ForwardDallas is haunting City Hall. The City Council’s Economic Development Committee was briefed Tuesday about the long-awaited, wildly contentious update to Dallas’ land use plan, first adopted in 2006. The discussion at the committee meeting echoed the acrimonious language that has ricocheted between the walls of drab community centers during public meetings for more than two years. Advocates presented ForwardDallas as a critical way to add new housing types and set a clearer course for the city’s development. Opponents fiercely maintained that it will destroy established residential neighborhoods.
The staffers hired to execute and communicate that plan tried to temper expectations on both ends, swatting away “misinformation” while explaining the dry, boring reason that such a land use plan is necessary: there is no citywide plan guiding the decisions about how our land is used, and that has created a giant mess. ForwardDallas is not a zoning document, meaning its passage won’t rezone anything in the city. It would create another point of reference as the city considers zoning decisions in the future. It’s complicated.
But the real stakes tumbled out of two data points Tuesday. Brita Andercheck, the city’s chief data officer, said that about a third of Dallas’ land mass holds single-family homes. Despite occupying 35 percent of the city’s dirt, those homes represent just 4 percent of our total taxable value per acre. Because of lot size requirements in the zoning code, a single-family home takes up a lot of space. Meantime, Andercheck said, just .2 percent of Dallas’ land—two-tenths of a single percentage point—holds multifamily or mixed-use commercial properties. That land accounts for 40 percent of the city’s taxable value. Single-family homes are an important component of a healthy housing mix, but they alone cannot generate enough tax revenue to run the city.
I explored this upside-down equation in the April issue of D Magazine, which you can read here. Tuesday’s discussion underscored a few points about ForwardDallas that are getting lost in the hubbub over the prospect of too much density creeping into single-family neighborhoods.
Andrea Gilles, the city’s deputy director for Planning and Urban Design, attempted to steer the density conversation toward corridors and away from neighborhoods: areas near transit, land adjacent to major roads, areas presently zoned for industry near homes and churches and schools. Those are the parts of town where density will likely have the greatest impact. Gilles reiterated that “there is no intent to re-zone our single-family neighborhoods.” But the ForwardDallas recommendations do encourage analyzing whether some of those neighborhoods could support a little density. Councilmember Cara Mendelsohn—for whom the idea of any multi-unit properties in single-family neighborhoods is anathema—grilled Gilles about whether a duplex that “blends” in with its single-family neighbors would be “appropriate.”
Gilles answered like a planner. The guidance in ForwardDallas is one of many factors to consider when deciding a zoning change, she said, a process that should include analyzing whether the existing infrastructure can support such density, as well as the makeup of the neighborhood. For instance, that little density—defined in the ForwardDallas document as multifamily with no more than eight units—is considered a “secondary use” in the plan, which means that planners should be careful not to allow that sort of multifamily structure to overtake the “primary uses” of single-family detached homes, townhomes, duplexes, and triplexes.
Mendelsohn was not interested in those other factors, and she is adamant that townhomes, duplexes, and triplexes have no place in established neighborhoods. She again asked her question about whether such blending would be appropriate. Gilles said of a hypothetical duplex in a single-family neighborhood: “I am not closed off to the possibility that that would be an appropriate use there.”
That’s the sort of sound bite that scares the hell out of some people. It’s why Councilmember Paula Blackmon, who represents many of the neighborhoods east of White Rock Lake, is proposing carving out the residential component of the ForwardDallas plan. She said she believes the city should pass its guidance on environmental justice, transit-oriented development, and commercial corridors.
“We had 1.0 and it didn’t destroy single-family neighborhoods,” Blackmon said, referencing the 2006 passage of the first ForwardDallas plan. “I don’t think this one would either. I think what is happening in some neighborhoods that we’re seeing are these huge buildings that are pushing the setback and going to the height limit after they tear down a little bungalow. And that’s frustrating and we can’t do anything about it.”
Gilles has said throughout this years-long process that Dallas does not have a citywide land use guide; nor does it have design guidelines for what gets built. (Apparently, just 7 of the 40 or so recommendations in the 2006 plan were actually implemented.) That is why neighborhoods like Elm Thicket, near Love Field Airport, felt overwhelmed when boxy moderns, often built legally within the existing zoning, began towering over smaller, older cottages. Ironically, ForwardDallas would actually suggest design guidelines aimed at avoiding such neighborhood conflict.
“I think a lot of the concern was, and justifiably so, that people would be willing to think about different housing types, but they’re so distracted by the really terrible design that they’re seeing,” Gilles said. “That it is problematic for any part of the city where we do not have updated standards.”
Blackmon believes the pushback is a reflection of the distrust of government, seeing changes in their neighborhoods that they cannot control. It didn’t help matters when Blackmon joined four of her colleagues in asking staff to begin researching reducing the maximum lot size for single-family homes. Now these policy matters are tangled up in ForwardDallas, even though they’re considered separately.
“I think the memo we wrote threw everybody into a frenzy,” Blackmon said. “It wasn’t intended that that was going to be done in this document (ForwardDallas) at all. I can understand why people are fearful.”
Which is part of why she’d like to separate the residential component and continue public outreach. But the conversation around residential neighborhoods has grown unbelievably toxic. On Tuesday after the meeting, a Facebook user made a post that asked whether she could “accidentally bump” one of the city planners “with my car.”
“Run him over with my car? Over a comp plan? We just need to all take a deep breath,” Blackmon told me. “Staff do not come with the intent of fucking people over. I cannot believe that someone posted that. It breaks my heart.”
Here is what planners are trying to solve: our city is stuck with antiquated zoning that makes it difficult to do much of anything anywhere without a special zoning change. That’s why there are more 1,000 “PDs,” Planned Development Districts where developers must apply to get special permission to build. ForwardDallas provides guidance for what types of uses may be allowed and where. It does not change zoning; that process would come later, should the City Council approve this plan.
Gilles said that something called “single-use” zoning applies to most aging commercial corridors, which would be ripe for redevelopment without affecting the makeup of single-family neighborhoods. (Andercheck said her office did not know the percentage of land that’s zoned for a single use like this, in part because of all those PDs.)
“It is only zoned for commercial. It is only zoned for office,” Gilles said of those parts of town. “We need to look at these key corridors throughout the city where we can add in that residential component.”
The ForwardDallas plan is how the city wants to begin addressing those problems, by declaring that people should not have to live next to industry, that our derelict shopping centers should be allowed to transform into places where people can live, that public transit succeeds when developers are allowed to build housing and mixed-use near stations, that enormous homes shouldn’t be allowed to blot out an older bungalow, that, yes, density is important and Dallas must be intentional about where it goes. Bills are coming due, and Dallas must grow its tax base somehow.
Instead, some folks have turned ForwardDallas into a bogeyman that is terrorizing the meeting rooms of City Hall. Its future is unclear.
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