The last time the City of Dallas prepared a comprehensive city-wide zoning plan, it conjured up images of a more populated and more pedestrian-friendly city, with better transport links through its neighborhoods and bustling city blocks connecting homes, offices and businesses. It provided an economic boon to southern Dallas, where there was still plenty of room for new housing developments.
The city council approved this plan, called ForwardDallas, in 2006. Today, many residents still want the same thing, but sometimes it feels like the city has barely moved.
Over the next two years, officials will update the city’s long-term plan to determine how Dallas should continue to grow. It’s a Herculean job of weighing different and sometimes contradicting perspectives in a city of 1.3 million people, and we believe that the city’s staff mostly hit the right note at the recent “Neighborhood Summit” that kicked off the planning process to have. More than 100 participants signed up for the meeting, including many neighborhood leaders and advocates.
The virtual event was a crash course on zoning and land use, but most importantly, it was an open invitation for Dallas residents and neighborhood groups to get involved. We think it was important for them to hear that city guides recognize that the old comprehensive zoning plan failed to address racial inequalities or to accommodate individual neighborhood plans.
But while the city has been promoting goodwill with its first ForwardDallas Neighborhood Summit, it still has a lot of work to do to restore confidence in some neighborhoods. One of them is Floral Farms, the rural neighborhood in south Dallas where, despite repeated complaints to the city, an illegal gravel dump known as Shingle Mountain has been created next to Marsha Jackson’s house.
Shingle Mountain has disappeared, but a history of industrial zone abuse in south Dallas has worried neighbors over any industrial activity near their homes. Lawyers worked with residents of Floral Farms last year to come up with a basic neighborhood plan that Dallas, in collaboration with city officials, is making possible. But neighbors said they bumped into a wall while trying unsuccessfully to get the plan through the city bureaucracy.
Floral Farms, Tenth Street Historic District, and others who formed the Coalition for Neighborhood Self-Determination told us in a statement that they renewed hope after officials at the city’s neighborhood summit said there would be a way Neighborhood initiatives in the city to welcome planning process. Julia Ryan, the city’s interim director of planning, told us it will take the city about two months to develop a framework for integrating neighborhood-led planning into ForwardDallas and to bring this change to the city council.
While ForwardDallas is not a block-by-block land use plan, the visions and priorities identified in it guide the city’s policymakers as they make individual recommendations and zoning decisions. Dallas is not a homogeneous entity, so it makes sense that the city, when creating the bigger picture, consider the plans of neighborhoods that have gone to the trouble of organizing and developing a consensus on what is important to their community.
We were told by the neighborhood guides at Floral Farms, Joppa, and Ideal that they are watching the staff move through the town. Dallas says the right things. Now it has to show that it is really listening.
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