Cities Of Yes: Emerging Collin County Hot Spots Have More Flexibility For Unique Projects, Developers Say
As Dallas-Fort Worth’s growth reaches emerging cities like Anna, Melissa and Celina, developers say they are ready to jump on advantages there that allow for building outside the norm.
Among the reasons cities like those are looked upon as future hot spots is a lack of red tape and the land necessary to accommodate creative projects.
Celina spans 70-plus square miles, according to Centurion American Vice President Sean Terry, who is also the city’s former mayor. That will eventually make it one of the three biggest cities in Collin County, alongside McKinney and Plano, giving developers enough open space to create projects where people can live, work and play, he said.
“The advantage north of [U.S.] 380 for all these cities is having the land mass to be able to create unique stuff,” Terry said at the Bisnow's Collin County State of the Market event Wednesday at FarmWorks One at The Farm in Allen.
While more established cities have strict rules and long-held procedures for development, smaller municipalities often have a greater ability to say yes to new projects, Beall Development President Logan Beall said.
“It made it easier for someone like me that doesn’t have much of a track record to go into a place like that and start building a company,” Beall said of working with the city of Anna on a multifamily development. “They were willing to work with someone new, and they were open to ideas. So it really formed a great relationship.”
Centurion American’s mixed-use project Legacy Hills in Celina is a 3,200-acre development that will include the city’s first golf course as well as single-family homes, senior residences, multifamily units and commercial development.
“[A] company that wants to come in, that they may have to go to the office twice a week … they can get on their golf cart and drive up to their office,” Terry said. “Those are the kind of trends I think these smaller, outlying cities like Celina, Melissa, Anna — all these that are growing — they have that ability to be flexible and be able to create unique stuff.”
Even so, cities north of U.S. 380 aren’t going to say yes to everything, as Welker Properties CEO Andrew Welker found when he got pushback from the city of Melissa about a proposed addition of multifamily housing near the company’s 343-unit build-to-rent project Wolf Creek Farms.
Cities like Melissa are braced for a flood of multifamily. Welker said he found 5,800 units have been proposed in North McKinney, Melissa and the surrounding areas over the next five years.
He is dubious that all of the growth will come to fruition, though.
“When we actually took the time and dove in, I will make a bold statement and say that … less than half of those will actually get built over the next few years,” Welker said. “So as much as cities think we have this big supply coming, I beg to differ.”
Welker didn't expand on why the proposed units might not appear.
But municipal pushback on proposed multifamily projects is something developers have had to deal with for a long time, and Terry said it is their responsibility to meet with homeowners associations and talk to people in nearby neighborhoods to smooth the way.
Putting in the work to compromise with homeowners and get them on board with the plan goes a long way toward winning the support of city and elected officials, he said.
“When you go into a multifamily project, I think you have to educate those citizens that live around there,” Terry said. “You have meetings with them. You get up there and get screamed at and get yelled at, [but] most of the time you can find that happy medium.”
