It's been a little more than a year since Balcones Realty Partners announced its intentions to build a 37-acre, 365,000-square foot restaurant-retail center near Love Field -- at Mockingbird Lane, Maple Avenue, Forest Park Road and Empire Central. It's called West Love Market -- enh. Work on the site was slated to begin in April, but in recent months some folks have gotten a wee bit antsy over progress, or lack thereof, on the site. No doubt, this is the reason for the hold-up: Balcones Realty, owned by the company owned by boxer Oscar De La Hoya, is waiting to see whether Dallas City Hall will create the Maple-Mockingbird Tax Increment Financing District, which the council's Economic Development Committee will discuss this morning, among other things.
The West Love Market, development of which may cost as much as $100 million, plays a big part in council's 28-page presentation; it is, after all, referred to repeatedly as the "catalyst project" for the proposed TIF. "The development is projected to generate approximately $58 million in added tax value to the district," reads the committee memo, which acknowledges that much of the district right now is filled with "functionally obsolete multi-family properties," "retail center[s] with an extremely low occupancy rate" and "abandoned and deteriorated commercial buildings." Timing's right, what with DART's Green Line Inwood Station scheduled for a December 2010 opening. Still, what's that sound over the horizon? Crunch, crunch, crunch. --Robert Wilonsky
