Drive around East Dallas and Lakewood, and they seem to be everywhere — next to a vet, in back of a Mexican restaurant, tucked behind the intersection of Garland and Abrams roads, along lower Greenville.
No, they aren’t notices for Crime Watch meetings. What they are, in fact, are townhouses and condominiums, and they have been going up for the past 18 months in parts of the neighborhood that used to be bottle-strewn vacant lots, run-down rent houses, and abandoned retail. Developers and builders who once thought of East Dallas as nothing more than the place between downtown and LBJ have put up more townhouses in the last year and a half than they did in the first eight years of the decade.
“What’s going on across the country as well as in Dallas is an urban renaissance,” says Steve Kanoff, a partner and executive vice president of Southwest Properties Group, Inc., a company that’s turning historic warehouses downtown into upscale loft apartments. “The ‘burbs are pretty vanilla, really; and there are more and more people who want to live in more interesting, less homogeneous spaces that offer more freedom.”
Yet this new development—the real estate people call it in-filling—has brought with it a new set of concerns. Yes, the development has raised property values and made a house in the M Streets or Lakewood more valuable. But will long-time residents, who kept faith with the neighborhood when others abandoned it, be priced out of their homes? Will the charm and character of their surroundings be buried by a wave of Village-like in-fill, their unique aspects lost amid cookie-cutter marketing and development?
That’s the question in back of the recent controversy over building an Albertson’s supermarket at Live Oak and Fitzhugh. It framed the dilemma facing East Dallas and Lakewood succinctly: How much — and what kind — of development is enough? After years of wishing for, and working towards, recovery, and just when they were beginning to benefit from it, can we afford to be choosy about how it comes?
Getting better all the time
That things have been getting better in East Dallas is undeniable. Realtor and community activist Joan Snider sold a house in Junius Heights in 1995 for $28,000; two years later, it sold for $59,000. It went on the market again, after restoration, for $85,000.
Meanwhile, the average time that a house in Lakewood spends on the market has fallen from 104 days in 1995 to 60 days at the end of 1998. And it’s not just the market for houses that’s running red-hot: sales of condos, townhouses, and lofts have also taken off. In-filling, which every available square foot in desirable neighborhoods, helped the townhome/condo/loft market rise 15 percent in the first half of 1998 in Dallas, and the average price of such units rose almost as fast, by 11percent to more than $95,000. Even then, they are still less expensive than the price of a new home for one of the few times in Dallas real estate history, and that makes them even more attractive.
Those townhomes next to the vet clinic were snapped up almost immediately despite an asking price of more than $200,000. More are going up across the street.
In one respect, says David Stocks, an independent area real estate broker who lives and works in East Dallas, this development isn’t new.
“Urban pioneering — a return to the city from the suburbs — was well underway in the early ‘80s,” he says. “The areas to the south of Lakewood proper, which have always been mixed-use and close to poorer neighborhoods, did really well throughout the boom times. As an urban pioneer moving into these neighborhoods, you got a lot for your money, particularly in the area of aesthetics, and sales climbed up until 1985. Unfortunately, the collapse of ‘86 brought a huge retraction in spending behavior and the area just lost momentum.”
What is new is that the resurgence came so strongly and so quickly, and caught so many people unawares. With this boom comes a potential bust, the threat of untrammeled and inappropriate development. People fear being priced out of areas they’ve lived in for years, and new construction often changes not only the cost, but the appearance of surrounding property.
In Junius Heights, for example, homes are springing up that would fit right in Plano or Colleyville — brick houses with big picture windows and a one-car garage out in front. But they are gratingly inappropriate in a neighborhood full of wooden houses built in the 1920s and 1930s.
“The aesthetics of an area, the rhythm of appearance, is very important,” says Joan Snider, an area Realtor and long-time member of the Junius Heights Neighborhood Association. “East Dallas was laid out very much like a village, along trolley lines; uncontrolled development threatens that village feel.”
Hence the uproar over the Albertson’s. Those scummy apartment buildings it would replace have been scummy for more than a decade, and no one wanted to develop them. Why is the property so hot now?
Urban geography
The answer lies in what urban planners and sociologists call anchors. In the downturn in the mid-1980s, Lakewood proper was hurt, but not as badly as neighborhoods to the south and west. It was stabilized by things like the Lakewood shopping center, the Lakewood Country Club, and White Rock Lake. Says Stocks: “Those are the kinds of entities that legitimize neighborhoods as middle-class investment opportunities.”
Other neighborhoods were long on wood floors and attractive architecture, but lacked these stabilizing centers. As their market values fell, which they did, the perception of risk rose, first in an economic sense, then in a very personal one. Each of the perceptions fed the other in a classic vicious circle.
What countered it, oddly enough, had little to do with the neighborhoods themselves. Changes were going on around the periphery. Deep Ellum changed from a mostly deserted, semi-seedy artist’s haven to a chic, fashionable entertainment center and desirable place to live. The expansion of Baylor Medical Center, particularly the establishment of the Landry Center, helped nail down the southern border of East Dallas. To the west, City Place turned a ratty, intimidating neighborhood into a well-lit consumer center with a movie theater and a shopping center.
These legitimizing islands slowly began to work against the economic downturn and the perceptions that had fueled them. People came to go to a movie or shop or work out or eat dinner and liked what they saw. These people from outside – who had believed the perceptions – got a first-hand look at the area, and saw it in a completely different way. It wasn’t dangerous; it was funky.
Kanoff says that in his experience, people will pay a premium for more interesting living quarters. “In almost every part of Dallas, upscale [townhouse and condo] rents greatly exceed the costs of the available housing around them,” he says.
Hence a six-figure townhouse next to a vet.
We were here first
But what happens to everyone who doesn’t want to be next to a townhouse or a movie theater or a restaurant?
That’s the situation facing homeowners up and down Greenville Avenue, where residents have experienced first-hand the down side of our neighborhood’s growth.
“It’s been terrible,” says Cheryl Kellis, who lives near lower Greenville and has seen a half-dozen trendy bars and nightclubs open in the past year. She tells stories – echoed by others up and down the street from Ross to Mockingbird — of late-night concerts, bumper-to-bumper traffic, and drunken customers vomiting and urinating in their yards.
“There are two houses down the street from me,” Kellis says. “They’re zoned residential, but now we’ve got developers trying to get the zoning changed to [commercial retail] and talking about offering $80,000 a lot. The deal is that if you give these people an inch, they’ll take 6,000 miles. You can’t trust ‘em.”
But residents don’t have too many other choices. Dallas has never been known for planning its development, and zoning laws are usually the only limits imposed on developers. If a project matches the zoning (or comes reasonably close), it is almost always approved. On lower Greenville, for example, the Palace nightclub stands on the site of an abandoned church.
“In the absence of city planning all we have is zoning; commercial zoning is OK but it doesn’t go far enough,” says Snider, who has been active in the Junius Heights Neighborhood Association since 1990. “Controlling commercial development by zoning just ends up being based on who gets there first with the most money – greed. That leaves you open to the kind of hodge-podge development that turned Ross and Gaston from single family houses into what they are now, which is quite frankly trashy.”
Even though City Hall is more sympathetic these days than it was a decade ago, this is not a city like San Francisco, which aggressively manages development, and it never will be.
“Upscale properties like townhouses do reduce affordable housing,” Southwest Properties’ Kanoff says. “But they also increase value and pricing, and we live in a capitalist society. What are you going to do? What should you do? Anything? I don’t think so.”
Reaching a compromise
On the other hand, successful developers and perceptive residents realize that this is the real world, and that compromise is not only beneficial, but inevitable. Sometimes, says Snider, they can even work together to achieve it.
“Really, it all boils down to the traditional issue of landowner rights,” she says. “Here in Texas we have this sort of ‘wild west’ idea of ownership — that you can’t tell someone what they can do with something that they own–as opposed to the northeastern part of the country, where the ideas of tradition and stewardship are more important.”
She says one solution to this problem would be to slow down the whole buy lot/build house/sell process and allow a greater flow of information between builder/developer and the neighborhood. A slower pace would allow builders to be more sensitive to the needs and expectations of the neighborhood and afford buyers a clearer idea of what they’re getting into. That, ironically, is what happened in the Albertson’s situation, once the two sides started talking to each other.
It also is happening in Junius Heights, where the Carroll family — Mary, her husband Robert, and their two children — have been buying and rehabilitating houses since 1953.
“We personally go out of our way to use the best materials when we work on a house,” says Mary.
“We rewire, redo the plumbing, use good paint and try our best to match the woods originally used in these old houses. We don’t really work with a budget—I like to get a place the way I would like it, if it was for me.”
The Carrolls put their money where their mouth is. They bought an infamous property at the intersection of Augusta and Tremont, well known for the condoms and syringes, and put two years and $80,000 in renovations into it. That it remains unrented has not deterred them.
“A bad property will drag everything down with it,” son Sean says. “A good property will have the opposite effect, but you have to have insight and be willing to spend a little money and go for the hoop.”
“We have to be careful about where we go from here,” Mary Carroll says. “We need more renovation and more quality development, and more historical areas. I live here because I believe in this area; I always have. I think that it has everything going for it.”
