It’s the upper portion that needs the city’s help
Now that city officials have finished building so many things that we don’t need, can we get them to focus on something that’s really important? One suggestion: Greenville Avenue between Mockingbird and Walnut Hill, which has gone downhill so badly during the recession that it now has title lenders, the blood-sucking leeches of post-modern retail. Once that happens, can dollar stores, the harbinger of a shopping area’s collapse, be far behind?
This was not supposed to happen on upper Greenville. After all, doesn’t it have the Park Lane development, complete with snazzy Whole Foods, brand name outlet stores and a bowling alley? And, just 1 1/2 miles south, isn’t there the biggest and baddest Central Market in the state of Texas? Aren’t there two DART stations in that stretch, and isn’t mass transit the catalyst for urban redevelopment? And could the demographics be any better — the Park Cities on one side and the Village apartments and established single-family neighborhoods that held their value during the recession on the other?
Yet there it is — discount liquor stores, empty storefronts, bare land and the vacant Sam’s location, the retail equivalent of a nuclear waste dump. Parts of upper Greenville look like East Dallas in the old days, and I never expected to see that (the other being Far North Dallas around Valley View, but that’s a column for another magazine).
How did this happen? Part of it was the recession, of course. Part of it was over-development before the recession, when Dallas had more stores than it could support even during good times. But part of it — and the part that will still be with us as the economy improves this year — is the city’s preference for baubles instead of the bottom line and of showpieces instead of practical results.
Consider three things:
• Building bridges is seen as something the city is allowed to do, under the 19th century guidelines that define the role of government in Dallas. Guiding real estate development is not, even when the parcel of land involved is complex and has many owners — a situation where a third party could bring much-needed perspective about who should do what and how they should do it.
• There’s no mechanism for recognizing this kind of problem and dealing with it. Even if someone wanted to do something, that stretch of Greenville is in three council districts, making a unified approach all but impossible given the way the city council works. We’ve had success on Lower Greenville because most of it is in one district, and that councilwoman actually knew what she was doing.
• City officials have to yet recognize one of the key features of the post-recession retailing world, that cannibalism has replaced new development. Retailers are more likely to move to new locations and close the old one — what the experts call cannibalism — rather open a second store. The people Downtown are still waiting for Costco like characters in a Samuel Beckett play.
There is irony here; after all, we are dealing with the city. The infamous forwardDallas! (can’t forget the small f and exclamation point) zoning plan of 2006 was supposed to guide us through this sort of problem, offering a blueprint so government and private business could work together without the former throwing money at the latter:
“Older neighborhoods are often near stagnant commercial development that would benefit from revitalization,” said the plan. “These areas, due to their lack of reinvestment, negatively impact the community’s look and feel. Focusing investment to these commercial areas benefits the retail areas and the adjacent neighborhoods.”
But recognizing a potential problem is not the same as solving it. And the latter is not nearly as much fun as building a signature bridge.
