Revitalizing Redbird: A Paradigm Shift in Community Development

I moved here when I was twenty four, in nineteen ninety five. Many white people in the city of Dallas, I really never went to Southern Dallas. All I ever heard about it was don't go there. I thought of it as a small neighborhood that was to be avoided. What I realized when I started spending time in Southern Dallas and getting to know people there, Everything I'd heard about it was untrue. And so I began to develop an investment idea to provide those quality amenities to the community that wanted them, deserved them, and could afford them. This is an investment just like everything else is However, it also seeks to do good. False preconceived notion is that those two things can't be mutually complementary. There is no reason why an investment can't also lift up the community and to provide an environment that is dignified, which is what they deserve. Redbird is the name of a neighborhood in Southwest Dallas. At nineteen seventy four, the Red Bird Mall opened. It was a developed and is the only indoor mall in all of Southern Dallas. When the demographics went down a little bit, started to suffer from a lack of shopping, and it just sort of had a downward spiral the impression and the interpretation of Southern Dallas played a lot of that about, you know, some of the crime ridden neighborhoods and really not worth the development and you look at the history throughout the city of Dallas, that particular area with the with the upper middle class, the predominant White And we had a transition that everybody started moving to the suburbs, you know, the whole story throughout America, and it left everything. But for many years, I was intentionally starved of resources of infrastructure of capital, and that really has to do with the racial politics of Dallas, Texas in the fifties, seventies, and even up into the eighties. Del Cliff community in particular by Red Bird, it's a predominantly African American black community. And it's a community that has a substantial amount of wealth around it, but always just sort of been under invested. And so it was really finding the right sort of investment group that was patient and really wanted the best interest for the community and so we found that in Peter. Peter bought the project seven years ago, was very much a listening to the community and being one of the first developers that came in and purchased them all and started listening to what really the community wanted. This is a revitalization. That's why I believe it's very important. And I think the exciting thing about this is the repurposing not only of the mortgage sale, but the reuse of using and servicing a community in which serves through a cadre of other services that are just not retail, retail other types of community related projects and services. I had when I was journey is that I really knew nothing about real estate. And so the first thing was getting some people on the team. I partnered up with a guy named Terrence Maden, who's the co developer. He grew up in the community, went off to college, came back, went into the real estate business, and he and I were very philosophically aligned. And we really hit it off. I really liked his sort of approach to the project that he had a a very fresh perspective. We started having really meaningful conversations with key stakeholders in particular on the healthcare side, on the residential side, and and retail entertainment. And so we really spent, you know, a substantial amount of time just sort of thinking through the design strategy. And that's when we sort of reached out to BCC. First met Peter at Redbird Mall, Southwest Center Mall at the time. One of our clients who we did a similar project for in Los Angeles recommended us to Peter because he knew the vision of what Peter had. Peter introduced to us and invited us to the site to walk with him and learn more about what him and the team were trying to deliver. The city of Dallas conducted in Erman Lane Institute study years ago about the mall, and that study ultimately revealed that the mall and its highest and best use needs to be mixed use. And so we we realized very quickly that we're gonna have to repurpose and reposition some of the former anchor buildings. The city of Dallas has been a critical partner and really from day one, even before I bid on buying them all. But throughout the process, the city has totally bought into the vision and then really supported it financially. So the city really believed that this project could be catalytic for development in Southern else. Here is a developer who wanna do the great development, but where the money gun come from? At that time, Mike Ronald was the mayor was grow south. Case to Thomas, you know, was a council member there. We kinda went to public private partnership bucket Mike Ronald has a discretionary fund. I has a discretionary fund. We kinda roll up roughly about twenty some million dollars to put in infrastructure. So that was the first shot at Redbird that it took his own groundwork. Then also, we had to turn around, hey, how did we get investors to come over there? Then Peter had more investor coming in. Another group that we got involved with also through the same developer was Omni Plan. And so they really held my hand, helped develop the vision over time. Well, Peter approached us as really a retail expert within Dallas Fort Worth area. Peter wanted to bring top notch designed to Southern Dallas, and he wanted to bring that kind of design quality to to Redbird. It kinda charges my batteries to be able to be involved with something like And for us, it was important to have the sort of inclusivity, WMB component as a part of our strategy. And we want to identify a contractor that represented the community. Conrell is general contractor. I mean, of course, we look for opportunities to build in the area. Red Bird community is community that we know in Dallas is predominantly black, an African American community. When we heard that there was an opportunity of them revitalizing this area, of course, something that we know has a group of people that looks so much like us. We wanted to be part of it. And even more so, not just coming in and building and leaving, we wanted to have some type of ownership in it to show that we believe in it. Speaking to the project itself, first, it really challenges need to know how to put them all together before you can take one apart, and that's kind of what our mission has been. You have to be really in a project like this, you have to be really diligent on the pre construction side. The unforeseen conditions and the risk there are real, especially, you know, even if you have the best set of Asbel you're gonna find surprises behind the walls. It's I think sixty sixty five acre site that we're operating on. In the cities requiring them to completely replace all of the underground utilities that have been there since, you know, the seventies. The infrastructure is pretty complicated from that perspective, having to phase certain drive lanes or leave certain parking lots open and navigate that while you're doing a major infrastructure which has to be sequenced per the design. You have to do it in a sequence where, you know, the fall of the line is still functioning and still a functioning system. The other thing too is that we were faced with COVID so you're trying to re redevelop a mall in the midst of a pandemic. So there was a lot of different options that we were faced with. I think the advantage is that we had a very resilient team in place that could see the bigger picture. And, you know, I think all of us working in sort of a unified fashion helped us to really push the project for. It's critical to have a good partners in a project like this from day one. The the partnership between Red Bird and VCC and Omni Plan, you just have to have a construction partner at your side making those decisions with and I believe through the combination and the coalition of different organizations that cross the community It represents a true diversity of opportunities and services that can be provided and anonymically as well as quality for the users in the community that they serve. I'm proud to be a part of this project because of what it represents. I am all about providing people examples and opportunities to encourage people. You can do it. If I had a part of that. That is something I'm more than proud of. We're so proud to be a part of the Red Bird project because we're doing something substantial in a city we care deeply about. We're bringing amenities and services to a community that deserves those amenities and services and that it'll resound as a as a huge success Conroe and VCC have a sort of same mission, do good as you do good. And in that process, we believe that not only we can bill a standing structure, but we can build a community while we're building that structure. I'm just excited to see where the project is. I mean, I think, honest I really do think that this is kind of gonna set a new standard on how people look at redeveloping these properties. You look at ten years, you just imagined, you said, where did this come from? Ten years ago, we still were billing. You got a hotel. You got a red in in. You can shot. You can eat. But also, you've got quite a lot You got trails. And you also got one thing that potato is a safe neighborhood.