Kaizen Development Partners LLC is amending its KERA site plans, pivoting from an exclusively residential building towards a tower with both condos and hotel rooms.
As if the Uptown Dallas area was not busy enough with new projects, Kaizen wants to construct a 30-story hotel and condo west of Uptown Dallas instead of previous ambitions for a residential-only building.
The tower was proposed at the April 2 meeting of the Oak Lawn Committee, the same day Crescent Real Estate LLC was proposing their own 30-story project. According to publicly available documents presented to the committee, the new development, Chalk Hill, would sit on 2.31 acres along Harry Hines Blvd, which Kaizen is acquiring from the existing owner, the broadcaster KERA.
The new plan replaces the previously proposed 315-foot residential tower with a 385-foot hotel and residential building. Once complete, the hotel would occupy nine stories and house 200 rooms. The residential section above the hotel would comprise 90 units across 15 stories with an average footprint of 2,000 square feet per unit.
The partnership between Kaizen and KERA was first revealed last year. Initially, plans were to build two towers on the existing site in addition to a new headquarters for the non-profit broadcaster. While a 340-foot office tower is still expected to be constructed, the latest changes replace the previously planned 25-story residential high-rise.
Construction on the project at Chalk Hill is expected to commence during the first quarter of 2025. For his part, Derrick Evers, CEO of Kaizen, is bullish on Uptown Dallas.
“In the grand scheme of things, relative to the demand, we don’t believe there’ll be enough supply in Uptown proper to satisfy that, which helps inform our investment thesis to proceed,” he told the Dallas Business Journal.