One of the premier developers in a Dallas neighborhood fighting displacement and gentrification was recently involved in a hot chicken scandal and did federal prison time for his role in a hydroponic marijuana growing operation.
That’s not particularly relevant to his credibility as a home builder, but it’s often raised by legacy residents in the Elm Thicket/Northpark neighborhood who don’t like his propensity for cutting down trees, leaving huge Dumpsters in the right-of-way, and threats to gentrify their Freedman’s community.
Olerio Homes developer Louis Michael Olerio Jr. has been building homes in Dallas for 14 years and no doubt has helped some people find their dream home. He’s quick to say he gets along just fine with the Elm Thicket/Northpark residents, but some neighbors tell a different story.
“That’s not just a lie, that’s a damn lie,” said Elm Thicket/Northpark Neighborhood Association president Jonathan Maples. “Nobody cares for Lou Olerio. He’s the same SOB that said he’s going to gentrify the whole neighborhood when he lost the first zoning case.”
Another neighbor who asked to remain anonymous offered her personal experience with the builder.
“The complaint ETNP has with Olerio is that he does not make an effort to preserve our old-growth trees. He is more than willing to pay whatever fines the city levels when he gets reported,” she said. “He has people work on Sundays when there is supposed to be no construction at all. He was trying to push spot zoning so he could build duplexes on residential lots, completely disfiguring how a neighborhood street looks.”
Over in Devonshire, residents are blowing up the Nextdoor neighborhood social media app about the proliferation of Olerio’s cookie-cutter “white box” homes.
“It’s not just our neighborhood; it’s the whole damn city, north of the Trinity River,” Maples said.
Lou Olerio’s Past
Olerio was sentenced in December 2013 to two years in prison for conspiracy to commit money laundering, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office Northern District of Texas. He was reportedly released to a halfway house in January 2016. Since then, he’s been building homes and investing in Lucky’s Hot Chicken franchises.
Sort of.
Earlier this month, a settlement was reached in a claim that Olerio and other investors raised $1.8 million to open Lucky’s franchises in Oak Lawn, Pleasant Grove, Richardson, and Arlington, but the stores never opened — or in the case of Oak Lawn, opened and closed within four months, according to a People Newspapers report.
Olerio Homes in Elm Thicket/Northpark
Olerio agreed to an interview with daltxrealestate.com but refused to answer questions about his legal history.
Fair enough; we’re a housing publication. We wanted to know about his dealings with neighborhoods like Elm Thicket/Northpark, where neighbors battled last fall for a “downzoning” overlay that restricted lot coverage and roof styles, among other things.
Residents have made it clear that Olerio isn’t violating the new zoning regulations and he wasn’t doing so prior to the October vote that put the restrictions in place. But some think he’s trying to tear down legacy homes and drive minorities out of the neighborhood.
He didn’t make a lot of new friends when Olerio told daltxrealestate.com in January 2021 about his plans to build 64 single-family attached units on March Avenue.
“We’ll totally regentrify that area,” he said at the time.
In response to the criticism around building huge, expensive homes next to smaller, legacy cottages, Olerio said he’s adding value to the neighborhood.
“When I first started buying over there 20 years ago, we were paying $40,000 to $50,000 a lot,” he said. “Now we’re paying $500,000, plus a lot. My answer to that is we’re creating generational wealth for families [for whom] that is their biggest financial asset. I mean, when prices have increased tenfold on dirt, that’s creating value for the homeowners.”
Maples disagrees.
“You don’t build generational wealth when the person that is buying your home is low-balling you,” he said. “Building generational wealth would be getting 80 percent of what he’s going to sell the home for when he’s ready to sell. What he’s buying the homes for in this neighborhood, they’re getting about an eighth or less of what he’s going to end up selling it for.”
Maples said he encourages homeowners who want to sell to tear down their own homes, scrape their own property, build new, and ask for the same amount that builders are asking for.
“If you go to any bank that loans for real estate and give them the ZIP code of 75209 and your street address, there’s a great chance they will loan you the money to rebuild your own home, simply because they understand the value of the dirt,” he said.
Homeowners are not being forced out, Olerio explained.
“If they want to stay, they’re welcome to stay,” he said. “If they want to stay there, that’s great. If they don’t, then they’ll get a sales price that is much more than they ever thought about when they purchased their homes.”
Downzoning in Elm Thicket/Northpark
The Dallas City Council approved in October 2022 a “downzoning” that requires single-story and two-story structures to have 40 percent lot coverage. Ninety percent of the roof of the main structure must be hip and gable when greater than 20 feet from the grade. Maximum structure height is 25 feet.
Developers who pulled permits prior to the council action last year were cleared to continue construction, some of which is underway now, even though it doesn’t meet the approved criteria.
Olerio said he helped negotiate the changes with council members and made concessions.
“I really have no issue building within the new zoning,” he said. “The ones I’m doing [meet the new criteria].”
We reached out to another builder, Reagan Anderes with RAM Properties, who said our previous reporting on Elm Thicket/Northpark was one-sided.
“Dallas council members did nothing to help with displacement, which all of us fought hard to try to point out,” she said. “We fought hard to make the zoning case worthwhile, all while pointing out how it would make things more difficult for the original owners. Every single thing we tried to communicate to City Council has now come true. Everyone lost. Especially original homeowners.”
Olerio Homes in Devonshire
Residents of Devonshire, where there is no overlay zoning district, say they simply don’t like how all Olerio’s houses look alike and appear to be built quickly and cheaply, undercutting other developers who want to do business in their neighborhood.
Residents have shared stories about Olerio on Nextdoor that don’t paint a great picture of the developer.
Olerio’s portfolio shows a variety of home styles, and he says he started building in Elm Thicket in 2010 and Devonshire in 2012.
The builder said he likes the area because of its close proximity to downtown, Love Field, and the Dallas North Tollway.
“We build north of 50 homes a year and those are two of the neighborhoods we focus on,” he said. “We’ve seen increasing prices consistently year over year in those neighborhoods. There’s a lot of demand. Devonshire now is getting to the point where lot values are pushing close to $1 million. In Elm Thicket, lot values are between $400,000 and $500,000 on the smaller side and over $1 million on the bigger lots.”
Although some of these Nextdoor posts are a couple of years old, they display a disdain for cookie-cutter houses.
“This is much more than a white box trend,” one Elm Thicket/Northpark resident wrote on Nextdoor. “When three to four are going up on the same street at the same time as a spec, it’s pure greed and laziness. Consider the source. If you know LO, then you know there is an issue.”
Olerio said he has to build homes in that style.
“I think we do a good job of making them look different,” he said. “One of the things the overlay did is we’re going to have to all build boxes with low-pitched roofs. The overlay, the downzone, reduced the height and the footprint size. Instead of building homes that are more architecturally different, we’re now going to be forced to build boxes with low roofs. You can only build a hip or a gable and you can only max at 30 feet with 40 percent coverage. It takes away a lot of the ability to do creative things that you can do in other neighborhoods.”
The residents opposed to Olerio’s style say he could pay someone for a more creative design.
“The legacy homes are all different,” one neighbor said. “[Olerio] is lazy and does not care what the neighborhood looks like. He builds rectangle houses with hip and gable roofs because they’re the cheapest.”
We reached out to the Devonshire Neighborhood Association and got this response:
“Olerio has built many homes in Devonshire so I’m sure you could get some input. However, the Devonshire Neighborhood Association is a crime watch organization and only represents the neighborhood from that aspect. The best way for you to identify issues or solicit participation for your story would be through a post to all Devonshire via Nextdoor.”
Displacement And Gentrification
Elm Thicket/Northpark is plagued by investors who want to buy them out at less than market value just to tear down their homes and send them packing, many residents told us at the time of the downzoning last year. In an original Freedman’s neighborhood where many residents live within walking distance of their relatives, the threat of displacement is unsettling.
“My neighborhood is definitely in transition and I am hoping for more builders who want to keep cottages alive,” one Elm Thicket/Northpark resident wrote on Nextdoor.
Olerio currently has about a dozen homes under construction in Elm Thicket/Northpark, including a $3.75 million home at 6710 Robin Road in Shannon Estates, and three in Devonshire. Olerio also builds in several other Dallas neighborhoods and in Waco, Fort Worth, and on Cedar Creek Lake.
Maples, a resident of ElmThicket/Northpark for 58 years, said his neighborhood is in the top three of the things he’s most passionate about. When he hears the word “gentrification,” he interprets that to be an effort to run Black people out of the neighborhood, he said.
“I warn all my neighbors about the predatory tactics developers use to colonize our neighborhood,” Maples said.
Olerio told daltxrealestate.com he has a good working relationship with the residents of Elm Thicket/Northpark and while he doesn’t live there anymore, he did for 15 years.
“Everyone gets along very well,” he said. “There’s very little animosity. I find it to be a very safe and very friendly neighborhood.”
