Editor's note: This story is part of an ongoing series for Arts Access examining the health and well-being of our North Texas arts economy.
Flora Lofts. The name alone conjures up images of a 1920s screen idol, known for creativity and beauty. In Dallas, it’s something else entirely.
Flora is a street in the Dallas Arts District, where Flora Lofts was conceived more than a decade ago as a low-cost housing haven for artists of all kinds, a benevolent refuge near the Nasher Sculpture Center, in what would later become an increasingly high-priced district.
Today, the development is simply another upscale high-rise, with rents above the city’s market averages.
Flora Lofts continues to have meaning — but only in terms of shattered expectations. It ended up, critics say, like so many things in Dallas, a bold idea that won hard-fought approval for public money, only to revert back to a real estate play. In the end, what was pitched as a bohemian retreat is now 41 stories of “modern luxury living.”
Reid Robinson served as media and events manager for the Dallas Arts District Foundation from 2014 through October 2016, and Flora Lofts, “was one of the primary reasons I was excited to be there,” he says. He points out that although the area is home to performance and exhibition spaces, few artists call it their actual home.
“The idea of having an artist residency in downtown Dallas was a very poetic idea and obviously very needed — to make the Dallas Arts District an actual community.”
Dashed expectations
In June 2018, workers broke ground on the tower that was to include Flora Lofts. Dubbed the Atelier building, its name recalled a French studio, the kind of place an artist did their work.
“A groundbreaking took place this morning for yet another high-end, residential high-rise in downtown Dallas near Klyde Warren Park,” read a story from KERA. “But this one’s different.”
Explaining that “ateliers were the cheaper, top-floor apartments that painters in Paris often used for their access to sunlight,” the story noted that along with the building’s tower, “there’ll eventually be loft apartments for artists called Flora Lofts. Fifty-two out of a total of 600 residential units.”
The vision for Flora Lofts, approved in a 14-1 vote by the Dallas City Council, was heralded as being “43 affordable units” ideal for artists whose qualifications would be vetted and approved by an independent panel. (The count was eventually expanded even further to 54.)
As The Dallas Morning News reported in 2017, Flora Lofts would have allowed artists to live in units that ranged between 626 and 876 square feet, with the stated mission of accommodating “working artists who would otherwise not be able to live anywhere near the [Dallas] Arts District.”
The price to make it happen? Close to $25 million, which no one was able to raise, despite Flora Lofts being granted preliminary approval for $4.5 million in state tax credits, $14 million from bonds issued by the Dallas Housing Finance Commission, $2.5 million from general obligation bonds approved by the city, and $4.6 million from the City Center Tax Increment Financing (TIF) District.
By the time the building opened, the lofts were no longer part of the plan. And their absence was glaring to advocates.
Kristin Payne Atwell once served as a board member of a nonprofit committed to housing artists in the Arts District. “This is bittersweet,” Atwell posted on her Facebook page on May 31, 2022. “I was in the Arts District last week and paused to ponder the beautiful building that was slated to include a small number of artist housing units for deserving tenants at more affordable rates.”
The group to which Atwell belonged is La Reunion, TX, which would have managed the Flora Lofts component of what became the Atelier building at 1801 N. Pearl St., near the Museum Tower. The Dallas County Appraisal District lists its current assessed value as $163.8 million.
The Flora Lofts units initially pitched for artists remain in place on the southeast corner of the building from floors two through five. They even carry the name. But their rents range from $1,720 to $6,255 a month, far higher than the $598 to $769 a month figures shared with the Dallas City Council in 2017. Atelier’s larger units range from $2,800 to $12,005 a month.
‘It just couldn’t come to fruition’
So, what exactly fell through? In the case of Flora Lofts, asking the question is much easier than finding the answer.
Atwell reflected on Facebook: “It became La Reunion’s shifted mission and sole purpose for a time. But as often happens, the money won out.”
In an effort to follow the money, we made inquiries with more than a dozen people connected to Flora Lofts.
At the top of the list was architect Graham Greene, who first conceived the Flora Lofts idea. Greene did not respond to our requests for comment.
Bob Meckfessel, the former board chairman of La Reunion, declined to be interviewed.
Catherine Cuellar, a former La Reunion board member and now a city of Dallas spokeswoman, declined to be interviewed.
Atwell declined to be interviewed.
Zaida Basora, a former La Reunion board member, declined to be interviewed.
“I’m going to pass,” Basora said, echoing the response of the others.
Charles Santos, chairman of the board of the Dallas Arts District, provided a written statement, which reads in part:
“Flora Lofts was a terrific idea that everyone in the district is/was behind. Unfortunately, with complicated tax laws and building delays, it just couldn’t come to fruition.”
Greg West, CEO of ZOM Living, which owns Atelier, agreed to be interviewed.
“No one,” he said, “likes to talk about things that didn’t work out like you wanted them to. Right?”
A vanishing proposition
According to county records, Graham Greene sold the property in June 2018 to Atelier Apartments LLC, 15 months after Flora Lofts was green-lighted by the Dallas City Council. The sale price was not disclosed.
West carefully laid out the timeline of the project, noting that Atelier owns the 41-story building and its 417 units. And Greene stills owns a piece of it — the public parking garage beneath the building, according to West. Despite his intent to sell, Greene remained an active voice in shaping the Atelier design, West says, seeking, for instance, to ensure that the building would not cast a glare on the Nasher Sculpture Center like the nearby Museum Tower has done infamously since 2011.
“Graham is very engaged in the arts community,” West says. “He cares very much about the arts community.”
The News reported years ago that Greene bought the property in 1995, meaning it took decades for the address to emerge as something more than an outdoor parking lot, which had long served visitors to the Arts District.
“When he decided he wanted to sell the lot for development — he cared about money, of course — but he set the terms,” West says. “He said, ‘Here’s what I want. I want you to do two things as part of your development: Replace the parking lot that I have on the property and accommodate 54 units that will serve as housing for artists.’”
So, West says, Greene agreed to provide the financing for the 54 units that would house Flora Lofts and the new underground parking garage. In turn, Greene would own each of those components. The developer, West says, would then finance and own the rest of it.
ZOM Living won the bidding rights to develop the property, after which, West says, Greene began working feverishly in “putting together financing for the lofts.” It involved a complex calculus, which West calls a combination of “tax credits, bonds, subsidies from the city” and additional fiscal ingredients. In the end, West says, “Graham was struggling to get the financing for the lofts. And we tried to do everything we could to make it happen for him.”
West says he even got his investors to agree to put the project on hold for more than a year, hoping Greene could somehow pull off the Hail Mary of financing that would enable Flora Lofts to embody its stated mission — to provide affordable housing for artists.
The delay extended from 2018 well into 2019. By then, West says, “The market was going away. The tax credits were going away, and suddenly, the financing was not growing, it was shrinking. We got to the point where we had to proceed, or the whole deal would fall apart. In the end, we agreed we had to start building.”
When West says “we,” he means his investors, who are also part of the buzzy community narrative and the suspicion that shadows the failure of Flora Lofts.
Founded in 1977 by a Dutch oil executive, ZOM lists its its current “capital partners” as Daiwa House Group, which calls itself “Japan’s largest homebuilder,” and ITOCHU Corp., described as one of Japan’s largest general trading companies.
Foreign investors notwithstanding, the whole deal was carried out with the proviso, West says, that if Greene could somehow magically assemble the capital, he would be permitted to buy back the lofts from Atelier.
“But the financing he needed failed to come together,” West says. “And Graham is not happy it didn’t come together. Graham tried so hard to make it happen. He’s embarrassed it didn’t happen. He’s a wonderful person who tried to do a really good thing.”
In the end, West says, “We reached a point where we just couldn’t wait any longer.”
The words “FLORA LOFTS” still appear over an entrance 2121 Flora St. Inside, the doormat for an elevator bears them, too. Its destination is perhaps the most ironic: the parking garage that Greene still owns.
A scarcity of artists
These days, the Dallas Arts District includes plenty of space for performances. But what about space for the performers? What bothers Robinson, the former executive at the Dallas Arts District Foundation, is the absence of “resident artists” in the district.
“I really thought it was going to be fantastic,” Robinson says of Flora Lofts. “It would have been so good for the district, just for the amount of publicity and goodwill it would have generated. I feel like it’s a real loss that it didn’t happen.”
He sums it up this way:
“What’s an Arts District if you don’t have artists?”
Lily Cabatu Weiss, executive director of the Dallas Arts District, calls it difficult but not impossible for artists to find a place to live in the district. Spaces do exist, she says, in the Arts District Apartments, at the corner of Routh St. and Ross Ave. Its offerings range from studio apartments to units with three bedrooms, priced from $1,562 to $3,453 a month, far above the $598 to $769 initially proposed for Flora Lofts.
For artist Andrew Kochie, the demise of Flora Lofts as a safe haven for artists is an old and all too familiar story in Dallas. “Flora Lofts was a disappointment,” he says, “because there were a lot of people in the community who were expecting to be able to bring arts and culture right downtown, into the district itself. And I’m sorry, but visual artists are not really represented in the Dallas Arts District.”
Many people saw it as a long-term plan, and, Kochie said with a tone of resignation, “In the end, it didn’t happen. So, I hope somebody in the future has the foresight and the will to actually make it happen.”
Santos, board chair of the Dallas Arts District, noted in his statement that “the development of the Dallas Arts District neighborhood is progressing quickly.” He pointed to Artspace, a Minneapolis nonprofit that builds artist housing across the country and has been exploring the prospect of a Dallas development.
“We stay committed to exploring all manners, housing included, that we can achieve to support our cultural community,” Santos wrote.
Which of course is another way of saying that, when it comes to providing affordable housing for artists, Dallas has landed where it often does:
Back at square one.
Arts Access is an arts journalism collaboration powered by The Dallas Morning News and KERA.
This community-funded journalism initiative is funded by the Better Together Fund, Carol & Don Glendenning, City of Dallas OAC, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Eugene McDermott Foundation, James & Gayle Halperin Foundation, Jennifer & Peter Altabef and The Meadows Foundation. The News and KERA retain full editorial control of Arts Access’ journalism.
