Redevelopment is roiling Lake Highlands, pitting a variety of neighborhood groups against city councilman Jerry Allen, several developers, and various members of the Lake Highlands establishment. This is unusual for several reasons, one of which is that people in Lake Highlands have rarely disagreed about development. They had very little, and they wanted more.

My, how that has changed.

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I attended a development-related Town Hall meeting in Lake Highlands last night for a big  package we’re doing in that magazine next month (Schutze isn’t the only who has to sit through these things), and several things struck me:

 

• There are some very angry people up there — as angry as the people here were over the Whole Foods business. The only difference is that they are a lot more polite. Hardly anyone hollered at the meeting. The one time that there were a couple of catcalls, former city councilman Alan Walne, who was the moderator, held up the meeting to point out that Lake Highlands people didn’t do that sort of thing. He got a round of applause.

• The development dispute is complicated and messy, taking into account personalities, Lake Highlands’ unhappy relationship with its blighted apartments, and what sort of development should replace the apartments. What’s most interesting is watching the community take sides, more or less along the same lines that we take sides down here. The neighborhoods are on one side; almost everyone else is on the other. Also interesting: There seems very little room for compromise, something that is only supposed to happen down here.

• The city’s new urban buzzword is density. I’m going to write more about this in an upcoming column, but here is one of the most interesting things to come out of last night’s meeting. Theresa O’Donnell, the city’s director of development services, is very sharp, very smart, and very savvy. When she talks, she isn’t doing it to hear her voice. "Lake Highlands is going to face change for at least the next 20 years," O’Donnell told the audience. "It’s about how we manage that change. Everything in Dallas will increase in density."

Yikes. Everything? That’s food for thought, even for those of us who don’t live in Lake Highlands.