, which she delivered to commissioners with an argument that, because Crosland hadn't followed the law, the case had to be tabled. The attack was surgical but effective. Highland House was delayed.
Following Miller into the Highland House fight last spring was a coalition of Preston Hollow homeowners, seasoned by the Transwestern campaign, and a bevy of Highland Park moms. They flooded the Plan Commission with overwrought emails, predicting the imminent demise of the Park Cities/Preston Hollow way of life.
"One of the most compelling -- and valuable -- elements in our neighborhood is that one can live within proximity to downtown without seeing tall buildings," one complained. Another described a plan commissioner's description of Preston Hollow as "urban" as "disturbing." Others warned that beloved neighborhood businesses in Preston Center would collapse because of the added traffic -- just too many potential customers passing by.
The Highland Park moms predicted doom for their children's schools. "I think it's a joke to believe that the developers aim to market this to 'empty nesters,'" one wrote. "Anyone with intelligence will know that the primary residents will be those wishing to get their children into HPISD schools without purchasing property or paying taxes to do so."
Williamson, the Crosland Group's president, brushes off those concerns as irrational. "It's my job as a real estate developer to know to whom I'm catering and for what market I'm building," he says. At iLume Park, a new Crosland development on Cedar Springs, "there's a piece of art on the wall of the lobby that's two naked men and a naked woman. It's kind of weird so you have to kind of look at it to figure out what it is, but there's a subtle message that, you know, this probably isn't a great place for kids. There's all kinds of ways to do that. But these people were like 'Oh, how do you know you're not going to get five generations of some Mexican family living there trying to get into Highland Park schools and they've got 32 kids living inside?'"
Miller wasn't so easy to dismiss. She returned to the Plan Commission in June and delivered a blistering attack on Williamson, whom she accused of hiding plans from neighbors and pestered for details on the Crosland Group's deal with the owners of the medical building. Crosland skipped the hearing, choosing to lie low in the wake of an NBC 5 story recapping the messier details of his divorce. The case was delayed and was ultimately withdrawn by Crosland.
Plan Commissioner Bobby Abtahi regrets that Crosland and the neighbors couldn't reach a compromise. He feels the same about Transwestern. "That area is really primed for walkability," he says. "Everyone's talking about live-work-play in urbanism." Preston Center has the latter two. It just needs the "live."
Miller's involvement in the Highland House case influenced the Plan Commission's deliberations, Abtahi says, but no more than any other citizen who knows how to work the system. "I don't think that her position and former position in the city was as important as the fact that she prepared," he says.
Crosland and Williamson aren't so sure. Asked to rank the many factors that may have led to Highland House's demise -- bad blood with surrounding business owners, Preston Hollow opposition, etc. -- Crosland blinks, as if surprised that the question even has to be asked.
"It was all Laura Miller," Crosland says.
Williamson nods. "One hundred percent."
It's the middle of a weekday in late September, and the door to the Crosland Group's headquarters is locked. Williamson apologizes, explaining casually that the locked doors are a precaution against unwanted visitors -- namely the process servers from Crosland's divorce.
Crosland arrives later, dressed down in athletic gear from a lunchtime workout. "Did Rick show you this?" he asks, striding over to a table containing a scale model of Preston Center, which consists of crudely shaped Styrofoam blocks arranged atop an aerial photograph. There's a gaping square in the center for the parking garage. Crosland covers it with two additional blocks -- the Marriott and apartment complex, plans for which are immortalized in framed renderings on the wall. Despite everything, he's optimistic that he can get that project built given the proper city tax incentives and a guarantee of enough parking for his neighbors. But those plans were indefinitely shelved in favor of Highland House, which Crosland demonstrates by placing a taller Styrofoam tower one block south of the imagined Marriott.
If only it were so easy. Outside the window, things are as they've always been. The office buildings still tower in the distance. The crummy strips of retail continue to moulder. The parking garage is still an infuriating tangle. A couple of weeks later, Williamson will be hit by a car as he walks near it, seemingly as punishment for daring to meddle with it. Ebby's little white house still sits across the street, and a weird metal apartment complex decorated with rusted Lone Star decor holds down the other corner.
The landscape here isn't going to change anytime soon. If Transwestern and Crosland's example wasn't enough to scare other developers off those corners, Councilwoman Gates took Miller's suggestion and put in place a de facto moratorium on major rezoning cases while the city conducts a land-use study. Gates hopes the study will establish a template for development in the area that can strike a balance between neighbors and developers and head off the types of messy zoning fights Preston Hollow has just endured.
"It's complex," she says. "It's probably an easier thing to say no and walk away from it, but I understand by that process you don't get any improvements, you don't get any better connection to the neighborhood."
The moratorium came too late to quell neighbors' anger at Gates for not taking a stronger stand against Transwestern and Crosland from the outset. Political opponents like Miller and Rasansky, both of whom endorsed Leland Burk in last year's election, used the case to raise concerns about Gates' leadership, and rumors are flying at City Hall that Parks is preparing to challenge Gates in May's election. Parks is coy about her political ambitions, but doesn't rule out a campaign.
There's a joker in the deck, and the seeming calm that has settled over Parks' corner of Preston Hollow might not last as long as she and her neighbors had hoped. Entrepreneur and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has spent the past quarter century patiently piecing together the 10 acres of wooded estates lying along Northwest Highway between Ebby Halliday's little white house and Northwest Bible Church. Recent weeks have seen an unprecedented flurry of activity on the property: fences being torn down, trees being felled, reports of a 1930s mansion set to be razed.
Michael Romo, a real estate developer working for Cuban, has approached Gates and a few of the property's immediate neighbors shopping plans for the corner, which include two large office buildings and planting a stoplight at Northwest Highway and Jourdan Way. Andrew Sommerman, a trial lawyer who owns a neighboring estate, left his meeting with Romo both amazed by Cuban's chutzpah and hellbent on stopping him.
"I'm going to fight him in planning and zoning," Sommerman vows. "If I lose there, I'm going to fight him at City Council. If I lose there, I'm going to fight him in court. If I lose there, I'm going to fight him on appeal."
Romo says that won't be necessary. "Simply put, the neighborhood will not engage in discussions, so there's no story." But Cuban bought his first property on the corner in 1988. He's playing a long game, and like Miller, Cuban plays to win.
Email the author at eric.nicholson@dallasobserver.com
>< Previous>