Residents of a lower East Dallas neighborhood are furious about plans to convert an abandoned apartment building into a residential hotel.
But that’s not what they should be worrying about.
The problem is not the renovation of the Prince of Wales complex on Live Oak Street between Fitzhugh Avenue and Peak Street. This project, which will convert an empty apartment building into 61 living quarters for the homeless sometime next year, may well be regarded with affection and wistful yearning in years to come.
And that is what residents should be worrying about.
Since the Prince of Wales project is part of a federal program, it’s subject to federal restrictions and federal guidelines. The point is not whether these guidelines are stringent enough; at least there are guidelines.
Because any developer who doesn’t use federal money doesn’t face any restrictions. He or she can buy an empty house or apartment building on Live Oak – or Gaston Avenue or anywhere else in East Dallas, for that matter – and turn it into a welfare hotel, and there’s almost nothing anyone can do to stop it.
The only requirement is that the property be zoned for a form of multi-family use, which is the case for many of the empty buildings we drive past every day back and forth from Downtown. There is no parking requirement, no need for a special use permit. Code enforcement, given the City’s inconsistent approach during the past several years, isn’t much of a barrier.
Even I could go out tomorrow and become a slumlord, and I’m not much of a businessman.
“The people in the neighborhood should be terrified,” says Graham Greene, the architect developing the Prince of Wales in conjunction with the Dallas Housing Authority and the non-profit Center for Housing Resources.
“They have legitimate concerns, which we have tried to address. But not everyone is going to try as hard as we did.”
Greene’s point should make everyone who lives in East Dallas shudder. We pride ourselves on social responsibility, and we’ll do our bit to help the homeless. But we don’t want to become a dumping ground for all of the transients North Dallas doesn’t want.
And it doesn’t take a leap of faith to figure that some sharpie in Addison is, even now, adjusting his profit margins to take advantage of the situation. There are a lot of empty buildings in East Dallas (owned, ironically, by the federal government as a result of the last wave of developer frenzy) that are begging to be sold.
Any solution probably lies in changing the zoning law. It seems simple enough to mandate a special-use permit to change an apartment building zoned multi-family into what “zonies” call an SRO (single-room occupancy) unit. But zoning is never simple and almost always becomes highly political.
“Without a doubt, this is something that needs to be re-examined,” says City Councilman Chris Luna, whose district includes the Prince of Wales development, as well as a number of other vacant apartment buildings.
“You have to ask if any further development is consistent with neighborhood needs, because then there’s a legitimate reason to examine the zoning.”
There are, for instance, forceful arguments against using zoning to protect neighborhoods, including the contention that it’s undemocratic to tell a property owner what he can and can’t do with his land.
Unless, of course, the property owner is a real estate developer intent on making money from the suffering of others. Then it’s easy to tell him what to do – let’s zone him out of East Dallas.
