Artemio De La Vega

De La Vega has moved his wing of the family business from Juarez, Mexico, to El Paso to Dallas, where he’s taking a big swing.

The son of North Mexican businessman Federico De La Vega Mathews and humanitarian Guadalupe Arizpe De La Vega started his real estate career developing open-air shopping centers in secondary and tertiary Sun Belt Markets, like El Paso, where his firm built the 700,000-square-foot Las Palmas Marketplace, and Shreveport, Louisiana, where his firm built  the 400,000-square-foot Kings Crossing. 

He moved to Dallas-Fort Worth in 2002. He’s betting big on The Central, a 27-acre, $2.5 billion project rising at the intersection of North Central Expressway and North Haskell Avenue that he hopes will bridge the historic imbalance in investment between the West and East Sides of Dallas. The project promises to bring the less-developed East Side its first high rise between downtown and Mockingbird Lane in 40 years. De La Vega bought the first 11-acre swath of land for The Central in 2017 from Trammell Crow Company. At full build-out, the project is expected to feature 110,000 square feet of retail, 2.5 million square feet of office space and 2,000 multifamily units. It’s De La Vega’s most ambitious project by a mile and a high-stakes test of his developer chops. The project has been plagued by pandemic delays, including a memorable demolition mishap that turned the former Affiliated Computer Services building into a temporary tourist attraction: The Leaning Tower of Dallas.