(Photo Credit: Jeffrey McWhorter / Special Contributor)
It’s an ugly truth established even before the Bishop Arts District’s renaissance and the ensuing gentrification that plowed through north Oak Cliff: The area’s affluent white neighborhoods get all the attention — and the large working-class Latino areas to the southwest are barely an afterthought.
That’s why City Council member Chad West’s big plan on behalf of those residents who are too often forgotten would seem to make so much sense.
The goals of his West Oak Cliff Area Planning initiative sound great: Protect single-family neighborhoods. Retain residents and attract new ones with affordable housing options. Encourage businesses compatible with surrounding neighborhoods. Preserve historic buildings and expand green spaces.
So why is this effort sparking fear, suspicion and a lot of misinformation among some of the very people whom West says his plan is designed to protect? Timing, inadequate outreach and politics.
An area-plan process like this one is designed to be community driven, so launching it last May, in the first months of COVID-19, was risky. Engaging working-class, mostly immigrant neighbors is never easy, much less doing so during a health crisis when engagement is the one thing people are not supposed to do.
But that’s the path West took. Now with a pandemic — and a contentious election — mostly in the rearview mirror, the council member has to make sure more neighbors are involved in the process and get this important work done well.
“We’ve got to get the word out in every way we can and meet people where they are,” West told me. “We’ve also got to make sure people understand this plan came out of a desire to preserve, not develop.”
West appointed a 15-member task force of neighborhood association representatives, business folks and developers to lead the way last year. The group’s first community meeting, in November, and the three follow-ups were online events and sometimes failed to provide adequate resources for Spanish speakers.
Engagement is just part of what concerns the West Oak Cliff Coalition, formed after the May election and whose members include council candidate Giovanni Valderas, who lost to West, and his supporters.
The coalition shared a letter with me that it sent to West on Thursday with details of their criticism. The complaints reflected what Yolanda Alameda and Christine Hopkins, two of the eight names on the letter, had expressed to me over coffee several days earlier.
Alameda and Hopkins said residents can’t trust a plan in which only areas with neighborhood associations are represented on the task force. That’s part of why they hope to see the planning timeline slowed by at least a year to ensure ample participation.
The West Oak Cliff Coalition also wants the plan broken down into neighborhood-specific planning areas and partnerships that would allow residents to work with academics or nonprofits experienced in bilingual planning and zoning education.
For sure, some of this controversy is driven by election politics. But to dismiss the concerns as no more than sour grapes underestimates the real problem. Residents in this area have seen too many of their neighbors in north Oak Cliff and West Dallas kicked to the curb by encroaching development and gentrification.
As if a pandemic hasn’t sufficiently muddied the planning process, new procedural changes at City Hall have created concerns in underserved neighborhoods all across Dallas that residents will get even less say in land-use issues.
There’s a lot of complexity here — more than can be completely sorted out in a single newspaper column, much less in an online dual-language community meeting.
That’s why slowing things down on the west Oak Cliff initiative is likely a good idea.
West and his task force also should take a close look at the very different neighborhood-led planning just announced for West Dallas neighborhoods vulnerable to gentrification.
While the West Dallas effort, born out of the unaffordable property tax spikes of 2018, has Communities Foundation of Texas resources behind it, the west Oak Cliff plan must work under city staff and budget constraints.
But West’s initiative can — at the least — embrace the guiding principle of the West Dallas effort, as described by Builders of Hope president James Armstrong: “Instead of inviting the neighbors to the table, we should remember it’s their table.”
That’s a mindset Alameda and Hopkins say would ease their concerns. They want to see the task force meet people in the schools, churches and nonprofits that already have their trust.
“It’s disingenuous to think you can expect there will be ample participation in the midst of a pandemic and economic crisis for many in our city,” said Hopkins, a lawyer and former president of the Elmwood Neighborhood Association.
Alameda is a representative of the Polk-Vernon Neighborhood Association and longtime supporter of two-time council candidate Valderas. Despite being added to the task force in January, she still worries that the effort is not in residents’ best interests.
“My fear is that this kind of planning could change the face of the neighborhoods — the blanket loss of longtime people, their residences, small businesses,” Alameda said.
Another task force member and longtime resident of the area, Mary Paras, sees it differently.
Paras lives in Jimtown, a single-family area southwest of the Clarendon Drive- Westmoreland Road intersection. The neighborhood is the site of one of several west Oak Cliff land-use cases that motivated West to initiate the larger area-plan effort.
Jimtown neighbors sought West’s help after discovering that a zoning designation put some of their homes at risk of developers buying the property and converting it to apartments.
Paras believes an area plan will address problems such as this as well as identify the need for other improvements throughout west Oak Cliff. “We need to be talking about making sure kids have proper sidewalks to walk to school on and proper drainage,” she told me.
She acknowledged that not all residents feel represented, but she believes the solution is “for all of us to redouble our efforts to know their hopes and their needs. … There’s a lot of good that can come of this.”
Mike Anglin, the longtime Kessler Park resident who chairs the task force, also said more must be done to ensure the city and his group hear from every resident who might want to voice an opinion. But like West, he worries about what developers might try to do in the meantime.
“The whole idea of an area plan is that things are probably going to change some over the next 20 years, and a lot of change without a plan always makes me nervous,” said Anglin, a former city plan commissioner.
He also pointed out that all community representatives on the task force will pass along — by whatever means works best — information to residents in order to get “their dreams and fears for future development in their neighborhoods.”
West would like to stick with the timeline to get a draft done by the end of summer in order to get fixes for neighborhoods like Jimtown in place as soon as possible. “But I have no problem delaying if we need to get more input,” he said.
As for the accusations that he’s overly pro-development, he said: “I don’t think we should throw a tower up over here. But incremental development that helps bring jobs — I support that.”
West told me he’s not surprised that some people are scared by the area plan. “That’s part of the growing pains in a neighborhood that hasn’t had any attention or preservation,” he said.
It’s also why, West said, “We have to be better — both city staff and me — about communicating. It would be a shame for this to die.”
My reporting left me with the sense that both sides in this controversy want the same thing: preserving this part of Oak Cliff for the full diversity of people who currently live there.
Now that the election is over, perhaps everyone will consider the radically pragmatic step of sitting down together and making that happen.
More information about the West Oak Cliff Area Planning effort, including upcoming meetings, is available through the Dallas City Hall website.
