A few days ago, I walked up and down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard showing people two renderings of a proposed 25-story tower that would swallow the block between Interstate 45 and Colonial Avenue. Most fun I’ve had in months.
The girl taking orders at the recently opened Ruthie’s Cafe asked if it was real, then said, yeah, it’ll probably get built because it’s Dallas and apparently developers can build anything they want in Dallas.
The woman behind the counter at House of Parts rolled her eyes and said, “No possible way.”
Sam Washington Jr., owner of the 65-year-old Robert’s Ready to Wear, laughed and said, “If you can do it, go for it.” Then he laughed some more. I’m going back this week to buy a summertime Stetson Open Road just to hear that laugh again.
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Robert’s Ready to Wear is directly across the street from the site of the proposed high-rise, land currently owned and occupied by the 21-year-old Winners Assembly Christian Church and its pharmacy and clinic. In recent emails sent to some area nonprofits, church leaders say “we are taking up this initiative because God gave the vision” to Senior Pastor Raphael Adebayo 12 years ago.
Apparently, God isn’t aware that zoning along MLK doesn’t allow for anything higher than three stories. But more about that below.
Thursday morning, oft-former political candidate Ed Okpa told me he actually pitched the tower to church leadership a few years ago. Okpa said he convinced the pastors that a high-rise along MLK made the most sense given its proximity to the interstate.
The proposed rezoning sign tacked to the front of the Winners Assembly Christian Church’s storefront along MLK(Robert Wilonsky)
It would be “the highest and best use,” Okpa told me, “and it has to be mixed-use, not single-use multifamily, because you’d wind up with Section 8 and low-income housing, and it would become run-down.”
It’s hard to believe Okpa never became mayor after running twice.
“We don’t have to sugarcoat facts,” said the Nigerian-born, Harvard-educated Okpa. “We have to shake each other in order to wake each other up.”
Okpa’s now serving as lead consultant for what’s being billed as Winners Tower @ MLK, a $240-million behemoth that promises “luxury in Sunny South Dallas”: condos, a hotel, a grocery store and pharmacy, a bank, a media center and a helipad so residents can “travel discretely with ease and the luxury of your celebrity status.” The tower’s website suggests that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream to see a skyscraper built on a street named for him: “It is the DREAM of the TEAM motivated by the mantra BUILD THE DREAM.”
I knew nothing about this until a few days ago, when WFAA-TV (Channel 8) ran a piece about Winners Tower, treating it as far closer to reality than the overwrought renderings would suggest. It’s still under review by planning officials, according to the city’s website.
The current state of Winners Plaza, now a two-story storefront along MLK and Colonial(Robert Wilonsky)
At least one rendering has been around a while: A reverse Google Image search shows it was posted on July 3, 2024, to the Facebook page of Nigerian-based Oduak Projects, whose past projects don’t appear nearly as ambitious as a 25-story tower. Oduak’s managing director, Akinola Akintayo, told me via email they were involved in the project. Okpa said that wasn’t true.
Either way, the proposal being passed around South Dallas suggests Winners Tower would result in the wholesale demolition of the area, including the recently remade highway, new and legacy businesses across MLK and the 17-unit Winnway Motel next door. That rendering also shows the tower completely erasing Cornerstone Baptist Church, which sits on the corner closest to the I-45 service road.
Cornerstone has cared for South Dallas longer than City Hall has cared about South Dallas. It also owns most of the block — and most of the land behind it, including the stretch of South Boulevard that wasn’t demolished when city and state officials used South Central Expressway to carve the neighborhood in half in the 1950s.
“Oh, I’m not concerned, not at all, because I know it’s not possible,” Cornerstone’s longtime pastor Chris Simmons told me last week when I stopped by to talk about that shiny tower I’d seen on TV.
The man called Pastor Chris, who came to Cornerstone in 1988, grinned and chuckled the longer we spoke about Winners Tower. But he wasn’t joking.
Cornerstone Baptist Church on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard owns most of its block and the land behind it, though it doesn’t appear in the Winners Tower renderings.(Ashley Landis / Staff Photographer)
“This isn’t going to happen,” he said. More than once.
That’s what he’s been telling friends and congregants who’d seen the news story. Simmons said the proposal’s been around for a long time, as evidenced by the faded and curled rezoning sign tacked to the front of the Winners Assembly Christian Church’s storefront.
“And everybody who’s seen the website and the renderings has said, ‘They can’t be serious,’” Simmons said. “But now that a credible news outlet like Channel 8 has picked it, it has gotten some attention.”
And it’s certain to get more in coming weeks, as Okpa and church leaders attend community meetings to make their pitch, which is: This will create hundreds of jobs for South Dallas residents and bring in a fortune in tax revenue.
They’re also sure to face skeptics and adversaries who see Winners Tower as something that’s “incompatible with the community and opens up the door for gentrification and significant displacement.”
That’s the sentiment of South Dallas activist and former Dallas City Council member Diane Ragsdale, who attended one recent meeting and counts herself among the opposition. She told me a few days ago that she’s not going to support Winners Tower for numerous reasons, chief among them, “We want it to benefit the people who live here, not be something that will run us out of here.”
The old Winnway Motel sits between the Winners Assembly property, at left, and Cornerstone Baptist Church, which actually owns most of the block and the land behind it.(Robert Wilonsky)
For the last few months, Winners Assembly has been trying to garner the support of Cornerstone, Forest Forward and St. Philip’s School and Community Center — the holy trinity of organizations largely responsible for the slow-but-steady revitalization of the MLK corridor. And so far, that effort has been to no avail.
In 2018, the three organizations partnered with The Real Estate Council to create a district revitalization project only now taking shape along MLK. Forest Forward is in the midst of transforming the Forest Theater and its adjacent buildings into performance and educational spaces, with the promise of affordable housing to come. And St. Philip’s owns several refurbished storefronts across MLK, including the one where Ruthie’s food truck parked its first restaurant.
Terry Flowers, the headmaster at St. Phillip’s, said he believes Winners Tower is … “unlikely.” To put it politely. But St. Phillip’s did host a recent community meeting about the high-rise at the request of City Council member Adam Bazaldua, and Flowers is eager to talk about Winners Tower, if only to use it as a warning about what’s to come.
“It’s now evident — undeniable — that this community is turning around,” Flowers said. “Without a doubt, MLK needs to be revitalized and representative of its namesake. But the way it’s done is pretty important. It’s good for the neighborhood to discuss this type of proposal, because it precedes what very well could happen to the neighborhood,” Flowers said, laughing.
“If you don’t have a neighborhood plan, you’re in a position where people will plan for you, and this is exactly what the community needs to take a look at — what’s in the mindset of the developers as the skyline of downtown marches south.”
The thing is, there’s already a plan. A few, actually.
On June 25, the Dallas City Council approved, with little fanfare, the South Dallas Fair Park Area Plan more than five years in the making. The extensive document includes neighborhood design standards, zoning regulations and tools intended to spur economic development, and is essentially an addendum to the rules codified by the council in 2001, when South Dallas-Fair Park became Planned Development District 595.
The goal back then was more about keeping bad actors out than inviting good neighbors in. But it does cap commercial structures at three stories.
The newly adopted area plan is intended to spur investment and calls for small businesses and “new residential housing that will be compatible with the existing housing” along the MLK corridor. It also bills itself as a “realistic and actionable guide for achieving the community’s vision and facilitating future development.”
Which, if I’m reading the area plan right — and I’d like to think that I am — does not include a 25-story tower capped by a helipad on the corner of MLK and Colonial. But I guess we will find out soon enough.