A Dallas-based developer says it plans to hit the restart button on its plagued mixed-use project in Richardson.
Belt & Main is an apartment and retail development planned for a stretch of Main Street near U.S. Highway 75 in Richardson. Plans called for 350 apartments and about 15,000 square feet of street-level retail. Townhomes would be part of a second phase of development.
Catalyst Urban Development hasn’t completed construction on the first phase, despite the $44.6 million loan it got from Bank OZK in 2021. Stalled construction at the 14-acre site between the Chase Bank tower and DART’s commuter rail line has been an eyesore for the last few years, according to the Dallas Morning News.
“We’ll be back rocking and rolling very shortly,” exec Paris Rutherford told the paper, adding that with a new head of construction, “progress can get moving again quickly.”
The first wave of troubles for Belt & Main came with the pandemic in early 2020.
Work on the project resumed in 2021 and was expected to wrap up by the end of the year when it secured the Bank OZK financing.
This past August, Rutherford told DMN, “we are about halfway through construction. The garage is erected, and we are about halfway through framing the buildings.”
However, there’s been little progress since then, and county records show multiple liens against the property, filed by subcontractors for payment of bills.
Read more
Architecture And Design
Dallas
Crow Holdings envisions mixed-use for Dallas Market Center
Commercial
Dallas
MetLife takes control of Galleria Dallas from borrower
Belt & Main is where Richardson got its start in the late 1880s as a railroad whistle stop and farming community. This development is on the site of an old cotton gin called Big Red. The area was recently revamped as the Core District, and Belt & Main is meant to be one of its main drivers of pedestrian traffic.
“Our property is literally where Richardson was founded — the beginning of the town,” Rutherford said. “The city has been committed over the last 10 years to reinvigorating the core.”
— Maddy Sperling