LH Press Library
Lake Highlands at Crossroads
Community wants retail, but are the conditions right for a renaissance?
Lake Highlands People, by Peter Simek
December 09, 2005
A quick drive through Lake Highlands shows a neighborhood on the brink.
At a number of intersections, dirt is flying. Retail corners are dotted with postings advertising retail space. If you talk with city officials or neighborhood leaders you hear the same thing: Lake Highlands is about to explode.
But if you ask Maury Levy who leases space at the corner of Audelia and Walnut Hill, the neighborhood market is not ready for anything of the sort.
The hard part is this is all interior space,” Levy said. “Although the carriers of Skillman are strong - traffic - it’s still not enough for what the national tenants are looking for.”
Levy hits on a tough point, a reality Lake Highlands retailers have struggled with for a generation: Lake Highlands is a small town in a big city.
For residents this is exactly what makes the neighborhood a great place to live. But for retailers, that character is part of the reason why the neighborhood’s 11 or so retail intersections have become vacant and dormant over the last 10 years.
Like many small towns in America, Lake Highlands has lost much of its commercial core.
“Before there was less of everything, each community had their own shopping environment,” Levy said. “But now there is a mall on every corner, a Target every five miles. Then the category killers came in.”
Category killers, as Levy calls them, are stores that carry 10 times as much merchandise as neighborhood shops. Home Depot, Marshals, and Ross make it hard for the small linen or hardware stores to compete on a neighborhood corner.
In the past decade, a number of these kinds of stores folded, or packed up, and moved away, and, if dollar stores and nail salons didn’t take their place, the spaces remained vacant.
But unlike many of America’s small towns, in Lake Highlands, residents didn’t leave with the retailers to seek out living near big cities. Lake Highlands is already in the big city and over the past decade, the population has grown. Property values have risen, and the neighborhood continues to attract residents who saw the tree-lined, rolling streets as a great place to raise a family minutes from down town Dallas.
The demographics for quality retail remained consistent, but no stores came to cash in.
A survey conducted by the Lake Highlands Area Improvement Association (LHAIA) four years ago showed that residents of Lake Highlands were dying for the kinds of stores they couldn’t find in their own backyard. Restaurants, bookstores, apparel, and gift shops topped the list.
That’s when the LHAIA decided to take a radical step to revitalize their own neighborhood.
Two Lake Highlands residents, Kathy Stewart and - Anita Siègers, helped pull together a group of community investors to open the Highlands Cafe at the corner of Audelia and Walnut Hill, and the restaurant/ coffee shop has been a success story.
The owners say their shop offers proof that a quality market exists in Lake Highlands. All retailers have to do is open their doors.
"We brought an automatic customer base,” Siegers said. “People were hungry for a gathering spot.”
The owners said a trail blazer like the Highlands Cafe can begin to create a retail environment that attracts tenants to the vacant street corners, though they admit it’s a project that won’t happen overnight.
“Let’s be the first domino,” Siegers said. “In 10 years I think it will be totally different, but in five years it is going to be modestly different.”
Levy said it may be more difficult than simply tapping into the demographic. Revitalization requires high traffic and a good retail mix before the apparel and bookstores residents want will even begin to look at a shopping center.
“Maybe if it had gotten a better grocery store, but these are all neighborhood corners,” Levy said. “Lake Highlands wants something that it can’t have.”
But Siegers and Stewart are dreaming realistically. They said they don’t expect a Gap or an Old Navy to open in Lake Highlands. They just want to take baby steps toward creating an environment where the simple service shops residents need can come back to the area.
“This is going to be your interior neighborhood retail,” Stewart said. “Gift stores, florists.”
They said there is already talk of another community invested project for a gift store near the Highlands Cafe.
The latest sign of hope is Studio Arts Dallas, which is opening in the old Whataburger building on Shoreview off Northwest Highway. Studio Arts is the old Lakewood Arts Academy, and its move to Lake High lands shows that more people see a neighborhood demographic that could help business thrive.
District 10 Councilman Bill Blaydes also sees that demographic, but doesn’t think it is— by itself — sufficient to attract the type of retail that could spark a wholesale revitalization of the area.
Like the owners of the Highlands Cafe, Blaydes thinks the neighborhood needs a first domino, but a much bigger one than the Highlands Cafe.
He has worked to get the city involved in turning around Lake Highlands, and now he believes the Skillman Corridor TIF is going to change Lake Highlands’ future in a radical way — and sooner than you think.
We're always looking for volunteers!
Find out how you can help out LHAIA!
