ForwardDallas Plan Advances to City Council With 10-4 Plan Commission Vote
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Following 200-plus public meetings and thousands of hours of deep dives into land use matters that will guide the future of Dallas, the City Plan Commission on Thursday made numerous last-minute amendments and recommended the ForwardDallas comprehensive land use plan to the Dallas City Council.
The vote was taken after a brief public hearing and a not-so-brief debate about the language in the plan. Commissioner Lorie Blair made the motion around 6 p.m. to approve the plan as amended. She suggested that it was not perfect, but the panel was beginning to suffer from “editing paralysis” and needed to move it forward and “let our bosses do what they get paid to do.”
“One of the things I want to make sure we recognize is that, when it comes down to single-family residential, we heard the residents,” Blair said. “We heard the community. We put in place all the protections. We rewrote [the plan], we dissected it, and we wrote it again to make sure that single-family detached had prominence. It had an area within the city that we know that we’re not going to immediately start putting in things that residents don’t want. This is a plan. This is not zoning.”
FowardDallas 2.0 will be revised by staff to incorporate the final round of CPC revisions approved Thursday, and the updated draft will be presented to the Dallas City Council’s Economic Development Committee for discussion on Aug. 5, Interim Assistant City Manager Robin Bentley said in an email to council members.
The vote was not unanimous.
Commissioners Joanna Hampton (District 2 Old East Dallas), Tom Forsyth (District 4 South Oak Cliff), Deborah Carpenter (District 6 West Dallas), and Melissa Kingston (District 14 East Dallas) voted against it.
“ForwardDallas 2.0 passed CPC tonight and will now go to the City Council,” Commissioner Kingston wrote on social media. “I voted against the plan. We spent over six hours just today making hundreds of changes that I have not seen and the public has not seen in an updated version … While I believe that there are numerous good aspects of the plan, as much time as we have spent on this plan, I decided that we owed it to the public to review the revised document before voting on it.”
Kingston’s dissenting vote came after she said she believed it was time to pass it.
“While I don’t think this plan is perfect, I also don’t think that it has the level of import that some people ascribe to it,” she said. “I think it’s time to pass it so we can move on to a number of other things that I hope bring more improvement to the city, whether it’s important zoning changes or important code amendments that really stand to impact positively the lives of the people who live here.”
Watch the July 25 City Plan Commission meeting.
Housing Needs Aren’t Being Met by Current Market
CPC Vice Chair Brent Rubin chaired the Comprehensive Land Use Plan Committee which wrote the first draft of the plan. CPC Commissioner Deborah Carpenter was vice chair of CLUP and was commended Thursday for her rigorous line editing of the document.
Rubin said Thursday he was proud of ForwardDallas, particularly how it addresses environmental justice.
“This is a very good document,” he said. “There are multiple strategies in here that are meant to address our housing shortage, including development around transit stations, mixed-use redevelopment in aging commercial areas, and looking at, ‘Can we add some additional housing in a sensitive way in our existing neighborhoods?’ Having sat on this body for over five years now, I’ve seen that none of these things is necessarily easy … I know there have been a lot of concerns expressed by people who live in single-family neighborhoods that this document will represent a significant departure from where we’ve been, but I think this body has worked long and hard to implement meaningful safeguards.”
Rubin went on to say that the housing needs of “tons of Dallas residents” aren’t being met by the current market.
“I believe this is a sensitive plan that includes a variety of strategies of how to address our housing needs,” he said. “It isn’t just addressing hypothetical future problems but it addresses an urgent problem that we have today. We are going to have some difficult discussions in the future about how we meet our housing needs but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be trying here and it doesn’t mean that our neighborhoods shouldn’t be part of the discussion.”
This story is developing. On Monday, CandysDirt.com will break down what each district plan commissioner has to say about ForwardDallas.
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April,
Thank you for your great coverage of city hall.
As a resident of Dallas and Oak Cliff, I have been monitoring the progress of Forward Dallas on a regular basis. I appreciate the hours and effort put in by all involved in the project. I am again saying to the committees and council please continue to involve the residents and keep us informed and to also develop with sensitivity to the neighborhoods and to scale. While development at the DART transit stations may happen, consider the different sizes of each station and do not overdevelop at the smaller stations.
One of the many silly statements made about safeguards in forward dallas is that they will not allow plexes in middle of neighborhoods but only alone on corner lots of single family zoned neighborhoods. A corner lot in the middle of a neighborhood is still in the middle of a neighborhood. If a block face has 10 single family homes and the two corner lots are replaced with 4 plexes then the single family zoned block ends up with 8 single family homes and 8 apartments. Every single family home neighborhood becomes 50% apartments just by allowing 4 plexes on corner lots.
The planners do not think that homeowners will care if there are new apartments on their block. Homeowners do care!
Doug, it’s inane!
Thanks for another good article! Can’t wait to see the next one on Monday.