Southern Dallas’ bright development future

If you needed a big dose of hope for the future of Dallas, you should have been on one of the buses that rolled out from Herbert Street onto Singleton Boulevard Thursday afternoon.

We were pointed east on the way out of West Dallas, but this journey was all about the south, the way southern Dallas will grow and who will lead the change that is coming.

Along for the ride were developers, architects, builders, financiers and others who are looking for ways to build on the opportunity that our city has south of the Trinity River.

But here was the important twist. Just about everyone aboard those buses was a person of color, many of them young and devoted to new ideas about the way southern Dallas should develop and how they can lead the area to greater prosperity and a greater mix of incomes while providing the affordable housing the city needs.

“Anybody who tries to do it the old way is going to find out it doesn’t work, it’s not sustainable and it’s not good for our city,” said James Armstrong, a West Dallas native now leading the community housing development organization Builders of Hope.

By the old way, Armstrong is talking about the way housing development got done for too long in the south. Much of it was entirely subsidy dependent, with City Hall or the state controlling the funds. A handful of developers, many with political connections, fought for the money. Too few homes were built and it took too long to build them.

Bad policy, lack of demand, unfair lending practices and corruption and insider dealing have choked opportunity for decades.

But along that bus tour from West Dallas, to South Dallas, to Pleasant Grove, looping through Red Bird and back north through south Oak Cliff and into Bishop Arts, what was on display was a new energy among a young cohort of developers with the knowledge and skills to bring sensitive and lasting change to our city.

The reason for the tour was a sort of graduation. A group known as the Community Developers Roundtable was founded last year by Maggie Parker, managing partner and founder of Innovan Neighborhoods.

Parker is a leading figure among this young group of developers of color who are bringing real change to southern Dallas. She founded the roundtable in partnership with not-for-profit Business and Community Lenders of Texas to help build the skills and knowledge of developers like her who are actively doing projects across the region.

Thursday’s tour marked the completion of nine months of learning for 15 developers.

This alone represents an important change. Whereas in the old system, subsidized developers were usually pitted against one another in a bid for the same pots of government funds, these developers are working together to share knowledge about how to access capital markets, philanthropic funds and a variety of subsidies.

Many are interested in producing affordable housing. But affordable housing is just one part of a broader mix. There is a great interest, and demand, for market-rate development, too.

Jay Taylor, an architect and developer who has focused on the 10th Street Historic District, is about to break ground on the biggest home he has built yet, a beautiful 2,700-square-foot, craftsman-style house with a wide front porch and big windows facing Ninth Street.

Scottie Smith, of Shekinah Legacy Holdings, is working in the Jeffries-Meyers area. Originally from Houston, Smith saw an opportunity in South Dallas when he literally took a wrong turn one day and found himself among vacant lots strewn with trash but filled with potential.

For Smith, developing here isn’t about putting up low-cost housing that looks like low-cost housing. It’s about re-creating a neighborhood through great design with a mix of incomes.

“You can’t pigeonhole all low-income people into one area. We’ve done that experiment before. It doesn’t work,” he said.

Smith lives not far from where he is building. One of his homes under construction reflects his belief in design as a way to shape the community. Its wide wraparound second-story porch is all about eyes on the street, he said. People who can see their community can help protect their community.

What was striking about the tour, even for those of us who have spent years in southern Dallas, was the reminder of just how open and beautiful it is. Everywhere there is land, much of it with mature trees, rolling topography and vistas of the city that you don’t get in the north.

But even if there is greater hope now than there has been in years, many of the old obstacles remain.

Jasmond Anderson, a city plan commissioner, architect and developer, voiced the fear that powerful people and groups will take over before developers from the community have a chance to make a mark.

“There is a desire not just to gentrify South Dallas but to gain control of South Dallas,” he said.

That’s a reasonable worry, given history, and Anderson, who went to Lincoln High School, has a long view of that history.

There are also the obstacles the city creates. It took Taylor a year to get through the design approval process for the home he’s building on Ninth Street.

But so much is better than it was. Cyndy Lutz, a longtime affordable housing apostle in southern Dallas, was on one of the buses. She saw a new light in part from improved city policy.

“For as much as we disparage [City Hall’s] 2018 housing policy, it changed the landscape of who got access to some of the lots. It really opened it up,” she said, referring to the city land bank of vacant repossessed lots.

That’s the overwhelming feeling from the tour, not just about the city land bank but about the southern Dallas development scene overall.

The process is opening up in the best way. There are more sources of funds. There are more ideas for ways to mix affordable and market-rate housing. There is a better mix of homes.

At the heart of that is a group of smart, young developers who care about the place where they are building. We need them, and we need more like them. Their visions are our future.

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