Visitors to Dallas quickly hear about the Bishop Arts District, an espresso-and-hip-boutique retail area located in rough (but gentrifying) Oak Cliff. What they’re usually not expecting to find when visiting the neighborhood is a building called Tyler Station, a 100,000-square foot remake of the former Dixie Wax Paper factory. The site houses some 70 small businesses in what Southern Dallas County developer and human connector, Monte Anderson, calls “a collaborative village.” It’s a prime example of what’s known as incremental development.

Colliding for shared prosperity

Artists, makers, and entrepreneurs productively “collide” here — as Anderson likes to put it — in dizzying variety: A co-working space (Wax Space); a martial arts studio (Oak Cliff Aikikai); Oak Cliff Brewing; Crumb & Kettle bakery; a barber shop; a tea store (Zakti); tattoo studios; and an event space (Place at Tyler). “We also had a hippie Baptist church for a while,” he notes, “and now we have the studio of an African American author of what she calls ‘gangster love’ novels — over 100 of them.”

Inside is a vast, high-ceilinged honeycomb of retail spaces constructed with repurposed wood and metal cattle panels so as to allow visitors to look in or chat with a business owner. It’s a large and inviting space. Many colorful events have been held including a Juneteenth Festival, a diaper party, grand openings, Origami Saturday, The Color of Ideas lecture series, community meetings, and much more. Inside is a vast, high-ceilinged honeycomb of retail spaces constructed with repurposed wood and metal cattle panels so as to allow visitors to look in or chat with a business owner. It’s a large and inviting space. Many colorful events have been held including a Juneteenth Festival, a diaper party, grand openings, Origami Saturday, The Color of Ideas lecture series, community meetings, and much more.

“This is not about real estate”

Another thing you notice: Quite a few of the tenants Anderson signs up are small, often minority-owned enterprises launched by people from the immediate area — and on shoestring budgets. As he describes the grassroots feel of Tyler Station, he pauses to add, “You get that this is not about real estate, right?”

A native of Southern Dallas County himself, Anderson is the founding and past president of the North Texas chapter of the Congress for New Urbanism, and a co-founder of the Incremental Development Alliance, a non-profit aimed at coaching small-scale, “missing middle” housing developers and an advocate of resident-driven neighborhood development. He is also a former motocross racer who barely made it through high school, as well as a remarkable social entrepreneur. His numerous real estate developments include a boutique hotel which was key in sparking the Oak Cliff comeback story. 

Making it affordable for low-income tenants

Anderson explains, “Tyler Station is just like what we’re going through now nationally with converting all the big box places, the office centers. We have to figure out how to scale down the rent to a point which is low enough for the area, while still high enough per square foot to make the project sustainable.” Which for Anderson means without subsidies and all the usual strings attached.

“We bought Tyler Station in 2016 for cheap — nobody wanted it. There was environmental contamination, it needed a $750,000 roof, it was full of smokestack equipment and dead raccoons.”

About that time, he decided to partner with Stash Design, a successful studio which specializes in sourcing found and salvaged objects for clients wanting a green-but-stylish look. Taking 20,000 square feet, Stash Design became the project’s anchor tenant and minority partner.

An emergent marketing plan

Yet, the partners did not go into the project with a clear marketing plan. “I thought we would put in a bunch of industrial users, a bunch of makers. But that’s not who showed up,” Anderson says. “It’s like when you’re first cleaning out the building, and then the more you see, the more your ideas change. We just wanted to let the building tell us what it wanted to be.”

He takes his hands-on approach a step further. “I want to teach people how to fish, as they say — but to do that, you have to spend time with them. I work mostly with the folks who are trying to scrape up $250 a month. I let my staff handle the regular business conversations back in the office. Where I’m needed is out in the trenches, feeling it, tasting it. For me, success is watching other people learn to do things — making it their own.”

“Farm where you are”

Toward that goal, Anderson is known for making personal low-interest or interest-free loans to entrepreneurs and cutting deals on the rent. “Here’s an important thing — the majority of our tenants are close by here and from southern Dallas, which has some of the poorest neighborhoods in the country. This is exactly what we wanted to see. We wanted to impact the immediate area first, to give them opportunities.”

Translating that goal of localism into a phrase, Anderson simply advises. “Farm where you are.”

SOUTH BEND — With his hand, Mike Keen brushed flaking paint from a column of pearly white ceramic “subway tiles,” saying, “This can’t rot.”

But, below his feet, the original oak floor had already rotted and been removed, thanks to a roughly 6,000-square-foot hole in the roof that had let rain and snow collect inside of this vacant former bakery at 906-910 Portage Ave., just over a half mile from downtown.

Sprawling piles of garbage were removed this year. Keen could now see across 56,000 square feet of often dark, dank, open floors. He saw past the puddles and mildewed arcade games littered in the basement.

Those tiled walls could become part of the new storefronts on Portage. Windows could again appear in their bricked-in spaces of the historic former Ward Baking Co.

“We’re really trying to create life on the street,” said Keen, managing partner of a group whose goal is to turn this into a nest for up to 60 businesses, artists or organizations in three years.  

At an estimated total cost of $3.75 million, the development’s biggest challenge now, Keen said, is finding the bank financing and the first possible tenants “when this is the best that it has looked in a decade.” 

“You have to have the vision and the patience to see that, in the beginning, you’re going to have almost no impact,” he said.  

Banks, he said, like to feel confident that such a project would land tenants. That may be easier for buildings designed for just two or three tenants, but that wouldn’t fit the vision of what Keen and his project partners aim to do. They want to draw together a collection of small and larger enterprises that could feed off each other and bring life to a previously stagnant area that Keen calls Portage Midtown. 

Across Portage, there are homes that he’s renovated and two 600-square-foot “tiny houses” that he and partners built this spring (with hopes for more in adjacent lots), plus the weekly South Bend Bike Garage co-op that bustles with volunteers each Wednesday evening. It’s all a few steps from the Near Northwest Neighborhood Center and its coffee shop.  

Keen, a retired IU South Bend professor who lives nearby on Riverside Drive, joined his Ward project partners in an LLC they call The Bakery Group: local architect Greg Kil, Borkholder Buildings owner Dwayne Borkholder of Nappanee and Dallas real estate developer Monte Anderson.  

They began cleanup and roof repairs in February. Keen hopes that, if the windows and storefront doors can be installed early in the process, they’ll inspire banks and the public to see how engaging the structure could be. 

The city has discussed allocating tax incremental finance dollars to help with the windows and doors along with other ideas, such as an outdoor plaza here and improvements elsewhere in Portage Midtown, said Santiago Garces, the city’s executive director of community investment. 

Garces said the city is looking at this and other corridors and how to “reactivate” such neglected mid-town spaces so that they draw people from their neighborhoods and even from the region. 

Keen said The Bakery Group’s goal is to repair the building enough so that, in the first year, it could gain an occupancy permit and move in 10 to 15 tenants — or about 30% occupancy — then 70% in the second year and 100% in the third year.

They would build it out one section at a time, structuring it according to what the tenants want, he said.  

Initially, Keen wanted to knock the Ward building down so that there’d be eight vacant lots to develop or build homes, but Anderson convinced him otherwise and offered to become a project partner.  

“Monte said this was too beautiful of a building,” Keen recalled.  

It reminded Anderson of Tyler Station in Dallas, a former wax paper factory, built in 1925 next to a train station, that he turned into a co-working space, now filled with a brewery, fabricators, retail shops, artisans, attorneys, churches, filmmakers, martial arts, wellness instructors and others.  

Representatives from co-working/entrepreneur centers gathered recently to describe their progress, strategies, and aspirations for Southern Dallas.

If capitalism could be reconfigured to allow neighbors to become owners of their own unique businesses, what would it look like?

That question is being answered in Southern Dallas, where six co-working/entrepreneur centers are in varying stages of development.

Representatives from the Red Bird Entrepreneur Center, Impact House, GoodWork, the Fair Park Entrepreneur Center (The District), Tyler Station, and the Grow DeSoto Business Incubator gathered on June 15 to describe their progress, strategies, and their aspirations for Southern Dallas. 

Around the back of this brewery in the Tyler Station and situated over the Elmwood Branch of Cedar Creek, this garden has picnic tables, shade trees and an old snow-cone trailer full of beer kegs. A taco trailer has taken up residence, too, which means that if you want to have a few pints on a weekend, there’s no reason to leave. In its early days, Oak Cliff specialized in hazy IPAs and fruited sours, and its most popular offerings now are a series of brews inspired by paleta flavors. But there are good offerings for normcore drinkers, too, like an outstanding pilsner (Bounced Czech) and a Goldilocks-style just-right blended pour called John Hancock, which mixes together the rather sweet light lager and rather bitter dark lager in one perfect cup.

The Ward Baking Company located on the corner of Rex Street and Portage Avenue, has sat crumbling and empty for close to 10 years. Needless to say, it holds a lot of history.

“This was built originally when it was at the edge of the city as the ward baking company and originally it was just a small German bakery called the Beuse Bakery and then they bought that up, added another building in the 1940s,” Bakery Group LLC President Mike Keen said. “And then it was abandoned in 2012 and since then it’s just sat empty full of stuff.”

A few years after it was abandoned, the Near Northwest Neighborhood Community Center tried to turn the building into affordable elderly and workforce housing, but were never able to win the grant needed to make it happen.

“The thing has been a neighborhood nuisance for the last decade, plus driving down neighborhood property values and making people feel this isn’t a very attractive neighborhood,” Keen said.

So, two years ago in 2019, Bakery Group LLC President Mike Keen stepped up to the plate, dedicating tons of time and brainstorming, to bring life back to the building and to the area!

“We want to turn it into neighborhood asset so that it becomes a draw because it’s such a beautiful building and if we can bring it back to its earlier life, it’ll be one of the coolest spaces not only in South Bend but really in the region,” Keen said.

“I sure do hope it does give people an opportunity to give it a second look at the near north side and portage corridor,” South Bend Chamber of Commerce Executive Vice President Rob DeCleene said.

Last night, Keen and the South Bend Common Council met to discuss ways the city can help financially, and approved two tax abatements for the development. With this help, the vision for this enormous space, is that much closer to becoming a reality!

“What we are looking for is a broad variety. We want some really creative folks, the artists and the makers, but we also want some professional office folks, you know people who can provide services to the other people in the building but also the neighborhood.”

“I think anytime you can use a building anywhere in the city that’s of that size with that much street frontage, it’s just an exciting opportunity for guests, for the city, and the neighborhood surrounding it,” DeCleene said.

What the future holds for the building down the line, and what it’ll bring to the table, is what Keen calls a complete transformation.

“We’ve been working for the last couple of decades to sort of rebuild the neighborhood, there have been many vacant lots that we’ve recently purchased maybe 15 or 16,” Keen said. “But to go from a neighborhood that people sort of see as a scary neighborhood to a place where it becomes a destination that people want to come around and hangout and be part of, it really is, what I say is transformational.”

Keen said the transformation hopefully begins next year, and estimates it to be a 3-year project. In the meantime, he’s on the lookout for local businesses who are interested in rent out one of the 60 units inside when it’s done. If you’re interested in collaborating, you can reach out to him at mfkeen1@gmail.com.

Big Award & New Successes for Public-Private Partnership Between DeSoto Economic Development Corporation, City of DeSoto, Options Real Estate, and The Industry Hub Boost Shuttered Hardware Store Turned Market & Small Business Incubator.

At one time the future of the large shopping center on Belt Line Road in DeSoto, Texas looked bleak. Their anchor tenant, a 26,000 square foot Ace Hardware Store shut down, and the only option to some was to bring in a dollar store. But City Leaders, their Economic Development Corporation, and forward thinking civic allies teamed up to oppose the dollar store option and, instead, proposed the idea of a market place for merchants with unique items and services and that could also act a small business incubator to “grow” the next generation of DeSoto’s businesses.

Back on June 14, 2019, The North Central Texas Council of Governments (NCTCOG), an association of North Texas governments that assists with regional planning efforts, awarded their Celebrating Leadership in Development Excellence (CLIDE) Award for New Development to the DeSoto Market Place for exemplifying one or more of their Principles of Development Excellence. They also declared that the DeSoto Market Place serves as an example of Development Excellence in the North Central Texas Region. And since then the Market Place has welcomed a Vietnamese Restaurant the has elevated DeSoto’s culinary landscape and seen one incubator tenant build on their success and venture out into DeSoto’s business community.

The CLIDE Awards Program, created in 2003, recognizes public and private entities including cities, developers, architects, planners and engineers, to encourage innovative development projects and practices that will help accommodate expected growth and ensure a sustainable North Texas for generations to come.

The DeSoto Market Place houses the Grow DeSoto Market Place (Grow DeSoto) which came to fruition from a first of its kind public-private partnership between the DeSoto Economic Development Corporation (DeSoto EDC), the City of DeSoto, Options Real Estate, and The Industry Hub to repurpose a building once occupied by ACE Hardware in a manner that would benefit small business owners, as well as the community of DeSoto.

The vision of this unique partnership is to provide a lower barrier to entry on the path to entrepreneurship for small business owners. Businesses that lease space within the Grow DeSoto Market Place receive reduced rental rates with all utilities included, a high traffic area that is easily accessible from I-35 and I-20, flexible lease terms, ongoing business training, mentorship, and the resource assistance of the DeSoto EDC, the DeSoto Chamber of Commerce, the City of DeSoto, Options Real Estate, and The Industry HUB. The space also includes private office suites that are available for lease.

Grow DeSoto, which celebrated its grand opening in October 2018, provides shoppers in DeSoto and the region with a wide variety of unique retail shops, services, restaurants, and a full service fitness and rehabilitation center. “The Grow DeSoto Market Place symbolizes the creative rebirth of our small business community and serves as an example to many other cities that the closure of old businesses in a community can present bold new opportunities that can ultimately make a positive difference within a city!” stated DeSoto Mayor Curtistene McCowan. Monte Anderson, CEO of Options Real Estate, added “As I had expected, we have found highly skilled and creative entrepreneurs from the local community. And, at the same time, we recognize that there is still a lot of work to do in developing local entrepreneurs.”

ABOUT DESOTO ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT CORPORATION

The DeSoto Economic Development Corporation (DeSoto EDC) is a non-profit organization funded by sales tax revenue to foster local prosperity while maintaining an excellent quality of life and minimizing local ad valorem taxation. The DeSoto EDC aims to assist businesses with a seamless relocation assistance process to DeSoto by providing site selection searches, competitive incentives, a skilled workforce and a prime location in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex. Whether your company needs a new commercial office building on Interstate 35, a manufacturing facility on a hill overlooking downtown Dallas, a fulfillment warehouse, or a service-oriented facility, DeSoto is the place to build your business, raise your kids, enjoy life and retire in style. For more information, visit our website at http://www.dedc.org.

For more information about the Grow DeSoto Market Place visit http://www.growdesoto.org
For more information about the CLIDE Award for New Development visit http://www.developmentexcellence.com