Two local developers win national award.

[CTroyMathis]

Two local developers win national awards
Christine Perez

Two Metroplex developers took home top honors at the 2002 National Association of Homebuilders' annual conference in Miami.

South Side on Lamar, a 455-unit project in the former Sears Catalog Merchandise Center near downtown Dallas, won two Pillars awards, one for Best Loft Development and another for Best Property Web Site. The project beat out other finalists from Washington D.C., San Francisco and Tulsa, Okla.

Jack Matthews of Matthews Southwest, developer of the 31-acre, mixed-use project, said he was very pleased with the national recognition.

"The Pillars are extremely important, as they are awards given by our peers for industry excellence," he said.

Billingsley Co. also took home top honors for its Austin Ranch multifamily development, winning in the Best Garden Community category. Lucy Billingsley, partner, said she was stunned by the award.

"It's the first apartment project we've ever done, so we're obviously thrilled," she said. "All we want to do in our work is provide incredible environments for people to live in; environments that rejuvanate, that create the warmth of home and help stimulate friendships. To receive this award is gigantic feedback that we're right out there on the edge, doing it as good as it can be done in this country."

[MustangMonkey]

While I am familiar with SouthSide on Lamar, I do not know anything about Austin Ranch.

Where are there developments located?
DT, in-town, suburbs, rural-burbs

[KelleyUSA]

MM,

Austin Ranch is located in The Colony. It's basically off the Tollway and just a stones throw from Legacy in Plano and Stonebriar Mall in Frisco. It has rolling hills- very pretty piece of land. I think eventually retail will be located in the area- but right now they have a few homes, apartments etc... The development also has space for commercial building- and is the new corporate headquarters for Pizza Inn. I think in total- the development has 1400 acres. Hope that helps!

[MustangMonkey]

From the sound of it, this Austin Ranch (while visually nice) is the absolute wrong type of development we need here in DFW.


Mixed use:
Suburban Office park with a Country Club

[CTroyMathis]

Here's a current blurb on that place known as 'Austin Ranch' - from a local town paper.

Resort-style living in Denton County
By: K. Shelby Skrhak , staff writer 12/17/2003
http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=10677998&BRD=1426&PAG=461&dept_id=528214&rfi=6

The landscape is a little different here - residents are nestled into nature with creeks, lakes and trees and executive offices overlook hike and bike-trails through a nature preserve.
Sounds resort-like and that's what developers of the 1,900-acre residential, retail and commercial development at Austin Ranch in The Colony want you to feel while you're there.
They've pumped millions into creating such a city within a city.
Austin Ranch is built on Texas ranch land, sprawling Lewisville, Carrollton and mostly The Colony. Located west of the Dallas North Tollway, east of Interstate 35 and south of State Highway 121, Austin Ranch nearly straddles the Collin and Denton county lines.
It's similar to the mixed-zoned Addison Circle, Plano Post Legacy and revitalized downtown Plano, where residential, retail stores and commercial office buildings are all built in one walkable community. Weekday commuters walk down the street to catch the DART light rail to work; weekend loungers walk downstairs for their morning latte and their afternoon window shopping.
Real estate experts call it "new urbanism. Billingsley calls it a success.
"If I were young, I would want to live here," said Billingsley. "At no other development do you have the environmental features and prime location, as you do here. The environment can't be touched."
The development features more than 50 one-, two- and three-bedroom floor plans for apartment homes, lofts and townhomes with innovative designs and interiors.
Among the community's amenities are hike-and-bike trails; three resort-style pools; a state-of-the-art fitness center with free weights and showers; a business center with high-speed Internet access; retail shops located on site; outside professional stainless-steel barbecue grills; sand volleyball; and complimentary tanning.

New urbanism in Denton County
Bernard L. Weinstein, director of the Center for Economic Development and Research and a professor of applied economics at UNT in Denton, said he has seen so-called "new urbanism" flourish in the Sunbelt he describes as the south and the west.
"New urbanism is certainly en vogue right now," he said. "It's happening in rapidly growing areas near major metropolitan areas and major centers of economic activity."
Weinstein cites The Colony as such a place.
"Austin Ranch is probably the hottest area for development," he said. "Austin Ranch can link itself to all that development on State Highway 121 between Plano and Lewisville."
Popular particularly in the south, new urbanism is an old concept made new again.
"This is a new kind of development, but a fashion that repeats itself from the 1960's," Weinstein said.
Developers had once projected Flower Mound to be a new urban center in the suburbs.
"But the city didn't get that kind of growth and it didn't work out that way," he said. "Now Flower Mound has developed into something different and good for that area."
But Weinstein finds a certain humor in a new approach to the urban sprawl.
"There's a certain irony that residents want an urban feel in a suburban environment," he said, citing the reason why many people move to the suburbs is to get away from the congestion of urban life.
Characteristic of new urbanism is efforts by suburban developments to create an old town or downtown feeling, Weinstein said.
Austin Ranch's walkable, mixed-use community seeks to foster that urban pedestrian-oriented neighborhood feel with a mix of densities, scales and uses, according to architecture firm Calthorpe of Berkeley, California.
An urban look is created with a brick façade and uneven roof-lines, which architects of the project say promotes visual richness. Visiting Austin Ranch, you'll see that units, which each vary in building type, style and spacing, are repeated as strings of patterns.
The architectural styles and traditional town designs used in Austin Ranch are reminiscent of the Texas hill country, using local stone and Texas-style architecture.
Austin Ranch is one of the only mixed-zoning developments using such architectural techniques in Denton County
"This area is prime," Billingsley said. "Look at an aerial map of the location and you'll see there's a large undeveloped area of land. It hasn't been filled in yet."
But often large areas of undeveloped land come with problems - namely lack of infrastructure and distant accessibility to the Metroplex.
"Austin Ranch is the same distance north of downtown than other developments," Billingsley said. "To find an area of undeveloped land this large, you'd have to go north of Frisco or McKinney."
With close proximity to Dallas North Tollway, State Highway 121 and Interstate 35, Billingsley describes the area as ideal.
"According to the [North Central Texas] Council of Governments, this area is supposed to have the greatest growth," he said. "We bought all the continuous space we could find."
Buying all that land, working around the natural landscape and spending some real money on architecture, Austin Ranch hasn't been cheap to build.
But arriving at a total cost of development would be tough.
"The total number is so big that I don't want to think about it," Billingsley said. "The upfront cost is so staggering, that it's an extremely big number."

A workplace to call home
But upscale apartment living isn't the only push Billingsley makes. National corporate campuses are their bread and butter.
The offices of Austin Ranch are planned to ultimately contain 16 million square feet of space and employ 43,000 people. Master-planned by RTKL, Austin Ranch contains more than 700 acres for corporate campuses and 200 for speculative office parks and technological uses.
"We're pursuing three build-to-suits right now in the industrial area," Billingsley said. "I would say we're in serious competition for them."
Already, Austin Ranch is home to Sysco Corp., Pizza Inn and home mortgage giant Freddie Mac.
Houston-based Sysco relocated and expanded its Metroplex operation to Austin Ranch, where it built a 557,000-square-foot distribution warehouse that employs 800.
They relocated from 279,000 square feet in two buildings in Farmers Branch, where it spent more than 20 years and employed about 700.
Pizza Inn has two buildings at the development totaling 140,000 square feet, one serving as corporate headquarters and a training center for employees at the company's 437 restaurants in the United States and overseas. The other building is a food warehouse and distribution center.
It also is home to a test kitchen, where Pizza Inn develops its products.
Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp., also known as Freddie Mac, does business in their 70,000-square-foot single story headquarters on Plano Parkway.
New to the development is Advocare International, a nutritional products company, which plans to build a 225,000-square-foot headquarters and distribution facility, Billingsley said.
If the company relocates from Carrollton, it stands to save $91,000 over a 10-year period under a tax abatement package from the city of Lewisville. Published reports show the package would require AdvoCare to employ at least 225 full-time workers with an annual payroll of $11 million, and generate a minimum of $3 million in locally taxable sales.
While Billingsley said the development as a whole is strong, it is still affected by a soft economy.
"The office market has been soft and it's not going to get any softer," he said. "As a result, the office market at Austin Ranch is as low as the rest of the city after the technology debacle.
"But industrial is good, certainly not robust, but fine. Retail all around the city has been very good for us as well," Billingsley said.
So will Austin Ranch in Denton County be the Metroplex's most successful new urbanist site?
Said Billingsley, "We're been in this business long enough to know that we don't know."

I haven't seen this place ever, but, classifying it 'new urbanism' sounds like it may be stretching the term...? Maybe not. Again, never seen this area.

Rantanamo, you have any photos of this place by chance?