In recent weeks, some red-on-white “NO REZONE” signs have popped up along my route to work along Walnut Hill Lane just east of Marsh Lane. My inbox and the neighborhood Nextdoor overflows with form letters addressed to council member Gay Donnell Willis and her plan commissioner, Larry Hall, filled with fist-shaking opposition to Crescent Estates Custom Homes’ proposed rezoning of land occupied by the vestiges of a church torn asunder by the October 2019 tornado.
There’s also the inevitable Change.org petition, signed by more than 200 residents who “STRONGLY OPPOSE” developer Mehrdad Moayedi’s intention to plant million-dollar patio homes, 50 of them, most on 1,650-square-foot lots spread across 3.7 acres of abandoned parking lots and tall grass. Says the petition, building so many homes so close to so many existing residences at Walnut Hill and Betty Jane lanes is “too extreme a change and found nowhere else in our community or in our surrounding neighborhoods.”
Which is the same thing they said almost two months ago at a raucous community meeting at the Walnut Hill Recreation Center, when the plan called for even more homes — 60 as opposed to the 50. One resident told Moayedi’s surrogate a few weeks back to just forget the whole thing, because, as was plainly evident from the gathered opposition primed to wreck the rec center, the plan was “DOA.” Quite the opposite, turns out.
That whole shouting match culminated with another at Dallas City Hall on Thursday, this time in front of — and directly at — the plan commission, courtesy of the 20 residents who showed up to voice their opposition. Not that it would do any good.
News Roundups
John Wimberley asked the City Plan Commission Thursday to follow ForwardDallas 2.0’s recommendations to bring “gentle density” with new housing. Guess how he thinks that went.
Robert Wilonsky
“This whole meeting is performative,” John Wimberley said Thursday afternoon while we waited for the plan commission to take up the case, which rezones the area as a “single-family district” even though it’s actually for patio homes, most on lots smaller than a singles tennis court. Among their ranks was Virginia Worley, who moved into the neighborhood in 1967 and was among those who fought to keep apartments and a grocery store off nearby land eventually occupied by the Episcopal School of Dallas.
“Why,” she asked me, “should our neighborhood be sacrificed because this is what the city wants to see?”
Far as Wimberley, Worley and their neighbors are concerned, the CPC’s just another helpful piece of equipment in developers’ bottomless toolbox. The commission certainly took a hammer to their heads Thursday, with one commissioner even scolding them for the tone of their letters in opposition to the proposed project.
At Willis’ request, the 960-home Walnut Hill Homeowners Association did meet last month to gather feedback about how to blunt the development’s size and impact, which they shared with the developer, Hall and Willis. More than 80 people showed up, because not everyone in the WHHA has a lot of thoughts one way or the other about the development, and certainly not as many as Wimberley, who 20 years ago developed 10 houses along Betty Jane that would abut the new development. The issue has become divisive, and the president of the WHHA recently resigned.
“We all have the same goal of wanting the developer to compromise,” said WHHA second vice president Marla Hartsell, “just a different approach.”
Which is to say, the WHHA preferred to work on that compromise behind the scenes. And Wimberley, who takes the encroachment personally, prefers to make a very public noise.
On Thursday he gathered neighbors who’d never before been to City Hall, who had no idea how this works, who thought that showing up and speaking up might make a difference. Wimberley quickly disabused them of that, warning even before the short discussion and vote that they’d have to do this all over when the case goes to the City Council in a few weeks.
The residents of Wimberly Court behind the remnants of Primera Iglesia Bautista Mexicana de Dallas, which was demolished by the October 2019 tornado.
Robert Wilonsky
And it will go to the council, because — spoiler alert — the plan passed almost unanimously. Only South Oak Cliff’s plan commissioner, Tom Forsyth, rose to the residents’ defense, insisting that city staff and his fellow commissioners were “skirting around our zoning laws” and “just making exceptions all over the place” by trying to jam that much housing into that small of a space.
I’ve spent months talking to the residents, who live less than a mile from my front door, and have yet to meet one against new housing in their neighborhood, no matter how hard the plan commission tried to make it look like they were NIMBYs getting cranky at nap time. Time and again, in our conversations and again on Thursday, they quoted the city’s own guide to development, ForwardDallas 2.0, which says Dallas “should look to add housing in a way that is gentle, equitable, incremental, and sensitive to the existing context.”
In making the case to his colleagues, Commissioner Hall said this wasn’t some single-family neighborhood surrounded on all sides by calm and quiet. He explained that they already live near a busy retail intersection, behind a grocery store, across from a 7-Eleven, next to a fire station and Thomas Jefferson High School and three churches (including Northway, which is finally rebuilding its sanctuary blown back to God) and a pump station.
“All of Dallas needs a wide range of housing options at all price points,” Hall said, “and District 13 cannot and should not exclude those options.”
Those residents, all of whom aren’t far removed from having rebuilt their lives and homes after the tornado, say they do not disagree. They were just asking for fewer than 50 homes — around half that — on larger lots. They were just asking for houses shorter than three stories.
Virginia Worley, who moved into the neighborhood in 1967, has fought for land use in northwest Dallas for years. She won a few battles. And on Thursday, it looks like she might have lost one, too.
Robert Wilonsky
“You just cannot solve the housing problem in Dallas by putting that many [expletive] houses on that small of a property,” residential architect Laura Juarez Baggett told me after the meeting. “This is just a terrible architectural solution to the problem we have.”
The residents were just asking for a little compromise, especially after being threatened by the developer two months ago with an apartment complex if they didn’t get with the program.
The developer’s zoning attorney, former council member Philip Kingston, said there were good-faith efforts made to placate neighbors, with the deletion of 10 townhouses and the addition of a few small open spaces “The suggestion there weren’t compromises reached,” he said, “is hard to square with the facts.”
But the residents felt run over nonetheless, made to look like roadblocks and turned into roadkill. A few stormed out before the meeting was over. Friday morning, Wimberley sent me an email calling ForwardDallas’ advice “the noble concept” tossed aside, ignored.