West Side Boom: $6.8M plaza another big addition to Stuart Place Road development

HARLINGEN — The tripwire for explosive development on the western edge of the city may have just gone off.

Origo Works, a Brownsville-based design and development firm, has filed plans to build a $6.8 million commercial plaza shell at Stuart Place Crossing, the area where the new Texas Regional Bank building and Cheddar’s Restaurant also will be located, near Stuart Place Road on the north frontage of Expressway 83.

The new commercial shell, called Stuart Place Plaza, will have two stories with 12 units of about 1,500 square feet each on both floors. Origo Works will build out those sites to suit a lease-holder, said Rene Lopez, the company’s real estate sales manager.

“We’re very excited,” Lopez said. “We believe that we’re at the right place at the right time, so to speak. Hopefully, we’ll add to that boom that’s coming through.”

The filing of plans for the new commercial shell, which will be completed sometime in late 2017, is the latest development news in what could well be described as the wild west of Harlingen.

Earlier, Cheddar’s announced it would be building a restaurant at the site near the new plaza, and Texas Regional Bank will be building a new headquarters at the location.

Lopez could confirm two restaurant tenants for the new commercial plaza — Russo’s New York Pizzeria, which will take two units, and Kumori sushi and teppanyaki.

Russo’s has three locations in McAllen, one in Brownsville and one on South Padre Island. Kumori has four locations in McAllen, one in Brownsville and another in Weslaco.

“We do have somebody who has rented the whole top floor,” Lopez said of the approximately 18,000-square-foot space. “We can’t say who it is, but it’s already been leased out.”

According to filings with the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, the plaza will be owned by Varco Investments Ltd. of Brownsville.

The new commercial development on the west side of the city isn’t the only Origo Works project in the area. Lopez said his firm had built two homes just to the north in the Villas at Palm Valley development.

“There will be two pad sites in addition to Cheddar’s for two other restaurants that are coming,” said Lopez, who did not disclose the names of those stand-alone eateries.

“We’ve got a lot of property in the area, so we’ll be doing more development as the time comes,” he said.

Real estate developers are increasingly bullish about the interstate corridor from Harlingen to the west. Some say that within 10 to 15 years, there will be no vacant lots or farm fields between Harlingen and La Feria along I-2/Expressway 83.

“That area, that corner in particular, is really ripe for development, as is a lot of the area near that intersection and even further west,” said Harlingen Mayor Chris Boswell.

“It’s just a perfectly centrally located area for the entire Valley,” Boswell added. The City of Harlingen has annexed land all the way to Bass Boulevard.

In addition to the freeway-linked development, housing developments are being built along Garrett and Dillard roads about a mile south of the expressway, and others are expected to fill in the farmlands and scrub brush in parallel development westward along the freeway.

“We have some going in in other parts of the city, but three or four new residential subdivisions are going in there in close proximity to that intersection,” Boswell said.

“It just makes lot of sense that area would take off,” he added. “With everything else that is happening in the city, it’s time has come.”

Part of the reasoning for the boom in development is a vision of a single metropolitan area stretching from Brownsville to Mission. When the populations of the major Mexican cities of Reynosa and Matamoros are added to the U.S. population of 1.3 million in this zone, it adds up to a combined population of around 3 million people.