Source: Richardson Convention & Visitors Center.The 1% of CityLine that makes all the brochures
We all know where you can get to from Arapaho Station: wherever DART goes. What I want to know is where the City of Richardson will get to with the redevelopment of Arapaho Station. Is CityLine an exemplar of how it should be done or a cautionary tale?
Richardson's challenge: creating developments that function as authentic, integrated neighborhoods rather than collections of adjacent but disconnected uses. We need to learn from past efforts. For example, I consider CityLine as basically a bait-and-switch. We were promised mixed-use. What we got instead was multiple uses within a short drive of each other. Call it non-integrated multi-use. State Street is the exception at CityLine. There, all the uses are either vertically integrated in the same building or within walkable distance of each other. But CityLine is so much bigger than State Street.
I fear for what might emerge if the same approach is taken at the Arapaho Station site, where the primary consultant helping the City of Richardson is CBRE, a major commercial real estate firm. CBRE is assisting with selecting a developer for the site. I would rather see Richardson use consultants with primary expertise in urban design or placemaking. This choice matters. Real-estate-first frameworks tend to emphasize leasable square footage and tenant categories, whereas urban design frameworks begin with the public realm, walkability, connectivity, and long-term community health. Offices and maybe even a big shiny entertainment venue (movie theater, museum, or basketball arena — I'm thinking of you Dallas) may create activity bursts, but they do not substitute for the day-to-day life generated by a genuine mixed-use neighborhood.
CityLine serves as the cautionary tale. The design and placement of its multiple uses reduced its potential as a cohesive district. Retail pushed into isolated strip formats, green space not integrated with surrounding restaurants, and the overall spatial arrangement turned what could have been a dynamic, walkable urban node into a "multi-use" rather than a "mixed-use" environment. CityLine falls short on qualitative placemaking.
Because of its original sin of poor placemaking, CityLine falls short on quantitative goals. On July 8, 2024, the Richardson City Council conceded as much, voting to approve construction of 1,175 more apartments, overriding the City Plan Commission, who rejected the application, saying they wanted to see "more creative retail or entertainment uses," as called for in the plan. Dense places like CityLine reward fine-grained design. Instead, the City Council surrendered to the theory that what was needed was not better placemaking, but more "heads in beds."
We don't need a corporate campus developer planning the development at Arapaho Station. We don't need a commercial real estate broker. Both have value, but neither provides what Richardson needs — a deeply urban, mixed-use, walkable neighborhood around transit. In a word, placemaking.
"Arapaho sits,
tracks can take you anywhere,
but where do we go?
—h/t ChatGPT
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