Five members of the Dallas City Council want the city to research changing its development code to make it possible to build more housing units on lots that presently allow only single-family homes.
Councilman Chad West, of North Oak Cliff, sent a memo to the mayor on Wednesday that directs city staff to investigate changing the code to allow for duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes in residential neighborhoods. The memo also takes aim at lot sizes. Most of Dallas’ residential lots are between 5,000 square feet and 7,500 square feet. West would like to see the city’s minimum reduced to 1,500, which he believes would encourage manageable density on the city’s precious existing land. The memo asks for a Council briefing in the next 30 days.
“Housing in the city of Dallas is becoming unaffordable for many would-be residents due to a lack of available housing units,” the memo reads. “Reducing minimum lot sizes and increasing the number of residential dwelling units on a lot will allow for the development of additional dwelling units in residentially zoned areas.”
West was joined by colleagues Jaime Resendez, who represents southeast Dallas; Jaynie Schultz, the councilwoman for North Dallas; Paula Blackmon, of White Rock Lake; and Adam Bazaldua, who is over South Dallas and Fair Park.
West says he’d like to see the city follow Houston’s lead, which in 1998 dropped its minimum lot size from 5,000 square feet to 1,400. It’s not uncommon to find blocks of townhomes and duplexes scattered among single-family residences there.
In July, he laid out his plan in a Dallas Morning News opinion piece. This week’s memo is an important procedural step so that staff can eventually present its findings to the City Plan Commission for consideration. The City Council will ultimately have to approve any changes.
Dallas is trailing other major Texas cities in addressing its residential zoning amid a housing crunch. Austin dropped its minimum lot size to 2,500 square feet this summer, powered by recent research that has found that allowing more infill development can lower housing costs by creating more places for people to live.
And we need more places for people to live. Research by the nonprofit Child Poverty Action Lab recently found that Dallas is short 33,600 rental units for people who make 50 percent of the area’s median income: $31,150 for a single person, $35,600 for a two-person household, and $40,500 for three.
A little less than half of our labor pool (40 percent) works a job that has a median annual income of under $40,500. They’re getting priced out of the city, and West and his colleagues are trying to find ways to create scenarios to boost housing supply. Those strategies begin by way of the in-the-weeds work of zoning reform. Presently, the dream of owning a home is impossible for tens of thousands of Dallas residents. Next year’s bond will likely include money for housing, but the supporting work will be in the zoning code.
In planning parlance, West and his colleagues are asking about “context-sensitive missing middle,” the two-, three-, and four-unit buildings that often look like the single-family homes they neighbor. Junius Heights and the M Streets are existing examples of neighborhoods with a mix of middle density amid traditional homes.
Dallas’ zoning code is a tangled mess that makes building such things difficult, if not impossible, in most residential neighborhoods. The city has no zoning classification specifically for triplexes or quadplexes, which are currently allowed only in multifamily zones. But multifamily zoning also permits larger apartment complexes, which is generally a roadblock for single-family homeowners. Planners want predictability baked into the zoning code, so that neighbors can be confident that the quadplex that melts into the rest of the block will not one day morph into an apartment tower. The city will also likely need to analyze setbacks, lot coverage, and other associated code requirements to ensure that these new types of housing can be built.
That is a big part of the memo’s request: “The purpose of the briefing is to see what the process would be for amending the construction codes and the Dallas Development Code to allow for the construction of additional dwelling units.”
The urban planner and researcher Nolan Gray laid out the issue in 2019:
Small, 1,400 square foot lots allow for rowhouses and shotgun houses. These are building types that keep housing cheap and burden on infrastructure low by economizing on land; they also tend to produce more tax revenue, acre-for-acre, to fund local government services. Their higher densities also make walkable, mixed-use urban neighborhoods viable. Large, 5,000 square foot lots, on the other hand, are the standard in US post-war suburbs. These larger lots mean that fewer homes can fit in a given area, which encourages auto-orientation and the segregation of land uses like residential and commercial.
The Austin-based advocacy and research group Texans for Reasonable Solutions pushed legislators to take up the issue in Austin. It uses Houston as an example, calling it “the true success story of Texas.” It calls the city the “most liberally regulated major city in the United States in terms of land use restrictions” and cites data that show its median home sales price below that of the state and country.
Redfin data show this year that the median home sold price in Houston was $311,000, compared to the national price of $407,100, according to the U.S. Central Bank. The Texas A&M Real Estate Center’s October report found Dallas’ median sale price to be $398,000.
Similar efforts at encouraging housing density failed during the last legislative session. Democrats in the Texas Legislature helped kill a slate of bills championed by affordable housing advocates. One would have blocked local governments from requiring residential lots be larger than 2,500 square feet. Another would have given homeowners permission to build accessory dwelling units (garage apartments or granny flats) on their properties without permission from the municipalities.
Rep. John Bryant, D-Dallas, led the opposition, describing it as another one of the state’s attempts to block local governments from developing right-size ordinances for their communities.
The cynical view of the down-votes is that legislators didn’t want to add even a little density to state law. If this is truly a matter of local control, this week’s memo is the first step in discovering where the Dallas City Council stands on the type of housing that can be built in most of the city. And, in doing so, deciding who will be able to afford it in the future.
Author
