The residents of Dallas versus change

Ask any resident of Dallas whether their neighborhood should change and I'd be willing to bet 99 out of every 100 will say "No, leave it just the way it is." I think that attitude is short-sighted and unrealistic because an environment is going to change whether you want it to or not. If residents simply fight change surrounding their neighborhoods, the changes that take place naturally are usually detrimental to those neighborhoods.

You'll find classic examples of this in Lake Highlands and along Garland Road, two areas I am more familiar with than other parts of the city. For many years, the people of Lake Highlands fought to preserve the integrity of the neighborhoods by resisting change. As a result, the area slowly deteriorated to where parts of it, especially those areas to the north near Skillman and Whitehurst, are among the most crime-infested in the city today. The people of Lake Highlands wanted boutique shops to dot their neighborhood and to keep the so-called "big box retail outlets" out. Yet the neighborhood, until recently, refused the type of housing that would cater to this kind of retail, the kind of housing that is now so prevalent in Uptown (where, not coincidentally, exactly the kind of retail Lake Highlands covets is flourishing).

There are certain realities the people of Dallas need to deal with and accept. (1) Dallas is a city, an urban area and we can no longer treat many of the residential neighborhoods within this urban area as though they were suburbs. (2) Dallas is landlocked. It cannot expand beyond its presents city limits because it is completely surrounded by other incorporated cities. (3) It is estimated that all available land in Dallas will have structures on it in about a quarter of a century.

So what does the city do then? Does it put a padlock on the door and say "Sorry, no vacancy. No more people allowed"? Or does it try to continue to grow?

If the growth is the preferable option -- and I hope it is -- but there is no available land to accommodate that growth, then there are only two directions to go: up or down. Down doesn't seem like such a great idea. I don't think pining for an underground abode is what Bob Dylan really had in mind when he wrote "Subterranean Homesick Blues."

That was one of the reasons I was so dismayed a year or so ago when short-sighted residents around White Rock Lake shot down a proposal to build a 25-or-so-story condominium complex along Garland Road. The sole reason they opposed the project was that it would change the nature of their neighborhood. Yes it would and probably for the better. The top floor residences in that complex were going to list for at least $1 million so that right there says something about the type of new neighbors that would be moving in. Plus, I believe, these new residents would demand nearby retail services that would further improve the Garland Road gateway (luxury furniture stores, restaurants, clothing stores, specialty food stores, etc.)--retail services that have been crowded out of Garland Road now by the dollar stores, the tattoo parlors and low-rent consignment stores.

Wake up, Dallas! The high-rises are coming. There is no way around it. You are living in a city!

I bring all this up right now because a similar fight may be brewing in the Lakewood area and Rick Wamre, the publisher of the community Advocate magazines, has a marvelously insightful account of it on his Backtalk Lakewood blog. Rick goes into this in great detail but the upshot is that Whole Foods wants to put in a store where the old Minyard's used to be at Abrams and Gaston. But the store is in a Planned Development District that has rules concerning setbacks, rules that compel retailers to place their front entrances close to the street. The idea was not to create a strip shopping mall atmosphere with large parking lots in front.

The current structure already has an exemption to those setback requirements, hence the parking lot in front of the store. That exemption is grandfathered which would protect Whole Foods if it simply wanted to remodel the existing building.

But a simple remodeling job is apparently not what Whole Foods has in mind. It wants an outlet with more square footage than the present building and something that looks like its outlet in the Preston Forest shopping center.

Aha, but this means change and in typical Dallas neighborhood fashion, there's a host of Lakewood folks who are going to fight it. Not because Whole Foods won't improve the neighborhood, because, like the condominium proposal for Garland Road, it would. They are opposing a variance simply because it's different, a change in the way things have always been done around there. Mr. Wamre is saying such opposition would be a mistake. He writes:

"Whole Foods has put forth plans for a striking new building with amenities that will set a good tone for future development in and around Lakewood, and if we shoot it down here and now, we'll definitely be making it clear to future developers that even though we welcome them to the neighborhood, they'd better not try to do anything that is too far afield from what's already here."

There's a lesson there for a lot of other areas of Dallas as well.