Eds. note: This is the second post I’ve written on the now-decided Celeste proposal in Southlake. (If you haven’t already, start here: “The Toro visit Southlake officials may regret.”) As you'll see, this story isn't simply about one development or one town. And lest anyone get ideas and start spreading falsehoods: I am not for more apartments in Southlake. What I am most vehemently against, however, is the assumption that we will always have a choice. We won’t.

In the 1940s, psychologist Abraham Luchins conducted an experiment that should be required reading for anyone who’s ever excelled at something.

He gave people a series of water-jar puzzles, each solved by the same multi-step method. Then he handed them a problem that could still be solved the old way, but also had a much simpler solution sitting in plain sight. The experienced solvers continued using the complicated method they knew. A control group with no prior training spotted the simple solution immediately.

Luchins called it the Einstellung effect: the moment expertise stops being a tool and becomes a blindfold.

This experiment came to mind when I read Toro Development Company’s webpage for Celeste, its proposed 26-acre mixed-use community in Southlake. Toro has since withdrawn the project and said it would not return with another application. That ending was predictable, and the reason it was predictable is the whole point.

This is not really a piece about one developer’s blind spot. It is about what every fast-growing community should watch for as development pressure arrives, from the Texas suburbs to the Sun Belt cities absorbing the same wave of capital, because the misunderstanding that sank Celeste is the same one that decides whether residents shape growth in their cities or merely react to it.

Doomed from the start

One exchange on Toro’s page told you how this would end.

The company ran a Q&A with its chief vision officer, and one question cut straight to the bone:

“You’re not the first to try to develop this site. Why will you succeed?”

That is the right question; it may be the only one that matters.

Here is the answer:

“We are highly selective, and highly effective, in our work. We have the capital, capability and a proven track record of delivering premier mixed-use communities. And, we are relentless in our execution. We know every detail matters.”

Read it again, and notice what is missing.

The question was about Southlake; the answer is about Toro.

Asked why a city that has turned others away will say yes this time, the company offered its résumé. Capital. Capability. Track record. Execution. Not one word about the community whose approval it needs, the specific way that community regards density, or why that regard has ended better-funded efforts than this one.

That is the Einstellung effect, rendered in corporate prose.

I watched it happen in real time during the SPIN meeting.

The speaker, Mark Toro, the owner of the company, opened confident, easygoing, even considerate—a polished presenter working a room he expected to win. Then the comments started landing.

We don’t want apartments. We don’t want apartments.

The posture changed. His frustration grew, he went on the defensive, and at one point he described the community’s reaction as motivated by “fear.” It was the wrong word in exactly the wrong room. Call a Southlake crowd’s objection fear and you have told them their position is irrational, something to be managed rather than respected.

The tell came when residents pressed him on numbers, the unit counts, and pro forma details a room like that expects a developer to have ready. He said the project wasn’t that far along yet, in what, to listeners, felt like being brushed aside. Whether he didn’t have the figures or didn’t want to share them, the effect was the same: the community saw him as smug, arrogant, and dismissive.

A developer who understood the room would have known those numbers were the whole game. He treated them as a distraction.

What would success have looked like? Humility. A premium, respected developer would have spent real time getting to know this community and the people in it before ever booking a room. And I mean getting to know the community beyond simply supporters and antagonists.

Then he would have stood in front of them, named the winds of change already forming, the ones most residents don’t yet see, and explained why he wanted to partner with the community in deciding what a premium mixed-use development should look like for Southlake.

He would not present a conclusion; he would offer a partnership.

A distinction every growing community needs to understand: an approval problem is technical. You solve it with competence: studies, drawings, consultants, process.

A permission problem is political and human. It is not about whether the project is good; it is about whether the community has been given a reason to want it, and whether the people who must vote on it have been given room to say yes without paying for it later.

Those things do not come from capital or track record. They come from work that does not appear in a pitch deck. And a developer trained only in approval problems often does not know that work exists.

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This is the thing worth holding onto, because it runs underneath everything that follows.

Authority in a city is not possessed; it is practiced.

It flows to whoever does the work of earning it, and it drains away from whoever assumes it is automatic. A developer who skips that work loses. A community that skips it loses, too. The whole fight is about who is willing to do the work, and who only thinks they already have the right.

Southlake is a target

Here is what residents should sit with, even the ones who spent the past weeks cheering against this project.

Southlake’s demographics, its proximity to DFW airport, and its reputation make it the envy of nearly every city in the state. That same desirability makes it a target. From Austin to Dallas, when I have been in a conversation with a developer, one of the first things out of their mouths is how eager they are for the legislature to roll back local control so they can build in Southlake.

By build, they mean mixed-use, with apartments.

Comments I hear often go something like this:

Do you know how much capital moves through this region—driven by people who work and play in Dallas-Fort Worth but have no interest in maintaining a traditional home here? Given Southlake’s proximity to DFW International Airport, an outsized number of these individuals see our community as the optimal place to anchor a residence—provided it doesn’t mean managing yet another property alongside the ones they already own in Sausalito, Deer Valley, or Europe.

Read that as flattery if you want. Read it more accurately as a warning. The people who build for a living have already decided Southlake is worth the fight. The only question is whether the city decides what that fight produces, or whether it gets decided for them. And Southlake is not unique here. Every desirable community, in Texas and well beyond it, is on some developer’s map for exactly these reasons. The name of the town changes. The dynamic does not.

The stakes nobody is naming

The high-end developers make a point residents are quick to dismiss, and shouldn’t. It behooves the city to decide now where higher density makes sense and what it should look like, because when the state opens the floodgates, the loss of control filters down to quality, too.

This is not hypothetical. Back in 2019, the legislature passed House Bill 2439, a law most Southlake residents have never heard of. It stripped Texas cities of the authority to regulate building materials. If a material is permitted under a national model code, your city can no longer prohibit it—no matter what it does to the look or durability of the homes next door.

Cities fought it. They lost.

If you did not know that the state took that power away six years ago, that is precisely the point. Preemption does not arrive as a single dramatic event. It arrives quietly, one ordinary-sounding bill at a time, until residents look up and realize the leverage is gone. Texas is further down this road than most states, but it is not alone on it; legislatures across the country are steadily narrowing what cities are allowed to decide for themselves.

The same logic is coming for density. When it does, cities that refused to plan will not get to choose the materials, the location, or, to any meaningful degree, the number of units. They will get what the market and the statute hand them.

And here is the part that should sting: the people who understand this best are often the city’s own officials, current and former, many of whom privately know exactly what is coming and know the city would be smart to get ahead of it.

There lies the rub of politics. Tell residents what they need to hear, do what is best for the city’s future, and you will not be re-elected. Say nothing, let the city drift toward a reckoning, and your seat is safe.

As I am wont to say, most local politicians are cowards to the activists—the loudest voices in the room or the community.

So we get the second option, and we all pay for that cowardice in the end.

The fight is not really about apartments

Celeste’s renderings were, indeed, beautiful. The vision, walkable plazas, chef-driven restaurants, and residents living over retail, was genuinely good urbanism, the kind planners have begged suburbs to consider for years.

None of that was the problem.

Beauty and merit answer the developer’s question. They do not answer the resident’s question. Southlake was never really asking whether Celeste would be nice. It was asking who decided this, why wasn’t I part of it, and what happens to my city if the answer is yes. Celeste built an elaborate answer to the first question and barely acknowledged the other two.

A developer arriving with finished renderings, a launch video, and a résumé is not opening a conversation. It is presenting a conclusion. And a community handed a conclusion it had no part in reaching does not ratify it. It mobilizes against it.

There is a version of a project like this that gets built. It starts earlier, quieter, and with a different posture. It starts with tradeoffs: housing, traffic, tax base, public space, density, walkability, character and control. It asks what the city is willing to become before asking what the city is willing to approve.

What residents miss about themselves

Here is something a large forum like SPIN reveals: the diversity of opinion, even in a community as seemingly homogeneous as Southlake. The spectrum on apartments is wider than most residents would guess. There are people here who are firmly against them, people who are for them, and a real contingent open to them within reason.

That should open the door to a conversation.

It usually doesn’t, and the reason is instructive. A strong elected official, one not consumed by the next election cycle, would be willing to host an honest discussion about Southlake’s future and the role higher-density housing will likely play in it. That conversation rarely happens, because officials are afraid that a small band of activists, all of whom vote, would punish them simply for having it.

It’s a mechanic worth understanding, and it is the one both developers and residents consistently get wrong. These fights are not decided by the broader community. They are decided by a small, intense, reliable group, and the gap between who shows up and who actually moves a vote is where every one of these projects lives or dies.

A developer who courts the agreeable majority is courting people who were never the obstacle. An official who fears the activist core is bowing to people who may not represent the city at all. Both are misreading the room in the same direction.

Call it the participation gap. Who shows up decides, and almost no one shows up, which means a motivated few decide nearly everything while the rest of the city wonders how it got the government it has. This is the hidden engine under low turnout, uncontested elections, and the quiet capture of local boards and councils, in Southlake and in towns like it across the country. It deserves its own full accounting, and it will get one.

For now, it is enough to see that it is the same law at work:

“Authority goes to whoever practices it, and stays away from whoever assumes it.”

What this means for you

The outcome arrived on schedule. Toro read the cheering section as momentum, met the opposition head-on, and pulled the project when the room would not move.

The temptation now is to read that withdrawal as a win. Residents stopped a project they did not want. Fine. But stopping one developer is not the same as deciding anything, and the next one is already studying the same map.

That is the work residents keep skipping, and it takes more than a vote. Wherever you live, if your city is growing, this is your fight too. Educate yourself on what your state is actually doing to local control. Ask your elected officials the hard questions, and notice whether they answer or change the subject. Talk to your neighbors about the community they want one and two decades from now, not just the one they are trying to preserve today.

Two questions I wish more residents would ask:

1. If Southlake is as desirable as everyone says, what happens when we can no longer stop high-density residential?

2. What does this city look like if we don’t get in front of this, the premortem we keep refusing to run?

Answer those honestly, together, and early, and Southlake keeps its hand on the wheel. The renderings were always the easy part. They were never the question.