U.S. Route 75 is the dividing line.
On one side: mature trees that buffer luxury apartment complexes and glass office buildings from the highway. People drift in and out of cafes at lunch, shop after work and drive here on weekends to experience one of Dallas’ true walkable neighborhoods.
On the other side: a fence, an overgrown field and just one high-rise that looks taller than its 42 stories sitting beside the undeveloped lot.
“They want what they see across the freeway,” developer Artemio De La Vega, 59, said of East Dallasites, who live on the underdeveloped side of U.S. 75.
De La Vega wants this too.
Behind the fence, in the field, he is building the Central, a 27-acre, $2.5 billion mixed-use development that he says will give historically overlooked East Dallas the luxury that’s available across the road.
The founder of De La Vega Development has origins farther away. He grew up in Juarez, Mexico, and began his career in El Paso before moving to Dallas-Fort Worth in 2002.
He bought the land in 2017. It’s not his first large-format mixed-use project — he’s built similar developments in El Paso, Lubbock and North Fort Worth — but the stakes of the Central put the plan in a new category.
If he can pull off the Central, he won’t just bring the East Side its first high rise between downtown and Mockingbird Lane in 40 years, but could also create connective tissue for an area that’s bifurcated by the highway, in part by bucking the trend of Dallas developers favoring the well-established west side.
Between pandemic-related delays and a demolition mishap, the project is also a major test for De La Vega’s developer chops. He’s gotten this far as a small, but nimble developer in a city filled with industry titans.
Can he deliver?
The big leagues
Moving to Dallas-Fort Worth to become a developer is the real estate version of moving to Hollywood to get into film.
Between heavy hitters like Trammell Crow, JPI, Lincoln Property Company and Dominium, getting into the mix without a familiar name isn’t easy.
That’s not to say De La Vega moved to DFW with zero name recognition.
He began his real estate career in El Paso, a city very familiar with his name thanks to the work of his father, Federico De La Vega Mathews, who grew the family’s business consortium Grupo De La Vega just across the border in Mexico. Mathews’ 2015 El Paso Times obituary calls the family “a synonym for development in Juárez.”
Artemio’ first major development was Las Palmas Marketplace, a 700,000-square-foot shopping center on El Paso’s East Side.
He hadn’t developed something of this scale before, according to his longtime business partner Justin Nairn.
“My job is to help others see what I see.”
“He didn’t take no for an answer,” he said. “He basically worked his butt off and made that project happen. And it was a highly successful project.”
De La Vega’s refrain — this is for the community — was the same nearly 25 years ago. “El Paso deserves a first-class shopping center,” he told the El Paso Times in June 2000.
Artemio moved to Dallas in 2002. The move “was not a stretch for him,” said Transwestern’s Steve Williamson, who met De La Vega shortly after his move, since he had experience in real estate and traveled to Dallas frequently because it was the center of the action.
Nevertheless, his career in the Metroplex didn’t take off immediately. Breaking in required proving his track record, so he continued to develop projects in smaller Texas markets simultaneously.
In Lubbock, for instance, he built Canyon West, a 900,000-square-foot shopping center that opened in 2007.
In 2016, Williamson sold him 90 acres in north Fort Worth for what became the Citadel, a mixed-use development that, at full build out, will feature 100,000 square feet of office space and 500 apartments.
The leap from the Citadel to the Central makes sense in De La Vega’s trajectory: the project is “what he had done before, just in a bigger market,” Williamson said.
But the step up is a tall one — this is De La Vega’s most ambitious project by a long shot.
Still, the project doesn’t feel like a risk to De La Vega. It checks all the boxes: great location, invested community, job growth and booming population.
“My job is to help others see what I see,” the developer said.
Williamson credits his friend’s vision to the flexibility he gets from keeping his operation small.
“He’s had that ability to look at property and be able to cast a vision for what could be done,” he said.
He had to throw out three casts before he hooked a deal for the Central’s land in 2017 by putting a face to his name.
“If it’s an important deal, I get on a plane,” he said. He called the seller and asked, “Hey, what are you doing tomorrow morning?”
People places
He may not be a Dallasite, but De La Vega speaks about the city with the offhand ease of a native and is well-versed in the trends that made the city what it is today.
That modern narrative owes a lot to a few key mixed-use developments.
From Legacy Town Center in Plano to Bishop Arts in Oak Cliff, the Metroplex’s patchwork of towns, cities and neighborhoods began as assorted developers’ visions of places where people could live, work and play.
De La Vega speaks almost reverently about these kinds of projects, calling them “people places.” Unlike a utilitarian retail strip, he believes they facilitate connecting a community.
One of Dallas’ first mixed-use developments is the Quadrangle, built in 1966. The 4-acre complex in Uptown brought in 40 shops and restaurants. Twenty years later and half a mile south came a crucial moment in the area’s development history: the Crescent opened on top of a strip of former car dealerships. Some estimates put the cost at $400 million, according to a Dallas Morning News retrospective on the development’s 25th anniversary, or $3.8 billion in today’s dollars.
The 10-acre Crescent — three office buildings, retail and a luxury hotel — initiated the transformation of the former industrial district into a vibrant urban neighborhood.
Since then, it has become one of the most coveted spots for built-to-suit corporate headquarters. Sleek campuses for Goldman Sachs and Bank of America are in Uptown’s office pipeline.
In comparison, the swath of land across 75 is sparse and overgrown, with just the Brazilian red granite CityPlace tower and a Whataburger.
Neighborhood advocate Jonas Park lives there and has owned an East Village yoga studio for the last decade.
“East Village” is a modern name for this section of Old East Dallas to correspond with its counterpart across the highway known as “West Village.” With its proximity to downtown, Uptown and Old East Dallas, it’s hard to call the neighborhood isolated, but the lack of development can make it feel that way.
“We’re so close to everything, but there’s no place we can walk to,” Park said.
De La Vega is hopeful his project will be “the gateway to the East Side.”
Like the Crescent before it, a project like this could spur more development nearby. That would make investing in the historically neglected parts of Dallas a lot easier, he believes.
“What if you organically grew towards Fair Park and you didn’t have to put so much money into it?” he asked.
The advocates
Getting the Central from a transaction to the construction stage speaks to De La Vega’s ability to talk to his most critical stakeholders: the residents of the “East Village.”
It’s even more impressive if you consider the position from which he started.
Just two years before he purchased land at the site, the developer, the city and the neighborhood were embroiled in a bitter legal feud that meant nothing was getting built.
Trammell Crow had bought the covetable development site from Xerox in 2013 and got a zoning change in order to build a Sam’s Club.
The East Village Association sued the developer and the city of Dallas, alleging neither party was honest with the neighborhood group about what they planned to develop.
“Rather than create a vibrant community space where neighbors might enjoy an evening together, this plan will reverse the area’s recent revitalization trend,” neighborhood leaders Park and Christina Casas wrote in a Dallas Morning News op-ed in 2014.
Three years later, a court ruled in favor of the residents.
Enter De La Vega, who purchased the first 11-acre swath of land from Trammell Crow in 2017.
Park was skeptical of this new developer at first, according to De La Vega. Seven years into their relationship, they speak about each other like partners in this project.
The locals even bought into his vision to the extent that they helped him assemble the rest of the parcel, because they wanted to make it even bigger.
“The neighborhood is the key to your success. You want to build it for them,” De La Vega said.
After his last experience working with developers ended in the courtroom, Park described working with De La Vega as “a breath of fresh air;” and believes the project will reflect the community’s input.
“We want to make an example of how developers can benefit from working with the community instead of working against us.”
For example, early drawings of the Central didn’t include easily accessible green space, Park said. The group of neighborhood stakeholders working with De La Vega told him a development without a park wouldn’t fly for the community, which lacks public parks.
It took him some time to make the new plan financially feasible, but the Central’s crown jewel will be a 4-acre park. De La Vega jokes that they’ll call the space “Jonas Park.”
“We want to make an example of how developers can benefit from working with the community instead of working against us,” Park said.
De La Vega credits his mom, Guadalupe Arizpe De La Vega, for his emphasis on community engagement.
The Chicana feminist and activist was named a CNN hero in 2010, after decades of advocacy for women’s health in Juarez. She founded a network of health clinics and did health outreach to poor neighborhoods along the border.
He is, of course, in it to make money. But, even so, he aims to make a difference where he can, he said.
Onward
The Central experienced a false start when a demolition mishap went viral just weeks before the pandemic shut down the world.
An effort to raze the former corporate headquarters for Xerox, which was located on the site’s south end along Haskell Avenue, left the skeleton of the 11-story structure still standing but at a precarious angle, its guts dangling out of the side.
Then came Covid.
The financial challenges of starting at that time have been “enormous,” De La Vega said. But the Central still makes sense in all the ways it did when he started the project.
Now, seven years after buying the land, the Central is finally making progress.
After breaking ground in 2022, both planned multifamily towers have risen on the site. Apartment builder JPI is now leasing at Jefferson Innova, a five-story, 430-unit multifamily complex on North Carroll Avenue. StreetLights Residential, another Dallas-based multifamily developer, is expected to start pre-leasing its 19-story high-rise apartment complex this fall.
Even though they’re some of the first developers to build in this spot, De La Vega’s multifamily partners bought into the vision.
The developer should break ground on the four-structure retail piece within the coming weeks, De la Vega said in August.
The plans coming to fruition now are just the beginning.
Maybe a Fortune 500 company relocating to Dallas will reach out to De La Vega, with an offer to build another office tower. Park posits the next step might be a footbridge across 75 connecting the Central to Uptown — cementing the Central as both a literal and figurative gateway to the East Side.
Soon, a whole neighborhood might spring up.