Richardson General Contractor for Offices, Cafes, and Homes

Richardson isn’t adding people. The Census Bureau counted 119,460 residents in its 2020 base and estimates 118,542 for July 2025. It’s a full city. According to the City’s own history, residential and commercial development both peaked in the 1980s, and more than 88,000 people work here every day.

So almost every project here starts inside somebody else’s building. A 1980s office floor on US 75. A strip center from the early 1960s that became a regional food destination. A 1970s brick house with its original kitchen. Being a useful general contractor in Richardson mostly means being good at opening walls you didn’t close.

We’re MASACO Construction, a woman- and minority-owned general contractor at 7950 Legacy Drive in Plano, about 20 minutes from central Richardson. The two cities share a border. We’re commercial first, and we run a full residential remodeling practice too.

We haven’t completed a project inside Richardson yet, and we won’t dress that up. Our closest finished work is two cities up US 75 in Allen: Fade & Style Barber Shop, a 1,500 square foot shell we took to opening day in six weeks.

The Telecom Corridor still runs on US 75

Richardson’s business story starts with a highway. Central Expressway opened through town in 1954. Collins Radio bought land for its Richardson office in 1955 and opened in 1958, the same year Texas Instruments opened a plant just south of the city line. Commercial activity peaked in 1984, when site plan approvals passed 5 million square feet. That’s the office stock the Telecom Corridor sits on, and plenty of it is now 40 years old.

US 75 in north Richardson, with Telecom Corridor office towers on the skyline.

The City is betting on those buildings instead of waiting for new ones. Its stated strategy is reinvestment in legacy office buildings, backed by building modernization grants, building and tenant improvement grants, permit fee waivers, and job creation grants. In September 2026 it approved up to $4 million to support AT&T’s lease of another 190,000 square feet at the Lakeside campus on US 75, alongside about $11.5 million in landlord capital that includes a tenant improvement allowance (City of Richardson Economic Development). On Telecom Parkway, Celestica is expanding at the former Fujitsu campus, with an estimated $300 million going into tenant improvements and new equipment over two years.

You don’t need 190,000 square feet to feel that. A 4,000 square foot suite on a 1980s floor carries the same history:

• A ceiling grid and ductwork laid out around someone else’s walls
• Restrooms and door hardware that often predate today’s accessibility standards
• Materials old enough that the City asks for an asbestos survey before you demolish
• Power and data sized for rows of cubicles, not for your equipment

So as a commercial contractor in Richardson, we start office build-outs above the ceiling, not on the carpet. And before you sign, ask the landlord what the tenant improvement allowance really covers once demolition is priced.

Illustrative: a 1980s office floor taken back to slab and ductwork before a new tenant layout goes in.

CityLine, The IQ, and two new rail stations

The newer Richardson is at the north end. CityLine is a 186-acre development on the Plano border near US 75 and the Bush Turnpike, planned by developer KDC around a 1.5 million square foot State Farm campus next to the DART station (D Magazine). Today it’s home to State Farm and Raytheon along with restaurants, shops, apartments, and a hotel (Community Impact).

Restaurant and retail space there tends to sit at the base of taller buildings. That changes the job. A kitchen exhaust has to find a legal path up or out, deliveries and dumpsters are shared, and the landlord’s construction rules land on top of the City’s. Get the tenant criteria before anyone draws a hood.

Transit just got better, too. DART’s Silver Line started service on October 25, 2025, with two Richardson stations, CityLine/Bush and UT Dallas, and trains to DFW Airport (Richardson Today).

CityLine/Bush station from above in 2020, with CityLine’s towers, ground-floor retail, and plaza to the right.

Then there’s the Richardson Innovation Quarter, The IQ, a 1,200-acre district once known as Collins/Arapaho. City Council adopted a form-based code for it unanimously in December 2019, and the area took its new name in 2020 (Richardson Today). Its anchor is the City-owned IQ Headquarters at 1302 E. Collins Boulevard, a 27,500 square foot building that opened in February 2022 with UT Dallas in about 10,000 square feet of it (Richardson IQ).

In May 2026 the City paused its planned redevelopment at Arapaho Center Station, citing financing and market conditions. That keeps the action in existing buildings: labs, maker space, coworking, light manufacturing. Watch the chemicals: Express Permitting excludes spaces that store, use, or dispense hazardous materials, and the CO application asks for chemical data sheets for the Fire Marshal.

Chinatown, the Heights, and Richardson’s food corridors

The CORE District is the City’s name for five neighborhoods at the center of town: Chinatown, Downtown, Heights, Interurban, and Lockwood (Richardson Economic Development). It’s where Richardson eats.

Chinatown sits on Greenville Avenue north of Main Street, on the road the City’s history calls the Red Brick Road, completed in 1924. The shopping complex at its heart went up in the early 1960s as the Richardson Terrace Shopping Center. Chinese investors bought it in the mid-1980s, when many Chinese immigrants coming to Dallas settled in Richardson as engineers and scientists at Texas Instruments or Rockwell International (Richardson CORE District). Today its kitchens cook Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, and Vietnamese food.

The rest of the district reads like a timeline of reuse. Richardson Heights was the city’s first shopping center, built in the 1950s after Central Expressway arrived, and Alamo Drafthouse picked it in 2012 for its first North Texas theater. Interurban was Richardson’s first industrial district, developed in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and now has a brewery. Lockwood turned a forgotten retail center into coffee, coworking, and the city’s only distillery.

South Richardson is adding its own cluster. The developer of The Arabian Village bought his first building there in 2019, and Al Ameera Plaza followed a few years later; both have filled with Middle Eastern restaurants and businesses (Community Impact). City Manager Don Magner put it plainly: Richardson is “an international foodie city.”

In a 1960s strip center, price the slab cut and the grease interceptor before you price the finishes.

A center built for retail wasn’t plumbed for a commercial kitchen in every bay. Turning a retail suite into a restaurant usually means sawcutting the slab for floor drains and a grease line, new exhaust, and more gas and electrical capacity. The health rules below spell out what the kitchen needs, and our restaurant construction page covers the rest.

The statue square at DFW Chinatown on Greenville Avenue, in front of a shopping center first built in the early 1960s.

Richardson permits, express review, and the CO

Richardson’s Building Inspection Department works out of the Temporary City Hall Annex at 2360 Campbell Creek Boulevard, Suite 550. The City adopted the 2021 International Codes and the 2020 National Electrical Code on April 24, 2023, with regional and local amendments. If your drawings were prepared for a city on newer editions, have them checked against Richardson’s.

Every contractor has to register with the City before a permit is issued. The fee is $100, registration lasts a year, and the City keeps a registered contractors list so you can check anyone before you sign.

Express Permitting. The Express Permitting Program guarantees plan review within three business days for tenant finish-outs and interior remodels of 5,000 square feet or less in office and retail spaces with no hazardous materials. Restaurants don’t meet those criteria, though the Building Official can authorize other projects. The package has to be complete: a key plan showing the suite within the building, floor plans, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing plans, COMcheck energy calculations, the TDLR confirmation page for accessibility review, and an asbestos survey if required.

Remodeling an existing suite. A commercial interior remodel needs two sets of drawings: existing and proposed floor plans, room uses and exits, wall sections for partitions and demising walls, MEP drawings, and 2021 COMcheck calculations. Add proof of an asbestos survey for the area being renovated, TDLR registration for projects of $50,000 or more, and drawings sealed where Texas law requires it. Any site change, such as a new patio or dumpster pad, needs site plan approval through Development Services before the building permit. Under the fee schedule effective October 1, 2026, a commercial alteration costs 1 percent of its market value, with a $225 minimum, and finishing out a new shell up to 2,500 square feet costs $500.

The certificate of occupancy. Richardson’s rule is short:

“No tenancy or ownership change of any existing building or lease space shall be made until a certificate of occupancy has been issued.”

City of Richardson Building Inspection

The CO filing fee is $100 unless it comes with the completion of a building permit. The application has sign-off lines for Building Inspection, the Fire Marshal, Zoning, Police, and Health, so a new tenant in an old suite still goes through all of them. Inspections run twice a day: call one in before 8 a.m. and the inspector comes between 8:30 and 11:30; call between 8 and noon and it’s 1:00 to 4:30.

Health review for kitchens and cafes

The Richardson Health Department approves plans before construction or any extensive remodel of a food business, and its guidelines for new or remodeled food establishments are specific:

• Quarry tile graded to a trapped floor drain wherever floors take liquid discharge or get water flushed
• All plumbing in food prep areas run through indirect waste lines
• A grease trap or interceptor located outside the establishment, sized by Building Inspection
• Two customer restrooms if food is eaten on site, with self-closing doors
• A mop sink or curbed cleaning area, plus hand sinks in prep and dishwashing areas
• Floor-mounted equipment on six-inch legs or rollers, sealed to the floor, or set on a smooth platform

Then comes the Food Service Permit: $250 for up to 2,000 square feet, $350 up to 7,500, $450 above that, $50 more with a grease trap, and a one-time $300 plan review fee. It lasts a year and doesn’t transfer to a new owner.

Food service work: the order counter at Pizza Twist in Irving, which MASACO built out while the restaurant kept serving.

At Pizza Twist, the kitchen installation and new utility connections went in while the restaurant stayed open, with the work phased around service hours.

Fire Marshal permits

Richardson runs the 2021 International Fire Code as amended by Ordinance 4462. Hood suppression, fire alarm, and sprinkler work each need a fire construction permit, submitted as one combined PDF, with fees paid only after approval. Small changes are exempt: sprinkler work affecting fewer than 20 heads, or alarm work affecting fewer than 11 notification appliances. A full suite reconfiguration can cross both lines, so we count heads and devices during design, not at rough-in.

Remodeling Richardson’s 1960s and 1970s houses

Richardson had about 1,300 residents in 1950 and about 56,000 by 1972, and the City says 40 percent of its homes went up between 1970 and 1979. Home remodeling in Richardson means working on houses from that boom, in neighborhoods like Canyon Creek, home to a country club that has operated since 1963, and Richardson Heights, Reservation, Cottonwood Heights, Greenwood Hills, and Highland Terrace.

Most of those older neighborhoods have voluntary neighborhood associations, not mandatory HOAs. The City’s association list flags the mandatory ones, like Breckinridge Park Estates, and notes that voluntary associations have no legal authority to enforce design requirements. Check your deed restrictions anyway.

What these houses usually need:

• A kitchen that opens up. A 1970s kitchen is often walled off from the den. Kitchen remodeling here typically starts with taking that wall out, with a beam sized by an engineer if it’s load-bearing.
• Baths past their tile. Original hall and primary baths with small showers. Our bathroom remodeling page covers the full scope.
• A wiring check. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission notes that cables installed between 1965 and the mid 1970s in new homes may contain aluminum wiring. We look at the panel and branch circuits before we price electrical.
• Foundation work, sometimes. Richardson requires a permit for foundation repairs of four or more piers, with an outline drawing and a report sealed by a Texas licensed engineer.

The paperwork is clear. A residential interior remodel needs a permit for moving or adding walls or changing plumbing, electrical, or mechanical systems, with before and after floor plans showing bedroom egress sizes, a framing plan for structural changes, and a fuel gas sizing plan for gas appliances. Thinking about turning the garage into a room? The City allows it as long as the lot still provides two off-street parking spaces behind the front building line.

When the kitchen, the baths, the wiring, and the floors all need attention, a whole-home remodel lets us open the walls once, rewire once, and schedule inspections once.

Illustrative: a 1970s ranch den with its paneling painted, its brick fireplace limewashed, and new floors and recessed lights.

Richardson will even help pay for it. The Home Improvement Incentive Program rebates 10 times the increase in your city taxes after a remodel of at least $20,000 on a single-family home, finished within 24 months. The catch: you apply to Community Services before construction begins. Talk to us before demolition, not after.

Two Richardson landmarks

The Eisemann Center and Galatyn Park

The building at the top of this page is the Charles W. Eisemann Center for Performing Arts, a City of Richardson facility at 2351 Performance Drive that opened in September 2002. It holds the 1,608-seat Hill Performance Hall and sits in the Galatyn Park Urban Center just south of US 75 and the Bush Turnpike, a few hundred feet from DART’s Galatyn Park Station (Eisemann Center). Out front, the public plaza has the Texas Instruments Foundation Community Fountain.

The plaza and fountain at Galatyn Park, outside the Eisemann Center.

UT Dallas

In 1961 the Southwest Center for Advanced Studies was dedicated. In 1969 Erik Jonsson and other Texas Instruments executives donated it to the state, and it became The University of Texas at Dallas. Today UT Dallas enrolls more than 30,000 students across seven schools (UT Dallas), and since October 2025 it has its own Silver Line station.

The Engineering and Computer Science Complex at UT Dallas.

How a Richardson project runs with MASACO

Our process doesn’t change by city. The details do.

We start by walking the suite or house with you and asking the Richardson questions: Express Permitting eligibility, food or hazardous materials, asbestos, and whether a homeowner should file for the incentive program first. You see 3D renderings before you see a price. The proposal is fixed in scope and organized by trade, with allowances named, so items like a TDLR review on a $50,000 job or an outside grease interceptor appear on paper before they appear on site.

During construction you get one project manager and a written update with photos every week. At handover you get as-builts, permits, inspection records, the certificate of occupancy, and warranties in one package, and we stay reachable after move-in.

Signing a lease on a 1980s floor along US 75, opening a kitchen near Chinatown, or finally replacing a 1970s Canyon Creek kitchen? Book a consultation. We’ll walk it with you, tell you which Richardson reviews your project triggers, and come back with a plan you can hold us to.

Building in Richardson: what to know.

Richardson is built out: the Census Bureau counted 119,460 residents in its 2020 base and estimates 118,542 for July 2025, so most projects here rework an existing building, from a 1980s office floor on US 75 to a Chinatown that began as an early 1960s strip center. The City says 40 percent of Richardson homes were built in the 1970s, so a large share of home remodels here involve houses now close to 50 years old. The Building Inspection Department permits work under the 2021 International Codes and the 2020 National Electrical Code and guarantees three business day plan review for small office and retail finish-outs.

Richardson neighborhoods and districts.

• Canyon Creek
• Richardson Heights
• Reservation
• Cottonwood Heights
• Greenwood Hills
• Highland Terrace
• Sherrill Park
• Breckinridge Park Estates
• Telecom Corridor
• CityLine
• Richardson Innovation Quarter (The IQ)
• Galatyn Park
• The CORE District
• DFW Chinatown

Richardson on the map.

Open Richardson, TX in Google Maps