Peter Braster, Plano’s director of special projects, said the largest ongoing mixed-use projects are the Collin Creek Mall project, the Plano Market Square Mall redevelopment—called Assembly Park—and the Heritage Creekside development.
The Collin Creek Mall redevelopment is a $1 billion mixed-use project that will include 400,000 square feet of retail space, 500 single-family homes, 2,300 multifamily units, 1.3 million square feet of office space and a 200-room hotel, according to the development plan.
Planning documents for Assembly Park show it will include 180,000 square feet of office space, 305 apartments and townhome units and 16,000 square feet of restaurant and retail space.
Heritage Creekside is a $900 million mixed-use project that includes over 1,000 multifamily units, 287 single-family homes and multiple restaurant, retail and office buildings, according to released data about the project. Additional developments around US 75 include more apartments to be built in and around Downtown Plano, the Legacy Central mixed-use development continuing to expand and aerospace company L3Harris Technologies renovating its new office building off K Avenue, Braster said.
He said the mix of traffic coming through US 75 and the Dallas Area Rapid Transit line that goes through Downtown Plano to Parker Road, means the area around that corridor is often the first thing visitors to Plano see.
“It is a gateway, certainly,” Braster said. “We know how important gateways are to cities. It’s obviously taken into consideration when we look at a project. This is somewhere lots of people see.”
He said the convenience of transportation into and out of the corridor is a big reason why large, high-density, mixed-use developments are attractive to developers for that area.
“The transportation network can certainly handle that high capacity,” he said. “You have visibility and transportation options. That’s why we could go as dense as we did on Heritage Creekside and Collin Creek Mall.”
