As Opposition to ForwardDallas Rallies, Commissioners Say They Don’t Want a Watered-Down Land Use Plan

The City Plan Commission kicked off a series of workshops last week on the ForwardDallas comprehensive land use plan. They talked about density, placetypes, and parking requirements — and they acknowledged the plan has not been well-received by a contingent of residents who are concerned it will change or even destroy their long-established single-family neighborhoods. 

For what seemed like the hundredth time, city planners explained that ForwardDallas does not call for the reduction of lot sizes. Zoning and code updates are different processes outside the realm of the land use plan, officials said. 

ForwardDallas Isn’t Going to Make Everyone Happy, But Will it Address The City’s Messy Land Use History?

The plan does not recommend that developers build multiplexes on all vacant lots. No zoning changes are recommended in historic or conservation districts or individual single-family parcels. ForwardDallas does not recommend removing or regulating parking requirements. 

A public workshop on ForwardDallas with an opportunity for residents to provide feedback is set for 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday, April 18. 

Opposition to ForwardDallas

It’s not hard to find someone who doesn’t like the plan. District 12 Councilwoman Cara Mendelsohn has said she won’t vote to approve it as it stands because it doesn’t have a predominantly single-family residential placetype. 

Community residential is currently the only placetype that allows single-family as the primary use. 

CandysDirt.com reached out to landscape architect and local volunteer Melanie Vanlandingham, who has said that ForwardDallas “must be stopped in its tracks.” Vanlandingham did not respond to our request for an interview but she’s had plenty to say about the comprehensive land use plan in public meetings. 

“ForwardDallas does not include any category at all for single-family-only neighborhoods,” she wrote in a comment on this story. “Instead, staff lumps ALL residential uses together, and proposes allowing multifamily up to TEN units to be built next to ANY single-family home anywhere in the city.  This would indeed set the stage to eliminate traditional single-family neighborhoods. That empty lot near or next to you could be a multiplex if ForwardDallas proceeds as it is. Your current zoning won’t matter because Forward Dallas will have made it obsolete.”

Vanlandingham also says the plan paves the way for “more bulldozing of small, affordable homes to make space for higher profit apartments and condos.”

“Builders and developers have no incentive or inclination to build context-sensitive, less profitable small homes, and the city has no legal means to mandate affordability or design,” she said. “Staff recently admitted that Forward Dallas isn’t about affordability.”

State law requires that a city’s zoning must reflect the approved comprehensive plan, she added. 

“THIS is why staff ‘just wants to get Forward Dallas done,’ as if completing it has no legal consequence,” she said. “They know that if they can get it passed with the illusion that it would allow more discussion, they can use state law to force zoning for multifamily — everywhere — which they keep claiming they aren’t pushing. It definitely is bait-and-switch policy.”

Plan commissioners talked last week about easing “missing middle housing” into the city but acknowledged that there are areas of Dallas that aren’t suited for apartments. CPC members also have said they hear loud and clear that many neighborhoods don’t want multifamily nearby. However, the assertion that ForwardDallas is an attempt to allow 10 units on a single lot just isn’t true, planners say.

Language appears on the ForwardDallas informational webpage which has added to the confusion and mistrust of city staff, as homeowners against the plan say it supports their contention that ForwardDallas does, in fact, have something to do with zoning. 

“As ForwardDallas is adopted by the City Council, the existing zoning regulations will need to be revised to align with the priorities and objectives of the plan. This process involves revising the zoning designations of different areas of the city to match the land use placetypes identified in the plan. By doing so, zoning will become a critical tool for ensuring that development aligns with the goals and objectives set forth in ForwardDallas.”

Housing Data Related to ForwardDallas

About 35 percent of the city’s land mass is devoted to single-family detached structures, with a taxable value of $1 million per acre, according to Asheville-based Urban3. The taxable value for mixed-use properties, which compose 0.2 percent of the Dallas land mass, is $11.1 million per acre. 

Should Dallas Look at Land in Taxable Value Per Acre? Asheville Planner Wants City to Shift Perspective on Density

One topic of discussion at the April 11 CPC meeting centered around how creating additional housing adds to the tax base, generating funds that can be used to fix streets and infrastructure. 

“If you take the emotion out of it and just look at the math, the way forward seems clear,” D Magazine’s Matt Goodman wrote in an April 9 article titled You Need More Neighbors. “What gets built gets taxed. The city runs on that revenue. And right now, we need more of it. During the current fiscal year, the city anticipates generating about $1.44 billion in property tax revenue, 61 percent of which is immediately diverted to public safety. That property tax revenue equaled a little less than one-third of the city’s $3.6 billion operating budget. New properties will add a little under $28 million to the tax rolls this year.” 

A ‘Housing Catastrophe’

The City of Dallas is heading toward a housing catastrophe, said Plan Commissioner Christian Chernock.

“We really should be sounding the alarm bells,” Chernock said. “If the City of Dallas was a business on the stock market, there wouldn’t be anybody investing in it, because it looks dire. When you zoom out and you look at this long-term trend, to me, it’s really, really concerning.” 

The first ForwardDallas plan was approved in 2006. It was well-researched and poignant until the public “got a hold of it and freaked out,” Chernock said. 

“The whole plan got watered down,” he said. “It got passed and everybody felt great about it. Fast forward that policy 10 years and look where we are. My concern is we’re about to do the same thing. There’s a very well-researched land use plan that’s been presented to us.”

A small segment is yelling loudly, but they represent just a fraction of the 1.3 million people that the land use policy will affect, Chernock added. 

Plan Commissioner Melissa Kingston said planners should be “developing the city for tomorrow not for two decades ago.” 

A lot of the objection is “to the form of what’s getting built,” Kingston said. 

“I don’t think that necessarily the existence of some of this is what the issue is,” she said. “If we just take all of it out, what are we doing? If we’re not going to advance the ball, what are we doing here? Taking all this stuff out so we essentially just have 40 percent of the city’s land as single-family that is increasingly unattainable to an increasing number of the population, we’re just setting ourselves up to fail as a city … My generation is the last generation who, en masse, is going to be able to afford single-family homes in places like Dallas. If we don’t start doing things differently, we’re foreclosing that opportunity for all of the generations behind me.”