Adaptive Reuse in Dallas-Fort Worth — market context
Dallas offers combined federal and state historic rehabilitation tax credits worth up to 45% of qualified rehab costs — among the most generous in the country. Layer that on top of TIF districts in downtown, Deep Ellum, and Bishop Arts, and the financial path for adaptive reuse in Dallas is structurally favorable. Texas SB 840 lets residential drop into commercial zones without rezoning. SB 2477 proposes to exempt office-to-residential conversions from impact fees, public hearings, parking minimums, and traffic studies. The legislative environment is accelerating toward exactly the work ANDRES has been doing in Dallas since 2005.
ANDRES has completed 18 adaptive reuse projects in this market totaling $950M and 2,956 units. Mosaic in 2007. Dallas Power & Light in 2005. Gables Republic Tower in 2007. Corrigan Tower in 2018. The National in 2022 — 52 stories, $460M, three ownership changes mid-build, and the largest historic tax credit transaction in Texas history at $100M. Cathedral Guadalupe restored a National Shrine and pulled six preservation awards. The portfolio predates the current adaptive-reuse trend by nearly two decades. When Carlos Trevino took on Cabana — the 1962 Cabana Motor Hotel where The Beatles played, then a Dallas County jail for 25 years — he inherited a structure with column offsets at half an inch. The team built a custom mold to recreate broken Sarno blocks. Fifteen years on the job is the only reason that solution showed up on schedule.
Adaptive reuse is the convergence of three disciplines: historic preservation, structural improvisation, and multifamily delivery. Every drawing is wrong. Every modification has to clear NPS review. Labor is 60% of project cost — and the labor that matters most is judgment, not hours. ANDRES’s Complexity Walk runs before contract: PM and superintendent on site together, identifying the three to five conditions that will define the project’s risk profile. The superintendent who started The National finished The National. The PM who ran Cathedral Guadalupe still works here. That continuity is the mechanism.
