Could ForwardDallas Clean up The Messy Planning And Zoning Challenges in Oak Cliff?
Share News:
The West Oak Cliff Area Plan came about through years of public input and rewrites, billed as a way to protect residents and their property rights, taking those rights back from developers.
Now some South Edgefield residents — whose homes are adjacent to the WOCAP area — say it’s being used as a tool to allow investors to swoop in and tear down their homes, replacing them with duplexes, fourplexes, and accessory dwelling units.
In nearby Lake Cliff, a proposal to remove a ground-floor retail requirement has residents asking why, if it doesn’t work for developers, such a stipulation was put there in the first place.
There appears to be a groundswell of support at the City Council level for making things easier for developers, particularly when it comes to housing — but do residents’ wishes get overlooked in the process?
Area plans like WOCAP aren’t the law; they serve as a guide when the City Plan Commission and City Council are faced with a rezoning decision.
To add to the confusion, there are lots of plans — neighborhood plans, area plans, corridor plans, vision studies, and traffic impact analyses. They serve different purposes and some carry more weight than others.
Different Plans For Different Places
In the City of Dallas, not all plans are created equal.
The same neighbors who championed WOCAP and now have misgivings about it are thrilled with the under-review Elmwood Revitalization Plan, which encourages mom-and-pop businesses and walkability in downtown Elmwood.
The 97-page WOCAP, adopted in October is a bigger-picture document. It “provides a long-range vision for land use, urban design, transportation, mobility, infrastructure, open space, and community concerns around gentrification, displacement, and revitalization,” according to a document summary.
“The West Oak Cliff Area Plan lays out a roadmap to help ensure that existing residents will be able to remain in the neighborhood, while also working to improve quality of life and provide opportunities for future growth in designated locations,” the summary states.
Assistant Director of Planning and Urban Design Andrea Gilles clarified the difference between neighborhood plans and area plans.
“I think a neighborhood plan is good for [identifying what residents want an area to look like in the future],” she said. “I think area plans provide good guidance, especially in areas where there has not been recent land use planning or visioning. That was the case in the West Oak Cliff area. There were a bunch of authorized hearings, a bunch of city-initiated rezonings that were authorized, but we didn’t have the plans in place to talk about what kinds of uses you actually want to see in that area.”
ForwardDallas, the citywide comprehensive land use plan, currently under public review and slated for a massive overhaul and update in early 2024, will serve as a baseline guiding future land uses.
“From there, we know there are certain areas that have more fine-grained issues that we need to look at on a property-by-property basis and have more education with residents and business owners to think about how we deal with different changes,” Gilles said. “The neighborhood-plan level is a great way to do that because you can focus on the issues of a particular area.”
Area plans often deal with a multitude of diverse issues that affect a large number of neighborhoods that have different development patterns, Gilles explained.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to get down to the fine-grained issues at that scale,” she said. “I think moving forward, we’re going to be looking at doing neighborhood plans, which includes doing one, two, or three neighborhood groups together, really looking at and working through an issue. I think we’re going to try to be a little more focused in our planning efforts.”
Corridor studies also have become popular during the ForwardDallas process, as city staff reviews aging and changing corridors and the neighborhoods that immediately surround them, Gilles said.
Lake Cliff Case in Point
Lake Cliff resident Katrina Whatley told CandysDirt.com in May that she fell victim to the way zoning affects not just the area being rezoned, but the adjacent properties.
When the Oak Cliff Gateway rezoning case went through, Whatley’s building, which is next door to the boarding house where Lee Harvey Oswald spent his last days as a free man, ended up directly bordering the rezoned area. In fact, that edge went right up to her property line. Whatley’s property and several nearby are governed by the Lake Cliff Historic District overlay. The building next door was not. The developer who purchased the property next door was able to, according to the zoning enacted, build almost right up to the brick wall that separates her kitchen from someone else’s apartment balcony.
CandysDirt.com report, May 2023
Whatley started a petition opposing a proposed zoning change that would allow higher density a block away from her home, in an area bordered by E. 5th and E. 6th streets on the north and south and N. Beckley and N. Zang on the west and east.
The proposed zoning would reduce the street-level retail requirement for the developer on E. 5th and E. 6th streets and tweak the street-level use on N. Beckley Ave. to a live/work configuration or possibly townhomes. The project would bring a seven-story multifamily development that would include 253 residential units that would conform to the existing zoning.
“If the city council approves the developer’s request to remove the retail requirement, it could send a signal that the developers who want more profits come before the benefit to the neighborhood,” Whatley told CandysDirt.com in May.
The rezoning has not gone before the City Plan Commission yet but can be tracked here. It begs the question: if you can’t make ground-floor retail work as called for in the planning process, might the plan be flawed?
A lot of vacant retail space exists in Bishop Arts because of the ground-floor requirement. It’s not leased because it’s not affordable, critics say. So why can’t that space be used for studio apartments? Are we holding too firmly to plans developed with good intentions but without consideration to an ever-changing housing market?
Developer Reid Beucler of Slate Properties said his firm isn’t asking for any changes in density or height; they simply want to remove the retail requirement on “side streets” because the city’s required parking allotment could worsen traffic.
Gilles said in the case of a proposal for first-floor retail that turns out to not be feasible or affordable, “that’s when you have to look at amendments to the zoning.”
“A plan can recommend that, and if you don’t follow up with the appropriate zoning, you’re in a bind because you don’t have the regulations in place to be consistent with the plan,” she said. “Or you did follow up with the rezoning and as projects come in, you start to figure out, ‘Oh, shoot, this actually doesn’t work,’ that’s where you have to take a look at the zoning again and potentially make adjustments if it’s consistently not working.”
Chad West, the Dallas City council member who represents North Oak Cliff and the Bishop Arts District, recently proposed reducing the city’s minimum lot size in order to create more “missing middle housing.”
The councilman acknowledges that while it may look like an effort to tear down single-family homes to make way for high-density duplexes and fourplexes, that’s not his intent. He said he’d like city staff to craft the resolution in a way that conveys that just because a mix of housing would be allowable by right, that’s not a free pass to wipe out single-family homes.
Unintended Consequences of The West Oak Cliff Area Plan
A majority of the residents who live in the South Edgefield neighborhood supported the West Oak Cliff Area Plan.
West championed the plan and was proud of the effort to gather resident feedback. Dozens of bilingual community meetings were held, and more people responded to a WOCAP survey than a citywide Racial Equity Plan.
Elmwood resident Christine Hopkins, a founding member of the West Oak Cliff Coalition, said WOCAP set forth some good goals of protecting family-owned minority businesses, preserving the affordability of neighborhoods, and preventing displacement.
“The city needs to put action behind those goals in order for there to really be a positive outcome when it comes to the implementation of those plans,” she said. “The implementation only comes when zoning changes take place or when anti-displacement programs are put into place.”
Teardowns are happening citywide and would happen whether or not an area plan existed, Hopkins said.
“Unfortunately the city does not do what it should do to protect largely minority areas of this city from that type of predatory real estate practice nor from displacement pressures,” she said.
David Dockery, president of the South Edgefield Neighborhood Association, said he surveyed neighbors during the WOCAP public input process and found that the majority did not want increased density.
“So we expressed to the city what the majority wanted,” he said.
They’re now hoping to have an authorized hearing in the fall to address some of their concerns and get them on the record. They’re not interested in pursuing a conservation district — which would make it easier to prevent teardowns — because the homes and lot sizes are too diverse and such an attempt has failed in nearby Wynnewood, Dockery said.
“[The city is] trying to increase housing density within a half-mile radius of [the Tyler/Vernon DART station],” he said. “None of us want triplexes or fourplexes in the neighborhood.”
But just because an idea has been documented doesn’t mean it will hold water when it comes to the horseshoe.
In the case of the Garland Road Vision Study in East Dallas, a written document didn’t matter when it came time for elected and appointed bodies to cast their votes.
Lochwood residents opposed Ojala Holdings’ plans for a mixed-income housing development, saying the height didn’t comply with a 36-foot maximum set forth in the vision study. The housing proposal, funded through the Public Facility Corporation financing structure, was approved unanimously by CPC and City Council.
It’s unclear today whether that project is actually moving forward. Lochwood residents say they haven’t seen any signs of construction or heard from Ojala representatives in several months.
A Look at The Elmwood Revitalization Plan
A plan that appears to have garnered widespread support is the recently initiated Elmwood Revitalization Plan, which covers an area adjacent to South Edgefield.
The plan addresses the downtown portion of the historic Elmwood neighborhood, parts of which were planned in the 1920s.
It’s neither an area plan nor a neighborhood plan, Gilles explained.
“One of the things we’ve had to do through ForwardDallas is weed through all the different types of plans and try to be very consistent and deliberate about what plans get adopted by City Council and what kinds of documents or processes are just sort of strategizing documents,” she said. “When I say a neighborhood or a corridor plan, that’s city-initiated and led in partnership with the communities. Those will have a land use component that could potentially have zoning implications or recommendations for infrastructure improvements where we’re seeking resources from different departments in the city.”
A revitalization plan could go through Economic Development or Housing and Neighborhood Revitalization, or not be city-initiated at all, Gilles said.
Elmwood residents have said they don’t want their neighborhood to become Uptown or Bishop Arts, with high-rise apartments replacing their single-family charm.
Downtown Elmwood along South Edgefield Avenue offers a walkable, locally-owned business district that the residents want to preserve.
“They’re looking at one particular issue,” Gilles said. “When we do a neighborhood plan, that’s when we look at land uses, transportation infrastructure, housing, environmental concerns, and things like that. We really go into the weeds on all those issues and get lots of different departments involved to have conversations about how we’re going to address the issues that have been raised in a particular area. A revitalization plan can be a strategizing document or specifically attached to some funding source.”
The Elmwood Revitalization calls for a reduction in parking regulations and fosters walkability by encouraging sidewalks, marked bike lanes, and center islands on Edgefield. Residents say they are hopeful it will bring an end to the vacant storefronts.
This is the third in a series on housing and development issues in the Elmwood and South Edgefield neighborhoods of Oak Cliff.
