The city of Arlington has worked hard to establish itself as an important destination in North Texas and not just another suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth.

The Arlington Entertainment District has become a sports and leisure hub for the city, boasting the homes of the Dallas Cowboys and Texas Rangers, a Six Flags theme park and a pair of top-tier Loews hotels. But the city hasn’t rested on its laurels, instead pursuing developers and public-private partnerships to spark new development and revitalization.

"If you want to do business in Tarrant County, Arlington is the place," Trademark Property Co. Vice President of Redevelopment Services Monica Luera Kessler said during Bisnow’s Arlington State of the Market on Wednesday at the Caravan Court Hotel. "You can always get someone on the phone, and you can do business here."

Trademark broke ground this summer on the redevelopment of the 43-year-old shopping center formerly known as Lincoln Square next to the entertainment district. The company's planned $135M-plus investment will turn the property into the 404K SF Anthem, featuring a walkable development with extensive restaurants and retail offerings as well as public and entertainment spaces. 

“On retail square foot per capita, North Arlington is definitely at a deficit compared to DFW and even South Arlington,” Kessler said. “So we knew there was a lot of demand.”

The project has signed 10 tenants for Anthem, nine of them new to Arlington, Kessler said.

Trademark, which is working with Harrison Street Asset Management on the project, also obtained zoning to eventually turn the property into a mixed-use development with multifamily, office space and a hotel, according to Kessler. 

The 43-acre project is expected to be completed in early 2028.  

Fairbourne Properties and AEW Capital Management have also been working on a redevelopment of the 747K SF Arlington Highlands open-air shopping center at Matlock Road and Center Street.

Arlington Highlands had been such a dominant retail property for so long that Fairbourne Properties President David Harvey said there hasn’t been much tenant turnover over the years. Only recently did the development fall below 96% leased. 

However, that tenant turnover has presented an opportunity for the company to modernize the development and bring in fresh retailers. 

"Where Arlington has had opportunities to upgrade tenancy, it normally had nothing to do with something going wrong in Arlington,” Harvey said. “It's been a national firm which has had problems in their company overall, and they've ended up having to close."

The city also wants to unlock the area between the entertainment district and downtown Arlington with help from the new iteration of the federal opportunity zone program. Several nominated tracts along Collins Street are close to what Downtown Arlington Management Corp. President Garret Martin called a very underdeveloped area.

“We learned with FIFA that people are willing to walk that, but for Americans, it just might need to be a little more friendly,” Martin said of the area. “That area is ripe for development.”

Projects along Collins Street could also benefit from the Dallas Cowboys’ plan to develop the area around AT&T Stadium.

Cowboys Chief Operating Officer Stephen Jones said last week the team wants to do something similar to its 91-acre mixed-use district in Frisco. The Star in Frisco features more than 1.5M SF of office space, the 300-room Omni Frisco Hotel, a 170-unit luxury multifamily tower, a 300K SF medical office building and around 225K SF of restaurants and retail space.

Martin expects more projects will follow as the city has shown it can support redevelopments such as the luxury multifamily 101 Center property near the University of Texas at Arlington campus, the expansion of the Urban Union District in downtown and the revitalization of the Caravan Court Hotel.

“Unfortunately, we were swept up in the urban renewal of the 1970s, and we tore down a lot of our historic fabric,” Martin said. “We created a place for cars and not for people.”