Michael Amonett: North Oak Cliff Residents Don’t Want Rezoning at Clarendon and Edgefield

By Michael Amonett
CandysDirt.com Contributor

Thursday’s community meeting about rezoning Clarendon Drive and Edgefield Avenue in Oak Cliff branded the intersection as a historic “trolley stop.” But it never was that. The streetcar (it wasn’t a trolley) didn’t stop or even run along Clarendon or Edgefield. It was on Burlington Boulevard two blocks away. Much of the meeting was spent telling the 1939 Winnetka Elementary auditorium of about 50 residents other things that weren’t entirely true either. They were well aware of it.

West Oak Cliff Area Plan Approved, Giving Residents More Control Over New Development

Here’s a little background. The Edgefield Clarendon Authorized Hearing area spans 2.13 acres and consists of seven commercial properties featuring an auto service center, restaurants, a convenience store, and small-scale vacant retail and office spaces, according to city documents. Based on the feedback obtained from the West Oak Cliff Area Plan meetings, this particular intersection needs many improvements including infrastructure such as new sidewalks and streetscape. As a result, the project will explore potential infrastructure improvements and urban design standards to align future developments with the surrounding neighborhood context.

City planners told the crowd on Thursday that they were there because the West Oak Cliff Area Plan had passed the Dallas City Council unanimously and it was now time to implement the plan by changing the zoning. The City Council passed the area plan on Oct. 26, 2022. The most unanimous feeling Thursday was that residents didn’t want the plan or zoning. 

Planners acknowledged they’d heard overwhelmingly from residents that they didn’t feel part of the conversation and they weren’t happy with the results. 

“Please don’t ask anything about the West Area Oak Cliff Plan tonight,” the planners said. “That’s over. We aren’t talking about that tonight. Tonight we are talking about zoning to make the goals of the plan a reality.”  

Several versions of this request came at least 10 or more times throughout the meeting. With each repetition, the humming in the crowd got louder and louder. Kind of like when someone irritates a beehive. The bees try to warn you until they just aren’t having it anymore. 

City of Dallas Q&A directives (taken verbatim from a slide):

• Write your questions on the comments card and give it to staff.
• Questions should be pertinent/relevant to the topic of discussion (Zoning).
• No personal attacks on staff, community leaders, a resident, elected or appointed officials.
• No questions about the WOCAP planning process as that process is already completed and we are now on the plan implementation.

After staff picked the questions they liked, the holy stack was taken to the front. As a consolation for not being allowed to speak their own words out loud, one lucky attendee was chosen from each row. The winner was allowed to come up and read someone else’s question that staff had determined could be safely asked in public.

About five questions were asked. An interpreter was in the corner for Spanish-speaking guests but the crowd was almost 80% Hispanic and after an argument about time, each question was allowed to be answered both in English and Spanish. This was about when the beehive fell off the tree. Everyone remembered they were in America and could speak out loud about their neighborhood if they wanted to.

Some reasons given as to why you don’t know how good this is for you:

• We know you don’t want it but change is coming anyway. The city wants to help.
• We absolutely hear you and what you think is important but we have other things we must consider like the plan we passed that you don’t like.
• You can’t have today’s uses in these old buildings. They just don’t work (Bishop Arts is literally a National Register District of old buildings).
• You’re in competition with other area nodes. If we don’t do this, investors will go there.(It’s hard to see how someone thought this would help).
• You say you like it now but there are other areas that said that and they fell behind and are no longer desirable. We should change it now while you like it.
• You say you are worried about your already high taxes increasing like other areas we have upzoned but don’t believe what you see, it’s the market not zoning.

I would ask each of you to substitute ForwardDallas for WOCAP in this real-life example of how zoning is implemented in Dallas. They start the meeting with a timeline of how we got to today. Tomorrow, today will be added to that timeline and so on and so on until a council turns Thursday night’s train wreck into “community engagement” they can get behind unanimously. This will happen all the time and you and your neighbors will not only be tired from working all day, you’ll be mad that someone is pissing on your leg and telling you it’s raining. Gaslighting is an overused term but it’s most definitely applicable here

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Michael Amonett is a third-generation Oak Cliff resident, former Dallas Landmark commissioner, former president of Heritage Oak Cliff, and former chair of the Dallas County Trail and Preserve Board.