South Dallas Surfaces as Strong Biotech Contender

"We wouldn't be doing this if we hadn't already had interest expressed," Linda Burns, director of economic development for the chamber, said at yesterday's daylong forum on South Dallas to tout its resources and potential to a broad-based audience of researchers, healthcare executives and brokers. Though sparsely attended, the life science opportunities forum offered the best information to date on projects, site selection, construction requirements and the types of developments needed by emerging industries.

The chamber marked its second South Dallas forum and first life science conference with the event, held in Dallas' Infomart at 1950 Stemmons Freeway. A third South Dallas forum will be held in the spring, focusing on logistics and infrastructure of a submarket teeming with existing space, raw land and a solid labor pool.

The chamber, with 12 counties under wing, has targeted the southern sector because "that's the territory where Dallas has the most room for expansions," Burns tells GlobeSt.com. "We've had a lot of interest in South Dallas from consultants on the West Coast who think it looks like South San Francisco."

Winning the business of the emerging sector is far from easy, driving a first-time regional teaming of Dallas and Fort Worth as politicians, business leaders, university boards and healthcare execs campaign for a market share of what could be the nation's next best economic bet. The cost of the bricks, much like the food processing industry, is costly: a $700 per sf project is under way in Austin and a $5,000 per sf preliminary tab is attached to a development in Galveston. Still, the high-stakes game has players parading their intellectual and financial investments before bio, nano and pharma companies to get ahead of the curve for the next economic boon.

UT Southwestern Medical Center, which has just picked the development team for a 13-acre biotechnology development center, has a faculty with four Nobel Prize laureates, 14 members of the National Academy of Sciences and 11 Howard Hughes investigators--a recruiting strategy to attract biotech and pharmaceutical companies and gain extra traction for sponsored research, which hit $300 million last year. In November, the design team for the University of North Texas begins work on the 264-acre Dallas campus, which has been on the southern sector's wish list since 1997 and will include law and pharmacy schools. Methodist Hospital of Dallas is working on a $250-million expansion of two South Dallas campuses while Baylor Health Care System, with $2.3 billion of assets and more on the way, is deep into 550 active research protocols and 84 new research projects, just part of the provider's many contributions to the 21st century gold rush.

With intellectual property seeds planted and several sprouting, Burns and the chamber team have been chasing RFPs from coast to coast. Right now, she's searching for 100- to 200-acre tracts, with completed environmental studies, to submit for yet another RFP. She's also courting medical device manufacturers, many with plants in Mexico, to consider West Dallas and the southern sector for distribution hubs. The payday for the long hours and costly initiatives is "we're in the finals for doing this," she says.