The phone calls bother Steve Graham the most.

“I’ve lived in East Dallas my entire life – my wife and son had the same teacher at Stonewall Jackson – and people who have been here five years are calling me to tell me to go back to Frisco because they don’t like the houses I build,” he says. “Well, I’ve been doing my share to save historic houses, and we’ve saved some great houses. Where were all those people then?”

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Welcome to the battle over teardowns, perhaps the most divisive issue to face Lakewood and East Dallas in the past 20 years. So far, it has proven to be more divisive than zoning was in the early 1980s, more divisive than street widening was in the late 1980s, and more divisive than Greenville Avenue was in the 1990s.

Those fights pitted residents against outsiders, usually City officials but sometimes developers and business owners. Though there was some disagreement, the goals — and the methods used to reach those goals — were usually much the same for everyone. Residents wanted to protect their neighborhoods from un-residential forces, whether apartment buildings or four-lane highways or late-night revelers, and they agreed on how to do it.

This time, though, it’s residents vs. residents, and it’s not pretty.

Graham, whose self-named construction company has been a neighborhood business for 30 years, is accused of being an outsider intent on turning the area he still lives in into a mini-version of a Plano or Frisco subdivision. And if that’s not bad enough, consider what’s happening in the M Streets, where the debate over a proposed conservation district that would limit teardowns has resulted in nasty publicity, bruised egos, and more than one incident of neighbors not speaking to each other.

“I think we’re finally paying the price for our success in saving East Dallas in the 1980s and 1990s,” says former City Councilman Craig McDaniel, whose district included several neighborhoods teeming with teardowns, including Lakewood Heights, Vickery Place and the M Streets. “People from outside, who never wanted to live here, now see what we always saw in it.”

Focusing on the issues

The debate over teardowns has turned sadly, ridiculously simple, without any middle ground. Ron Emrich, a well-respected consultant who has worked with the city and neighborhood residents on a variety of urban preservation issues, sounds completely serious when he says teardowns should be stopped at every opportunity. On the other hand, Paul Caudouro, the director of government relations for the Dallas Homebuilders Association, sounds just as serious when he says that builders should be allowed to build the kinds of houses their customers want, with the fewest possible restrictions imposed by cities or neighborhoods.

“It just depends on your perspective,” says Virginia Tech’s Robert Lang, one of the country’s leading authorities on teardowns. “The people who do teardowns don’t see it the same way the neighbors do. They see a neighborhood they want to move into. The neighbors see it as someone moving in next door who is changing the way they live.”

That difference in perspective divides neighborhoods in four important ways:

• Property values. Teardowns, say those who do them, raise property values because they replace the least expensive homes in an area with new, more expensive ones. Yet anti-teardown measures, like conservation districts, are also supposed to enhance property values, since they add to an area’s desirability. Talk about an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object.

• Home trends. Most of East Dallas ’ housing below Mockingbird and between Central Expressway and Abrams was built before 1950. The style then was 1,300-square-foot homes with two bedrooms and one bath on a 50-by-150 foot lot. Today, the style is 2,500 square feet with three or four bedrooms and at least two baths. Yet the lot size isn’t any bigger, which means there’s a whole lot more house to cram in the same space.

• Reason for being. Ask someone in 1990 why they lived in the M Streets, and their reply probably would have focused on the area’s atmosphere, history and the like. Ask someone today, say a variety of urban experts, and the answer is more likely to revolve around avoiding long commutes. Is it surprising, then, that newcomers are more likely to do a teardown than a renovation?

• Aesthetics. Lang, with a laugh, says that much of the backlash against teardowns may be a reaction against rich people with poor taste. And there is little doubt that many teardowns in East Dallas look hugely out of place, resembling the McMansions that so outrage so many residents. But the difference is often more subtle. Two teardowns at the corner of Prospect and Empire certainly don’t do much for the neighborhood, but should they have been forbidden by law?

“I think you really need to look at these things on a case-by-case basis,” says Nick Glazbrook, an architect, M Street resident, and former member of the Dallas Landmark Commission. “The question is, what are you tearing down? Does it have any value? Is there a reason for it to be preserved? And what are you going to replace it with?”

Finding a middle ground

Which is the first step toward reaching a compromise on teardowns — and, like all compromises, will only be effective if it offends both sides.

“There is no question that compromise has to be the goal,” says Jim Lindberg of the National Historic Trust, who helped write the organization’s white paper on urban teardowns. “Cities can’t remain the same forever. There has to be change and growth, but that change and growth should also respect the character of the neighborhood. That’s tough to do, but it can be done.”

Compromise, in this case, recognizes two things. First, that teardowns are inevitable, and will remain so as long as real estate prices make the math work and as long as homebuyers continue to be willing to pay a premium to live in an area that Ebby Halliday’s Gene Garramone calls one of the hottest in the Metroplex. “They’re buying location,” he says, “and the prices are unbelievable.”

A lot in East Dallas that isn’t in the M Streets or Lakewood that’s suitable for a teardown costs about $150,000, which means a homebuyer who buys a teardown gets the same house they could get in Frisco without a two-hour round trip. Some builders are even finding ways to make $250,000 lots in the M Streets pay off as teardowns. Meanwhile, expect to see teardowns move east, crossing Abrams and White Rock Lake to the less expensive parts of Lakewood and to Little Forest Hills, say Realtors.

Second, Dallas is able to establish a system to manage teardowns so they don’t destroy the very neighborhoods that attract them. Says Lake Highlands’ Marcel Quimby, a member of the National Historic Trust’s board of directors and an architect who specializes in historic preservation: “It’s all about promoting dialogue, and it needs to start at the neighborhood level. Why do we live here, and what can we do to keep that?”

The answers to those questions, say urban experts, are the framework for a compromise. They emphasize that the framework includes everyone who is part of the process, from residents to Realtors to architects to builders to homebuyers. In some cases, conservation or historic districts and the stricter zoning each entails might be necessary. In others, less formal — but equally recognized — guidelines might be sufficient.

Regardless of the method, residents must accept teardowns as a fact of life, whether they like them or not. Realtors who work with teardowns must be forthcoming about neighborhood objections to potential buyers. Architects must take neighborhood sensibilities into account, even if they see those sensibilities as lacking. Builders must understand that residents have legitimate objections, be they trucks and workmen at 6 a.m. on Saturday, fears about shoddy materials and workmanship, or the dreaded two-story front entrances. Buyers must make an extra effort to appreciate that their dream house might be someone else’s sleepless night.

The good news is that those tenets have already been discussed. The homebuilders, says Caudouro, might be amenable to style shopping lists, in which builders would match features with specific neighborhoods. In Lake Highlands, where teardowns have yet to make much of an impact, one homeowners group says it’s considering guidelines to pass on to builders if and when teardowns come, detailing setbacks, height restrictions, and the like. Lang’s non-profit, in fact, is looking for grant money to put together just such standards, and he hopes to start the project next year.

“That sort of approach is the most realistic way to do it,” says Philip Henderson, a long-time Dallas architect who has done several historic renovations. “Some people just don’t understand why a contemporary house in a 1930s Tudor neighborhood might upset residents. If everyone can agree ahead of time, it takes the onus away and you create a positive impact.”

The linchpin to any sort of compromise, though, must be the city — which is the bad news. Not only does almost everyone on every side of the issue agree about that, they also agree that Dallas, as things stand now, probably isn’t capable of undertaking the job. The council is divided, the city staff must walk a political tight rope between the various parties involved, and resources, never abundant for code enforcement sorts of services, are even more strained.

Plus, there are substantial philosophical differences about the city’s role. The homebuilders see the conservation district process, for example, as a bureaucratic snafu that wastes time better spent elsewhere. Yet many homeowners see residential zoning in Dallas as little more than a suggestion, with inspections almost non-existent and penalties like citations and summonses nothing more than more paper to be ignored.

“Typically, in other cities, they work with neighborhoods in situations like this,” says Quimby. “In Dallas , we’re less restrictive about what can be done. We see planning more as a response to a crisis and not something that’s done ahead of time and acted on.”

Which means Graham will probably continue to get phone calls, despite his roots, his renovation work in Junius Heights in the late 1970s, and his commitment to build teardowns that are consistent with the neighborhood.

“What too many people don’t understand is that they can’t have it both ways,” he says. “They can’t sell their property for as much as they can get for it and still save every old house that should be torn down. If they do that, they’ll be shooting themselves in the foot.”

And that won’t benefit anyone, regardless of their view on teardowns.