Dallas is Really an Outpost Experiencing Growing Pains, but We Need a Plan (or Two)!

I went to a neighborhood meeting for an un-named neighborhood several months ago. Some of the residents wanted to close off streets to a busy, busy street nearby to put a halt to wild-driving trucks and cars crashing into structures and gouging lawns on corner lots. It’s apparently a huge problem. I went because I was thinking of maybe moving into the neighborhood, and also to get to know another part of Dallas for this blog.

It was a pretty level-headed meeting, but it had moments, many moments. One woman kept jumping up to say that what was being proposed was a government conspiracy. Later, the meeting organizer called her “our special child”.

When you have neighborhood meetings in any Dallas neighborhood, anywhere actually, there are a whole lot of those “special children” popping up to say that the NSA or Big Brother or some boogeyman is responsible for all the changes. It’s bad, really bad to change things up.

Yet change is the only constant thing in life. That’s why you simply must, must read this excellent opinion piece by Robert (Bobby) Abtahi, a Dallas attorney who is  vice chairman of the Dallas City Plan Commission. He is also a solidly great guy who I have known since he was 15 years old, the kind of guy you would really want to date your daughter, because he did! It’s called “Why Dallas Needs a Real Discussion About Density.” See, I am writing these stories about Behind the Pink Wall, Preston Center, and now the razing of the Saltillo Apartments on Cole in Oak Lawn that will bring us incredible new options in high rise living in Dallas.I’m writing and hearing a chorus of similar NIMBY concerns across the city:

1. These buildings are too tall, too dense.

2. These developments will lower my property value

3. These developments will bring in more people and traffic.

4. Oh yes: light reflecting, on something

All this, and Dallas property values have been going nowhere but up since we moved here in 1980.

Read what Robert says —

Doomsday traffic scenarios, the threat of lower property values and the destruction of our neighborhoods are all shouted from the rooftops — as if it is any developer’s goal to destroy our neighborhoods. Arguments for increased tax revenue and an infusion of new people are drowned out by the noise of loud knee-jerk reactions.

Perhaps the concept of density is so new to our city that we are ignorant to the fact that not all density is created equal. To get a truly quality development, it should be dense, sustainable, walkable and, most of all, people-friendly. When we get all those factors in the right mix, we end up with the quality communities that people and tax dollars flock to.

I told Veletta Forsythe Lill last week at Rockitecture that I wished Dallas could be as linear as Chicago, my home-town. It is impossible to get lost in Chicago: the city is laid out in a simple grid formation with Madison Avenue creating the dividing line between north and south sides of the city, and State Street dividing the east and west sections. You can always find east when it’s cloudy because of the gusts from lake Michigan. Downtown Dallas is lopsided, angular, has way too many one-way streets and no-way streets. Well, Veletta pointed out, we didn’t have a fire that made us re-do everything.

Robert is telling us that now, we do have a fire, with re-zoning. I would add that it is not only a chance to re-create downtown Dallas, but also the neighborhood depots such as Preston Center and Valley View. Think of what we could do with the revenue from Luke Crosland’s Highland House to that fugly parking lot squat in the center of Preston Center, two-stories, appealing only to skateboarders and an ingress/egress disaster. Preston center was a little depot, a corner that just happened to evolve with zero planning:

It’s time for people to stop fearing those rezoning signs and realize what they really are. They’re a chance for a mulligan, an opportunity for us to have a discussion of what we want our city to look and feel like. A chance to have wider sidewalks, new people and new businesses.

Instead of thinking about traffic, think of vibrancy. If that doesn’t work for you, think of tax revenue. Think about the potholes that will be fixed, and the police and firefighters who will be hired with the increased taxes from more dense development.