Roughly 40 percent of neighbors living in the proposed Stonewall Jackson overlay district had voiced their opposition to the new zoning plans, and that was enough for City Council to vote against it at a recent meeting. We covered the debate in March’s issue with a story titled "Conservation Nation," and it was fairly clear that there had been more of an uproar over the plans for Stonewall than in any other neighborhood that has recently sought to create a conservation or overlay stabilization district.
"That was a very contentious battle from almost the very beginning," Michael Finley, chief planner with the City of Dallas Department of Development Services, told me when I called him to ask what happened. "None of the others that we’ve had that are working now seem to have this level of opposition and the animosity among the neighbors. It got really ugly."
There could have been a number of reasons for the opposition, he supposed — misinformation, the fact that more than half of the 282 homes in the proposed district didn’t conform to the new standards — but Finley thinks the main reason for the opposition was that "there are a number of people in there whose homes are worth more money to tear them down" because of their relatively small square footage. Just across Matilda from the Stonewall Jackson neighborhood, the Greenland Hills/Mockingbird Park neighbors are also working on an overlay district, and it will "probably slide right through," Finley says, perhaps because people are willing to pay more to live on that side of Matilda.
One of the downsides for Stonewall Jackson neighbors was that they were the overlay district guinea pigs. After the Council created overlay districts in 2005, they were the first to apply, and "I’m not even sure the staff that first helped them knew what they were doing," Finley says. That’s obviously a huge frustration for the 60 percent of neighbors who wanted to create the district, but the most frustrated neighbor has to be the one who paid the city $2,400 — out of his pocket — to get the process going. "I’ve been told Council is going to find way to give back the fee," Finley says. "He’s a schoolteacher, and I’m not sure he can afford it."
