Who’s Afraid of ForwardDallas? These Residents Say You Should Be
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Who’s afraid of a little ol’ land use plan? Well, for starters, a resident who has a five-story apartment building overlooking her backyard. An architect who thinks the plan should be scrapped and the process restarted from scratch. A Park and Recreation Board member who doesn’t want multiplexes in single-family neighborhoods. A woman who lives near White Rock Lake and doesn’t think neighborhood associations have had a seat at the table when it comes to “initiatives that could radically change the character of their subdivisions,” to name a few.
The ForwardDallas 2.0 comprehensive land use plan is an update of a document originally drafted and adopted in 2006. It doesn’t govern zoning but it sets a vision for the future that includes a granular look at housing, something not everyone agrees on. Single-family homeowners have been pitted against affordable housing advocates as they’ve debated the best location and type of dwellings to address the Dallas housing crisis.
The Comprehensive Land Use Committee and the City Plan Commission have sliced and diced the document, and another big round of revisions was made at a Sept. 3 meeting of the Dallas City Council’s Economic Development Committee.
ForwardDallas 2.0 is now headed to the full City Council for a public hearing on Sept. 25.
Katrina Whatley
Lake Cliff resident Katrina Whatley bought a duplex on North Beckley Avenue almost 20 years ago. She says she’s been through the wringer as a five-story apartment building was built adjacent to her shared property line and is now about 40 percent leased.
Whatley is not against multifamily housing (she lives in a duplex and rents out the other half) and acknowledges that developers built the project next to her home without circumventing city codes or zoning regulations. In fact, the project was built by right, meaning it didn’t require a rezoning. It’s been zoned multifamily since the neighborhood-driven 800-acre Oak Cliff Gateway rezoning was approved about 10 years ago under the leadership of former District 1 Councilman Scott Griggs.
The ForwardDallas land use plan couldn’t and wouldn’t have stopped it or enabled it, Whatley says. However, the homeowner maintains that her situation is about height, density, and neighborhood compatibility, all of which have been discussed at length over the past several months as the ForwardDallas update has made its way through the review process. Whatley says it’s her responsibility to ensure that her neighbors know their rights and find their voices.
“Clearly everything that has happened to me is not because of ForwardDallas, but I can see it happening to other people,” she said. “People need to be aware of what’s going on. The only reason I knew about this city block coming down and an apartment building coming up is because I live within the 500-foot notification area. It’s become such a large part of my life dealing with this building, and I don’t want other people to have to go through that.”
Whatley, a real estate agent, said the construction project damaged her property and cost her a ton of money. She had to replace her roof. Eight balconies hang over her backyard, making privacy nonexistent. She frequently picks up cigarette butts that have been tossed off those balconies into her yard.
“Basically they won when they started construction,” Whatley said. “They took out my backyard fence without telling me, without asking me.”
The developers say they’ve spent at least $10,000 on landscaping and a new sidewalk. They say they initially offered to pay for new shingles for Whatley’s roof and eventually agreed to replace the whole thing but negotiations fell apart when Whatley refused to take down negative Google reviews about the building.
In a separate matter, Whatley took a petition to the City Plan Commission on June 6 and said she was “scoffed at” and “mansplained” by officials on the appointed board while attempting to fight a developer’s request to remove a ground-floor retail requirement.
“Because they were already OK to tear the whole thing down, the petition was asking to let the neighborhood have the retail at the bottom,” Whatley said. “The retail is not as lucrative as residential and it’s hard to fill, but they knew the zoning on this property when they bought it. The developers expected to just change it and I don’t like that.”
In a social media post last week, Whatley wrote that some of her neighbors “are not getting it.”
“And I don’t blame you because you have not lived it,” she said on Facebook. “This is not anti-apartments. That is just plain idiotic and a world away from the real topic. When you build this close to someone’s house, damage occurs. My property has been damaged from the backyard fence … to the front sidewalk that was busted up with their heavy machinery … I am just a person trying to save others from what happened/is happening to me. Go on and hate if you want. If you want the truth, ask.”
Rudy Karimi
Rudy Karimi, the District 14 Park and Recreation Board appointee, joined the fight against ForwardDallas several months ago and has been a frequent critic of the plan on social media. In a phone interview with CandysDirt.com last week, Karimi praised the compromises offered as protection for single-family neighborhoods by Councilman Paul Ridley but said he’s still not satisfied.
Karimi said he doesn’t want a land use plan that acts as a blanket policy to allow townhomes, duplexes, and triplexes in all single-family neighborhoods. To that end, such development should not be listed as secondary uses in the single-family residential placetype, he explained.
“I don’t think it’s enough until the matrix is updated,” Karimi said. “As long as I see the dot that says these things are secondary, I don’t think it’s good enough. The language that Ridley put in place is what we’ve been looking for this whole time, but until I see it in that matrix that tells me this is allowed and this is not allowed, I don’t like secondary. I think that’s still ambiguous.”
The likelihood of multiplexes being constructed in the middle of single-family neighborhoods is “slim to none,” Karimi acknowledged, but clearly the land use plan is being used as a political tool as 11 of the 14 Dallas City Council members are likely seeking re-election in May.
“This will absolutely make voters into single-issue voters, no doubt about it,” Karimi said. “A voter who voted for you in 2023 that turned against you in 2025 is a 2 to 1 hit against you. It’s worse than a new voter … I’m taking my vote away from you now and I’m giving it to your opponent. That’s a double punch in the face.”
Karimi acknowledged that misinformation has been spread during the comprehensive land use plan update but added that if ForwardDallas goes through as it stands today, it’s going to be up to the residents to fight zoning cases in their neighborhoods.
“Under the passage of this plan, instead of developers having to justify these plans to the city, neighbors will have to justify their objections,” Karimi said. “Put another way, it’s my job now to go defend my [property] as a single-family homeowner.”
Bob Ikel
Bob Ikel, an architect, developer, land planner, and real estate broker, has questioned everything from the expense (about $650,000 in consulting fees) to the procedure by which the ForwardDallas 2.0 plan was pushed through.
We outlined some of Ikel’s ideas in this story, including a letter he sent to Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson and City Council members.
In his latest email, sent Sept. 11, Ikel suggests that ForwardDallas is flawed and the city should address its 90,739 acres of unused space — comprising 37% of the city’s total land area.
“Dallas has a unique opportunity to address both housing shortages and urban revitalization,” Ikel wrote.
Specifically, the architect suggests:
- Currently, 24% of the Dallas Central Business District is allocated to parking lots. This prime real estate could be repurposed to accommodate over 13,000 multifamily units, assuming a density of 40,000 units per square mile.
- Additionally, there are 516 acres of multifamily-zoned land in Dallas currently listed for sale, which could potentially house up to 100,000 new multifamily units. 83% of these 516 acres is located in areas with a density lower than the Dallas average of 3,841 residents per acre, where higher density development might be more appropriate.
- 139 square miles of Dallas vacant land in Dallas is not currently listed for sale. Transforming this vacant land into housing and other uses could address the region’s growing demand and foster sustainable urban growth and economic vitality.
Davina Rhine
Davina Rhine, a representative of Reinhardt Neighborhood Group, has kept a fairly low profile during the ForwardDallas discussion.
In a lengthy email to Councilwoman Paula Blackmon in early September, Rhine asked that the ForwardDallas vote be delayed to late fall.
“There are some significant vulnerabilities in the ForwardDallas plan that undermine both the promoted goal of attainable housing (affordable) while also in the name of having the potential to seriously undermine the current fabric of long-established single-family neighborhoods throughout Dallas,” Rhine said. “Neighborhoods created, developed, and maintained by the residents through lots of effort, sacrifice, expense, and time guided by the foundation of family-centered values (left, center, and right). Neighborhoods [that] no one would want to live in without the work we have done to make them so and make them attractive to small businesses and development.”
Rhine and other D9 neighborhood leaders met Friday with representatives from the Dallas Housing Coalition to discuss potential areas of agreement regarding ForwardDallas and how the Coalition could work better with neighborhoods. Rhine told CandysDirt.com that the meeting went well, but more time is needed to address concerns.
What will happen at the Dallas City Council public hearing on Sept. 25? Stay tuned to CandysDirt.com.
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My first-ring suburb has announced a Forward plan and is reaching out to residents with a survey. Hearing “Forward” in the title is already making me nervous. Latest branding thing, I guess.
Which suburb is that?
I will add that the developer did not only request that MY FRIENDS take down their comments (I had not made a google review at that time) in exchange for fixing the damages they did, but that I had to agree that I would never talk about my past, present, or future issues with them. I refused to sell my soul on that one. Or ask my friends to silence themselves. Nope.
And that “$10,000” they paid to fix my busted up sidewalks looks terrible because they did not try to match the existing color and just used what they were already laying down for their new sidewalk.
And – yea – the lit cigarette butts thrown off their balconies are a whole new level.
I’m still not sure how paying for damage you caused to someone else’s property can be predicated on the person not saying anything negative about you. That doesn’t make any sense. You’re allowed to speak out about your experience. If they damaged your property, they need to fix it. End of story. They don’t get to dictate terms. If I slam into your car, I have to pay for the damages. I don’t get to tell you I will only pay for the damages if you agree to not warn other people about what a horrible driver I am so they can stay away.
I agree. How is a google review or any opinion post related to the actual monetary damage you’ve acknowledged is your responsibility? The damage to Ms. Whatley’s home should be addressed immediately without restrictions placed on her freedom of speech (or those of her friends).
Do what’s right Larkspur/developer and stop playing games.
Forward Dallas is consistent with UN Agenda 2030 and “Smart 15 minute cities.” We are told that increased housing density is required to lower housing cost and required for population growth. In terms of trends, neither is required going forward.
1) The housing bubble and the resulting prices are falling. I receive real estate updates from areas outside of Dallas in order to facilitate escape from the Great Blue H*ll-hole known as Dallas. Every day I’m bombarded with emails showing price reductions. In Dallas, populated with clueless liberals, this has yet to occur but soon will. Sell while you can and escape the open air prison and open air psych ward Dallas will become once the UN takeover is complete.
2) Birth rates and the ability of men and women to conceive is plummeting in highly-vaccinated countries such as the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, Japan and elsewhere due to the Covid-19 mRNA “vaccination.” In Australia for example the birth rate has fallen by about 70% post-vax. The “vax” attacks testes and ovaries intentionally. It was created to depopulate.
See: Japan Warns Vaccine COVID Vaccines Causing Global Population Collapse: https://www.brighteon.com/0ddf8251-b6a1-46cf-94c1-11ca29d73aac
3) The excess death rate is skyrocketing based on both rock-solid insurance actuarial data and observation. Ed Dowd has written about this considerably. In the insurance domain, what was originally the healthiest cohort, employed persons approximately age 25-45, now has an excess death rate upwards of 40% and being highly-vaccinated, in order to be employed, is the least healthiest. Died suddenly and disability are the “new normal.” Insurance actuarial data does not lie. Why are insurance company CEO’s not being vocal about this? Because they mandated the shots for their own employees and face a huge liability exposure.
Those with eyes that can see observe other disturbing trends. A small-town sleepy cemetery I drive by while running errands has almost doubled in area since the vax rollout. They are breaking new ground, literally and figuratively daily. There are usually two to three funerals there when I pass by. I see the graveside tents setup when there used to be none or maybe one.
My daughter is a trained professional singer who provides entertainment but also does weddings and funerals. She now does 3 or more funerals each week and the deceased are dying younger than she’s ever seen.
So with global population collapse in the developed world who will occupy all of these high density homes?
UN replacement migrants and gang members in high density housing will be your new neighbor if you don’t die from the vaccination or get killed (or eaten) by them.Your future in “Forward Dallas” will look like Springfield Ohio today.
There’s an easy way to defeat ForwardDallas, just sue the city council. Here in Austin Bill Bunch and Bill Aleshire are 6-0 in lawsuits against the Austin city council, by simply pointing out how strict Texas law is, in this case, on rezoning.
The way Texas law is currently written, specifically section 211.006(d), simply changing the definitions of existing zoning classifications is not allowed, because it effectively rezones thousands of parcels overnight, which bypasses the notice-protest-supermajority process required by law.
It works in big cities in other states because they don’t have the same onerous property owner protections, but it runs afoul of the law in Texas. Easy win if a suit is brought.