$1000 apartments coming to Cedar Hill?

by Steve Snyder of TODAY Newspapers

So far, Uptown Boulevard from FM 1382 to the Government Center has been a retail-only corridor.

With a zoning revision, that could change.

Nov. 25, the Cedar Hill City Council unanimously approved a zoning change from Retail to Planned Development - Multi-Family for the northwest corner of Pioneer Train and Uptown. Trammell Crow Residential thinks the spot is ideal for upper-end apartments, and requested the change.

Carl Starry of Trammell Crow made the presentation, having already gotten 6-1 approval from the Planning and Zoning Commission.

“This is a Class A product,” Starry said. He added, as part of a PowerPoint presentation, that this could be like the apartments at The Legacy in Plano.

“Frankly, I don't consider these apartments in the traditional sense,” Councilman Wade Emmert said. “It's time for us to say, ‘Let's not label every high-density development an apartment.' I think it complements the area; there's a synergy.”

Starry said Trammell Crow pegs rental prices starting at about $1,000 a month. He told the Planning and Zoning Commission his company targets 25- to 35-year-old professionals with a minimum income of $36,000.

Mayor Rob Franke said he thought the price point was appropriate to the area.

He added that, with the site being zoned as a planned development, he hoped that Starry continued to work more specifics about the apartments into a development plan, which will come before the city later.

The apartment units will have to be 100 percent masonry construction. No parking is allowed on either Uptown or Pioneer.

The site will have some garages, a boulevard through the site, three-story buildings, sidewalks abutting buildings, a club building that includes a coffee bar and game room, a park and more. In today's world of electric bills, Energy Star appliances and thermal windows are other touted amenities.

The flip side is that Trammell Crow has higher densities proposed for the units than the city's basic multi-family district standards. One-bedroom units will start at 650 square feet rather than the city's baseline of 800 square feet. And, at 1.7 parking spaces per unit, it has a bit less parking than the city's normal baseline of 2.0 spaces.

The development would have 354 units; of that, 52 percent would be one-bedroom, 44 percent two-bedroom, and 4 percent three-bedroom.

If Trammell Crow is correct on its price point estimates, the apartments will be the most expensive ones in the Southwest. At this time, the smallest one-bedroom apartments in Trammell Crow's mixed-use redevelopment of DeSoto's Town Center start at $820 and one apartment company in Duncanville charges $850 for its one-bedroom units.

Trammell Crow's tentative schedule is to start construction in February 2009, finish the first building in October and finish the project in July 2010, but with recent economic conditions, it may not be started that quickly.