With construction well underway on the Heritage Creekside development, one key portion has until recently been shrouded in mystery—the mixed-use project’s urban core. Now, the developers behind the city’s next big mixed-use development north of President George Bush Turnpike have made public new plans, approved by the city in October, that offer the clearest illustration yet of the employment center on the development’s western side. The plans also clear the way for developers to begin construction on the first office tower. The developers’ vision for the western portion show an active business park anchored by a quadrangle of office buildings that surround an open square of food trucks, restaurants and green space, reminiscent of Dallas’s Klyde Warren Park. Construction crews are actively building the mix of residential housing, stores and restaurants that will make up the eastern side of the property. But the final plans for the western side until now had only been a placeholder concept by developer Rosewood Property Co., according to city officials and developers. The Patrinely Group, a Houston-based developer, joined Rosewood later in the project to design the employment center. City planning officials believe the plan for the employment center will attract more people to the development’s office-heavy western side, Plano Director of Planning Christina Day said. A newly proposed east-west roadway would link the western office quadrangle with the various single- and multifamily housing throughout the development. “There’s a significant improvement to the employment center,” Day said to council members in October, comparing the new layout to the developer’s initial plans. “Before, the employment center was very much closed off and not accessible, and it was intended to be a campus-type environment. This really brings people into the employment center, which I think is a major improvement.” A day after the city approved the new plans, the developers announced construction on the western employment center will soon begin in earnest as crews begin to erect a 12-story office tower at Heritage Creekside. The building, scheduled for completion by the end of 2019, will include 343,800 square feet of Class A office space, according to a statement from the developers. “As you look at the evolution of the office customers, it’s about where their employees are going to live, the availability of walkable amenities and covered parking—you hear this every single time,” Rosewood President and CEO Bill Flaherty said in the statement. “We are very excited to be joining forces with Patrinely Group to bring our vision of office development to Heritage Creekside.”

Change of plans

The plans submitted to the city also outlined in more detail the road network and office building locations in the development’s western employment center. Developers have increased the number of planned single-family lots to 252, up from 173 in an earlier plan. Most of the new units would be built southeast of where Plano Parkway meets Westwood Drive. The increased single-family housing in the plan reflects developers’ belief that demand is strong for the homes under construction, Flaherty said in an email to Community Impact Newspaper. But it is also a product of discussions of nearby homeowners and land-use considerations, he said. “We made a commitment to the adjacent homeowners that we would have single-family adjacent to the neighborhood immediately to the north,” Flaherty said. “As we reviewed the layout of those homes along Plano Parkway, we felt it made sense to expand the single-family on several blocks, which allowed for a park in the neighborhood as well as an overall better neighborhood experience.” The amount of open space in the plan rose to 10.1 acres, up from 7.6 acres in its previous iteration. However, the most vivid changes to the plan, as laid out in the October meeting by Patrinely Group Vice President Ric Guenther, feature the fleshing out of the western employment center, which is now connected in the plan to the central and eastern residential neighborhoods by a new east-west, pedestrian-friendly roadway. “There were originally scattered throughout the site, I think, about seven or eight different [multifamily] buildings,” Guenther said. “We’ve reorganized the site in such a way that we’ve got a very strong east-west pedestrian street, and we’ve organized three larger—well, we’ve combined the seven buildings into three buildings which face that east-west street.” Developers are actively seeking their first tenants for the office building, said Carolyn Drushel, executive managing director for the Patrinely Group. Construction is underway on 10,000 square feet of the development’s restaurant and retail space, with construction to begin on 12,000 more square feet in the coming months, Flaherty said. One-fifth of Heritage Creekside’s approved townhouses and single-family homes are under construction, Flaherty said. Original plans for Heritage Creekside were approved in 2014, but they have been amended multiple times since. The latest proposal, which the council passed by a 5-2 vote on Oct. 23, represents the most substantial change to the plan in years, Day said.

Feedback from residents

Throughout the planning process, the developers held meetings with nearby residents and incorporated some of their requests in what Day called an “outstanding example” of collaboration between a developer and an adjacent neighborhood. Residential feedback prompted the city to insulate neighborhoods along the north-south street of Westwood Drive from traffic tied to the Heritage Creekside development. The plans for the Westwood-Plano Parkway intersection include median blocks preventing north-south traffic from crossing, allowing only left and right turns onto Plano Parkway. The comments of nearby residents also influenced developers as they set apartment complexes farther back from Plano Parkway and the neighborhoods directly to the north. Developers also placed some of the new proposed single-family areas on Plano Parkway. Robert Miller, Plano resident and president of a nearby homeowners association, told council members he attended the public meetings with the developer and was pleased with the process and the outcome of those discussions. “Whenever you have a development like this, there’s always some people that aren’t going to like it, and there’s some people that will,” Miller said at the October council meeting. “Most of the neighborhood is very supportive of it.”