If you've driven Walnut Hill past Audelia in the last twenty years, you've seen the tent-shaped roof at the corner car wash and probably never thought twice about it. It's been there since 1976, when the building opened as a Hardee's Hamburgers, the same red carnival-striped roofline it wears today. It became a Southwest Savings Bank in 1978, then sat as a car wash from the early 2000s until Melissa and Trey Chapman bought it from Jose Carbajal in 2019 and renamed it Lake Highlands Car Wash. This month, that fifty-year run ends. On August 24, the Skillman Corridor TIF District board voted unanimously to demolish the building and clear the way for Highlands Village, a retail and office project from developer TyGra Walnut Hill at 9715 Walnut Hill.
One small demolition on one corner doesn't usually mean much. But look at the calendar around it and a different pattern shows up. In the same narrow window this August, the city put real budget dollars behind two other projects that Lake Highlands residents have heard promised for years without much to show for it. That's the actual story here: not one corner changing, but three separate stalled threads moving at once, after a long stretch where this neighborhood got used to hearing "someday" instead of a date.
The car wash approval matters partly because of what it replaces and partly because of what it says about the corridor's track record. The Skillman Corridor TIF District has existed since October 2005, created specifically to fund the kind of infrastructure that turns aging retail into something else. Its original catalyst project, the broader Lake Highlands Town Center, was supposed to remake the Skillman and Walnut Hill intersection into a dense, walkable hub. The developer ultimately scaled back after phase one, and what got built was a mix of apartments and a Sprouts-anchored strip center rather than the more urban vision originally pitched.
That history is worth knowing because it's the backdrop against which this month's news reads differently. The TIF board isn't proposing another grand redesign this time. The plans submitted for Highlands Village describe a straightforward goal: align the site with current market conditions and improve how the land is actually used. After two decades of a corridor that mostly disappointed its own blueprints, a modest, market-driven swap of a car wash for retail and office space is the kind of change that actually reaches completion.
Two weeks before the car wash vote, on August 7, the City of Dallas released its proposed 2026-27 budget, and buried in it are the numbers that explain why the trail and the pond behind the Town Center have looked like a construction zone lately, or will soon.
The city has budgeted roughly $2 million to dredge the Lake Highlands Town Center pond, a stormwater drainage project funded through the city's Storm Drainage Management Capital Program and 2017 bond dollars, with completion projected for October 2027. If you walk that stretch near Watercrest Park, expect this to be a multi-season project, not a weekend fix.
Two trail items sit next to it. The White Rock Creek Trail's Walnut Hill/Lake Highlands connector carries a $1.93 million budget funded through 2012 bond dollars, and a separate $726,394 project extends the Lake Highlands Trail from White Rock Creek Trail to Skillman Road, funded through 2017 bonds. Both have been sitting in the capital improvement plan for years. What's new is that they're now line items in an active budget cycle rather than entries on a future wish list.
The dollar figures around the Town Center project itself put the pace in perspective. Of an $11.67 million total budget, the city has spent or committed $8,337,751, leaving $3,330,199 still available. That's a project three-quarters through its money, which tells you more about where things stand than any press release would.
None of this is happening in a vacuum of goodwill. The city is proposing an estimated $5.66 billion budget overall while facing a $30 million shortfall for the current fiscal year, and the plan calls for saving $17.3 million through realigned spending and staffing changes. Lake Highlands isn't getting special treatment. It's getting its turn, on a schedule set by citywide math rather than local pressure alone.
Some of this is small enough that you've probably already noticed it without knowing why. The Lake Highlands and North Lake Highlands Public Improvement Districts have been working alongside the city and TxDOT on a Skillman Corridor Master Plan that already has funding in place. Two enhanced medians exist today at Church Road and Skillman, and at Skillman and Abrams, and the plan calls for extending that same treatment down to Skillman and Sedgwick.
Near the Walnut Hill Lane bridge, a Green Ribbon grant is paying for gateway signage and additional landscaping on both sides of the crossing. The PID is also working on a mural planned for the space underneath that same bridge at Watercrest Park, the kind of detail that won't show up in a budget headline but will change what you see on a daily walk.
North of LBJ, the North Lake Highlands PID is running its own Forest Lane Master Plan, covering Forest Lane, I-635, and Skillman Street, with a specific push toward intersection safety improvements at Forest Lane and Audelia. If your daily routine runs through that corner, this is the project to watch over the coming months.
None of these are the kind of transformation that makes a headline on its own. Together, they're the difference between a corridor where change gets talked about and one where it's showing up in the pavement.
The same pattern shows up in where people actually eat. When Peter and Cheryl Kenny opened Lochland's on Plano Road in February 2020, after twelve years running Capitol Pub on Henderson Avenue and a quarter century before that at The Dubliner, they described the move as a bet on a neighborhood that didn't have enough places like it yet. That framing made sense at the time. It doesn't hold up as well now.
Yelp's own current ranking of Lake Highlands restaurants, last updated in July 2026, runs nine deep before it even gets to honorable mentions: Goldie's, Lochland's, Lake Highlands Cafe, Ghost Pizza, Strouderosa BBQ, Cedar & Vine, Rising Tides, El Vecino, and Lounge Here, with ONE90 Smoked Meats and Pizzeria Carina rounding out the list. Cane Rosso has its own Lake Highlands location on Skillman Street. Resident Taqueria, led by chef Andrew Savoie, has built a menu around slow-braised meats and made-to-order tortillas just off the same corridor.
Goldie's is a good example of how fast this turned over. It opened in the space at Walnut Hill Lane and Audelia Road that had been RM 12:20 Bistro until that restaurant closed in February 2023. The diner-inspired concept from Brandon Hays and Brittni Clayton, with a design studio calling the moody, velvet-booth interior "refined, sexy and fun," now sits at the top of Yelp's list for the neighborhood.
If you're a regular at Lochland's, there's a seasonal ritual worth marking on your calendar. Each fall, timed to the State Fair of Texas, the restaurant rolls out a State Fair menu for anyone who wants Fair food without the Fair Park trip. In its most recent run, that meant a foot-long corndog for $6.50, funnel cake fries with a choice of raspberry, salted caramel, or chocolate drizzle, and shepherd's pie balls at $14 for five. If the pattern holds, expect it back on the menu again as the Fair opens this year.
Put the corridor news and the dining scene side by side and the thesis gets clearer. Lake Highlands spent close to two decades being the neighborhood where big plans got announced and small versions got built, where restaurant owners felt like they were taking a risk on underserved blocks. That reputation was earned honestly. It just isn't accurate anymore, and this fall is the first time you can watch several of the reasons why line up in the same month: a fifty-year-old building finally coming down for something new, budget dollars attached to trail and drainage work that had been sitting on paper, and a restaurant list long enough that picking where to eat on a Friday is now the hard part.
None of this requires you to do anything. If you walk the trail near Watercrest Park, expect equipment and fencing through next year as the dredging and connector work overlap. If you're headed to Skillman and Walnut Hill, watch for the car wash to disappear before Highlands Village construction starts. And if you haven't been to Goldie's or Lochland's lately, the neighborhood's food scene has moved well past the point where anyone needs to describe it as underserved.
If you're the kind of person who likes knowing why a corner looks different before the sign goes up, or you just want someone who tracks this stuff to answer a question about your own block, the team at J. Klefeker Group pays attention to Lake Highlands the way a neighbor does. Book a Consultation any time you want to talk through what's actually happening on your street, not just what's on the flyer.
