Michael Hogue
When working on a zoning case, I often joke that Masterplan Consultants invites homeowners to meetings and, unfortunately, they show up. They do so with concern, emotion and bias.
One of the most frequent biases is an aversion to height, especially if the development is multifamily housing. Neighbors prefer three-story buildings of wood frame construction with surface parking rather than steel and concrete buildings with structured parking. The wood product is a 30- to 50-year building, while the steel one is a 100-year building. The taller building will far exceed $100 million in value, while the shorter one might be $30 million.
People would not behave this way about other products. No one would pick the basic commuter car when they could select the luxury car. On The Price Is Right, it sure looks like the people who win the Cadillac are a lot more excited than those who get the Yugo.
If Dallas is going to solve its affordability crisis and declining population (the city has been losing residents the last few years, even as the statewide population continues to grow), additional density is essential. Neighbors should be demanding developers build taller buildings, not setting up roadblocks for them to do so.
Opinion
Mark Lamster, this newspaper’s architectural critic, has lamented “the generic four- to five-story greige apartment block” that dominates Dallas and the suburbs. In 2019 he wrote, “It is sometimes known as the Dallas Donut (because they can be hollow blocks with parking in the center), but we’re calling it the Uptown Special, as it is there that their presence first emerged in bulk.”
It’s not just the developers and their architects who should be blamed. Just as often it’s the surrounding neighbors who refuse to consider a taller building. Only in Oak Lawn do you find any concentration of people who believe height equals quality.
“I don’t understand why people are scared of taller buildings,” said Tip Housewright, principal emeritus at the architecture firm Omniplan, and a member of the Dallas City Plan Commission. “They confuse height with mass and bulk.”
They have privacy concerns. I hear “people will look in my backyard” all the time. Newsflash: The affluent, busy people in high-rise buildings have better things to look at.
But more important, the sightlines almost never make that possible. Charles Gromatsky and his firm KTGY, formerly GDA, have designed some of the city’s best residential buildings. He told me, “I lived next to Preston Center for many years and people fail to note that in North Texas the tree mass is such that you can’t see into people’s yards.”
Lamster and practicing architects all rightly agree that taller buildings allow for better architectural shapes and superior design.
Gromatsky explained, “By their very nature taller buildings have more presence and opportunity to explore better architecture and better potential buildings.”
Taller buildings typically feature slimmer, less bulky structures and smaller footprints. They often allow for structured parking, often underground, and greater setbacks, which create more open space.
Housewright agreed, noting, “When you allow a developer to go taller it opens up more green space and affords you a better contextual response when you allow for height.”
Evan Beattie, an architect and the CEO of GFF, explained that smaller footprints allow “more light and air to reach the ground around them when they are designed carefully to be responsive and respectful of neighboring properties and surrounding existing natural features.”
David Marquis is a local author, actor and activist who serves as a technical adviser to the city of Dallas Environmental Commission. According to Marquis, preserving open space for the sake of the watershed means buildings are going to have to have smaller footprints and less impervious coverage.
“That means that we are going to need to be more vertical,” Marquis said. “And the trick to it is going vertical without encroaching on single family neighborhoods.”
The Institute of Transportation Engineers studies the traffic associated with almost every land use. High-rise residential development creates fewer trips than multifamily. This makes sense. When you use an elevator and it takes longer to go to your car, people will combine more trips. Likewise, these buildings are typically found in environments conducive to walking.
Taller buildings also put less stress on public schools. The resident makeup includes few school age children, but the building provides an out-of-proportion contribution to the tax base for school districts. Some might call that both good business and good public policy. More cities should try it.
I am hopeful single-family residents will come to embrace high-rise buildings. These buildings pair well with owners. Renters are more affluent and older with many having already owned a home before downsizing.
Additional housing options that appeal to empty nesters also help to turn over traditional homes to younger families. This allows homes that often have reached their maximum value and are capped by the over 65 years of age exception to return to a full appraisal value.
The taxable value of steel and concrete is underrated by neighbors. It should not be. Single-family homeowners carry an unfair tax burden. Dallas will face a stark decline in the appraised value of office buildings. This gap must be bridged somewhere, and high-rise residential towers help to do this while also providing additional housing.
Currently there is little desire to build condominiums because of liability concerns.
“Say the project is 100-units, you now have 100 individual owners, none of which are your client, all with different levels of expectations and incomes,” Gromatsky said.
Architects are especially exposed because they are often brought into lawsuits on construction defects because plaintiffs cast a wide net.
“The design professional is not generally party to the Owner Contractor Insurance Program (OCIP), which is designed to protect the owner and contractor, but not the design professional. So if the project does enter litigation, the owner and contractor have an additional layer of protection not available to design professionals,” Gromatsky explained.
New laws in Texas allow the redevelopment of commercial properties into multifamily housing without seeking a zoning change. Unfortunately, the cost of construction and necessity of extremely high rents will preclude that in many midrise or high-rise buildings. I recently watched a briefing at the city of Irving — long a jurisdiction with hostility to multifamily development — where leaders discussed requiring a minimum of 10 stories for multifamily.
Don’t think for a minute they were trying to set a standard for high-quality construction. Instead, they were looking for a way to thwart new state laws which do not allow cities to set maximums on height. That’s hiding the ball, letting all the other cities address the housing crisis. Thankfully, the measure didn’t move forward, at least not yet.
And we wonder why the state continues to pass laws regulating cities.
In basketball coaching there’s an adage: You can’t teach height. I’m hopeful in development that’s not true. I hope citizens can be taught that height creates better buildings in design, sustainability and with a greater tax base that contribute to the community.