'Growth Engine': RedBird Redevelopment Spurs Turnaround For Long-Overlooked Southern Dallas

Years of historic disinvestment in Southern Dallas widened the socioeconomic gap between the area below Interstate 30 and the Metroplex’s northern suburbs nearly irreparably.

But the revitalization of a 1970s-era mall is beginning to close that gap, attracting new developers to an area few might have considered before investor Peter Brodsky bought the 1M SF former RedBird Mall in September of 2015 and redeveloped it as The Shops at RedBird. 

Almost a decade later, Brodsky is no longer championing the area on his own. A spate of new projects is in the pipeline, and perceptions are slowly changing about the majority-Black neighborhood that was a medical desert until just a few years ago and still lacks a grocery store.

“Southern Dallas is bigger than northern North Dallas and has a much lower population and a much lower tax base and a lot of empty land,” Brodsky said. “With the right policies and the right investment, there's no reason that Southern Dallas couldn't become a real growth engine for the city.”

Developers and investors have started to believe that. Dallas Economic Development Director Kevin Spath said his office is involved with more than 20 other projects that have been recently completed, are underway or are in the pipeline in Southern Dallas.

The biggest of those is the $1B University Hills mixed-use project Hoque Global broke ground on last month next to the University of North Texas at Dallas. The 270-acre development will bring hundreds of homes, 1,500 apartments, 1.5M SF of commercial space, a hotel and a stadium that could lure a professional sports team to Southern Dallas. 

That development will be a huge shot in the arm for an area that has seen more progress made in the industrial and multifamily sectors than retail or office during the last half decade. 

Since 2020, nearly 50M SF of industrial space has been added to the submarket, while multifamily units have grown by almost 59% since 2023, according to Colliers data. Southern Dallas’ office market has remained virtually unchanged since at least 2022, with around 3.8M SF of inventory and nothing in the pipeline, Colliers’ first-quarter report showed.

“Pretty much any category you can think of is lacking in Southern Dallas, unfortunately,” Brodsky said.

Spath pointed to the neighborhood's varied housing stock, strong public schools and the “beautiful terrain” of Southern Dallas as lures for developers. And he said the city is determined to sell more of them on it.

“We are committed to implementing the City’s Economic Development Policy to ensure housing availability at a variety of price points, employment opportunities for residents (including more office jobs), and sufficient healthy and affordable food options while maintaining the qualities that make this area so appealing to hundreds of thousands of Dallas residents,” Spath said via email.

RedBird Mall opened in 1975 but faced economic challenges and declining traffic in the late 1990s that led to bankruptcy and a name change to Southwest Center Mall. The mall limped along into the 2010s with a couple of revitalization attempts that didn’t pan out until Brodsky came along.

Working with Russell Glen Co. CEO Terrence Maiden, Brodsky brought UT Southwestern Medical Center to the mall right before the pandemic hit. UT Southwestern opened a 150K SF clinic offering women’s health services, cardiology, and cancer and nutritional medicine. Parkland Health joined the mall around the same time, and The Shops at RedBird became a medical hub. 

But the biggest gap in Southern Dallas remains a grocery store.

“We promised the community that we would do everything we could to deliver a high-quality grocer, and we're going to keep working to fulfill that promise,” Brodsky said.

Tom Thumb planned to bring a 50K SF store to the mall property, but parent company Albertsons Cos. backed out of the deal late last year, opting to terminate its economic development incentive agreement with the city.

Eight miles north of The Shops at RedBird, Sprouts will open a new grocery store just south of Interstate 30 on June 20. The new store is a big win for the Oak Cliff neighborhood, which has been labeled a food desert, and Brodsky is cheering on the opening.

“My hope is that when they open, they do extremely well, which will surprise some people,” Brodsky said. “And we'll be able to use that as a proof point that they would do extremely well at our development as well.”

The work Brodksy has done at The Shops at RedBird has changed the perception of Southern Dallas, according to Marcelo Mills, senior vice president at American National Bank of Texas.

“We've got some really well-invested community leaders and organizations that recognize there's a community with a high level of potential that is historically underresourced,” Mills said.

While older generations have an institutional distrust of the area below Interstate 30, Onu Ventures CEO and founder Mikial Onu said that isn't something that has been passed down to younger developers like himself.

Onu is developing The Adaline, a 12-acre mixed-use project featuring a market, retail space and residences near the corner of Bonnie View Road and Interstate 20.

“What RedBird mall is doing is showing franchisees that you can make money here,” Onu said. “We need a couple of RedBird malls, and we need people to support RedBird mall, too.”

Hoque Global’s project near UNT Dallas is also pivotal for the area, Onu said. As that development spreads the growth beyond the RedBird area, it is only a matter of time until Southern Dallas sees the kind of growth the Metroplex’s northern suburbs have experienced, he said. 

“Now's the time for developers to really take a look at Southern Dallas,” Onu said.

The city’s tax base is growing faster in Southern Dallas than in its northern territory, Spath said. That has led city officials to direct funding for infrastructure improvements to Southern Dallas and other historically disadvantaged areas of the city. 

Neighborhood stakeholders hope the new development activity will continue building on itself, but reinventing Southern Dallas and getting a critical mass of buy-in isn't as easy as starting a new project from scratch in the Metroplex's northern suburbs, which have seen meteoric growth.

“A startup is easier than a turnaround,” Brodsky said, comparing converting farmland in Prosper into homes and office buildings to turning around a historic perception that businesses can’t thrive in Southern Dallas. 

The work happening around UNT Dallas, as well as the development in the Fair Park area, is all indicative of activity that is expanding the greater Southern Dallas community, Brodsky said.

But growth is just beginning, he said. 

“The big hurdle we have to get over is convincing the office tenants and convincing the grocers and convincing the owners of family entertainment businesses that their businesses will thrive in the area,” Brodsky said. “The biggest thing we do right now is point to all of the businesses that are succeeding in the development.”