Jim Schutze: “North Oak Cliff — Brooklyn But Your Parents Don’t Have to Support You”

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Crusty Jim Schutze of The Dallas Observer wrapped a very long, very sad week in Dallas history with some stuff to be actually positive about.

He didn’t come out and say it, but it’s really our real estate market:

Burdened as we are by a peculiar past, even hobbled by a certain disconnection from national progress, the fact remains that Dallas and its environs in the last decade have become a marvelous new realm, or, maybe more accurately, a couple of marvelous new realms.

Both new realms reflect changes that already took place in many other American cities 20 years ago. But they are happening here now, and these changes should make us all strongly optimistic for our future.

That peculiar past: the old way of running a city, he says, with iron fists, white iron fists. I wasn’t here in the sixties or even 1978, when Schutze says he arrived. But he is probably the most knowledgeable person in the city when it comes to race relations in Dallas. When I got here in the 1980’s and saw what people told me was a separate drinking fountain — separate for who, I asked?  Oh yeah, I had heard of those where I grew up, but had never actually seen one in Chicago, Boston or New York City. The whole concept of segregation like that was just so — so mean. I may have grown up in a Lily white Chicago suburb, but I never forgot the day my doll lost her shoes — wind blew them off — while walking down State Street in the Windy City with my parents. A kind man chased them down and returned them to me.

He happened to be black.

Schutze says he was info central this week for the out of state reporters here for a crash course in race relations, etc. They were reporting on the downtown ambush that left five of our finest dead. I’ve been cringing over this event since last Thursday night. How would it shape our city? Why Dallas? Schutze went ahead and told the out-of-towners about the skeletons (I wonder if he mentioned the name John Wiley Price), then he said something very positive:

Dallas, although late to the game of hipsterization, is developing its own culture – quite unique, I think – of young back-to-the-city urbanization hybridized with old-fashioned Dallas entrepreneurial spirit.

Here’s the thing. Nobody young moves here because it was always his dream to live within sight of the Trinity River. The gen-x-to-millenial generational spectrum coming to Dallas or staying in Dallas does so for the same basic reasons my now-geezinski generation did a third of a century ago, for opportunity, for a job, to start a business, to get a foot in the door in the underwear-model trade, whatever. To make money.

But this new wave also brings with it some wonderful qualities of tolerance and what I call geographical porosity. By that I mean they can move into what had been a poor Mexican immigrant community in North Oak Cliff, walk the streets with the Mexican families, maybe shop at some of the tiendas, even speak decent Spanish once in a while, and not just try to bulldoze everybody else who isn’t white middle class right off the edge of the world as I fear we did.

Yes, that is happening in Oak Cliff, Bishop Arts, all over South Dallas. It’s one of the hottest ‘hoods in town — just this week I toured a neighborhood nearby where there is a $12 million home and a $450,000 “small house” all in one little ‘hood.

Course, I also recall the charm of an area called Little Mexico I saw every day when I drove down Harry Hines into downtown Dallas. There may be one or two bungalows holding out, but that area has been wiped out by shiny, beautiful new high rises running several hundred a square foot.

Gentrification happens. God, at least we are not Jackson Hole.

Schutze says the “gen-x-to-millenial generational spectrum” is coming to Dallas for work, employment. If I may be so bold, I think there are other factors.

I think they are coming here for washers and dryers.

A lot of us moved here in the 1980’s from places like New York, Chicago, even LA. We came for jobs or residency programs or something that was supposed to be temporary, but then we stayed because we ended up LOVING DALLAS.

You know what we really loved? The housing.

My apartment in New York City was so small, 300 square feet I think. Size of my side of the master closet now. We moved here into a 750 square foot apartment and I was in hog heaven. When I said I wanted to buy our first home — true confessions, we were not even MARRIED yet, that’s what a Hussey I was — those back east thought I had consumed too much hot sauce. Home ownership is serious stuff and expensive! Rent, stay in an apartment. Nope, I pushed. In a year we were married, had college debt and a $79,000 mortgage.

Bankruptcy, I was sure, was just around the corner.

Then we had kids, who we hot-housed and coddled and raised with some different values than the skeletons Schutze knows of. This city has benefited from the inbound migration of three decades of outsiders. Then we let our kids traipse all over the world during summer breaks from school, where they picked up more different values. Those are some of the kids who are walking the streets with the Mexican families and going to the tiendas, maybe because the area reminds them of their Junior Year Abroad.

The others are just amazed at the bang they get for their housing buck. This blog is on a platform with the folks who own the Brownstoner in Brooklyn, part of the BlankSlate Network. I loved this recent headline:

Park Slope One-Bedroom With Juliette Balcony, Washer/Dryer on Park Block Asks $699K

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Yes, that’s $700,000 for a one bedroom. In Brooklyn. And it’s a big deal that there is an in-unit washer and dryer:

The apartment appears to be in excellent condition, with a renovated eat-in kitchen, in-unit washer/dryer, and well-maintained bathroom with new pedestal sink and Art Deco tub.

The bedroom faces the rear of the building and is “peaceful and quiet,” according to the listing, from Elizabeth Pizzulli of Corcoran.

Pets are welcome and the maintenance is $964 a month.

Like Schutze says, in Brooklyn Your Parents Have to Support You. Maybe not in North Oak Cliff.

And for $700,000, you will get a washer/dryer and live like royalty: look what $750,000 gets you at 1115 South Canterbury Court. 2663 square feet, a quarter of an acre, four bedrooms and two full baths.

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Meantime, I am still freaking out that we paid $79,000 for our first home. My Lord, had I known then what I know now, I would have bought FIVE!

 

Candy Evans, founder and publisher of CandysDirt.com, is one of the nation’s leading real estate reporters.

3 Comments

  1. Bob Stoller on July 15, 2016 at 5:04 pm

    If you grew up in or around Chicago, (as did I in the 50’s) then you had a different version of segregation. Black people could drink at the same water fountains and sit at the same soda fountains–they just could not live near you. Remember “A Raisin in the Sun”? That was how it was, in Chicago, St. Louis, New York, Boston–everywhere in the North. In some ways, Dallas has come farther along than its Northern counterparts, but we still have a ways to go.

    • Candy Evans on July 15, 2016 at 5:35 pm

      As I said, I grew up in the lily-white Chicago suburbs, not Lilly as in Lilly Pulizer. But since my mother had been raised amid discrimination — taunted for being a Hunkie i.e Romanian — she was careful to teach us to look beyond nationality and race. That’s the thing though, America is a melting pot yes but that pot was sure scalding if you weren’t in the “right” nationality. Italians were Dagos, Poles Polaks, and look at the vicious fighting on the streets of New York with the Irish. Sometimes I think humans are all savages!

      • Bob Stoller on July 16, 2016 at 2:42 pm

        Candy, the Dallasites who filled the Meyerson last Thursday night with song and hope would have proved to you that we are not all savages. From the opening of the blowing of the Shofar, the prayer by the imam, the songs of the soloists and the massed choir, through the words of the rabbi, the bishop, the spoken word poets, and our lesbian Latina sheriff, we affirmed our common humanity and we committed to move forward with hope and resolution, not with despair. If you were not there, you may find the video of this gathering on the Art&Seek website and on YouTube.

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