THE CITY BELT LINE BONANZA

IF ADDISON, TEXAS, had been a woman, her name would have been Cinderella.

There she sat in 1970-in her dusty chimney corner of 40 houses and a few apartments. Population: 593. More people lived there in 1900 than that. While the Prince Charmings of this world danced the night away with glamorous Dallas, Addison’s face was smudged and smeared with warehouses and 18-wheelers. There was no sewer and water service to 70 per cent of her land and no building codes or zoning ordinances to speak of. If anybody ever needed a fairy godmother, it was Addison.

The talent of a fairy godmother is determined by her ability to recognize unappreciated potential and appreciate it… and appreciate it … until its value multiplies 7.3 times over (the amount Addison sales tax revenues have increased).

No magic spell was ever cast more effectively than on Addison. By the end of the Seventies, this five-square-mile strip had become the prestige address of north Texas, heading for a 1986 daytime population equal to downtown Dallas. The tax base is so strong that its city council has discussed the abolition of property taxes. More corporate jets and turbines are based at Addison Airport than in all of Tarrant County. In the month of April, building permits worth $40 million were issued in Addison – compared to $42 million for Dallas and $27 million for Fort Worth.

How did all this happen? Who waved the magic wand, anyway?

The most obvious answer would be the developers, those necessary self-servers who make the economic world go ’round. They have swarmed in. The list of buyers of Addison property reads like a big-money Dallas all-star team: names like Hunt and Folsom and Crow and Tycher and Criswell.

But that’s not exactly news. Every saga of ragweed to dogwood has involved a fortune or two. What makes Addison different is the city leadership that wrote the script for the developers -an unlikely band of young idealists who took power in 1975 with nothing but vague notions that they wanted “a classy city.”

When Jerry Redding, then a 34-year-old insurance agent, was elected mayor, Addison was in sad shape. The town had no money. Its roads were so bad that an apartment dweller, who had seen a lady walking along Marsh Lane dive into the ditch to avoid being hit by a car, approached the council with an outrageous demand. He wanted to know when the city’s streets were going to be made safe.

That was a joke, considering the city barely had enough money to pay its nine policemen and 10 firemen.

Bill Cook, Redding’s predecessor as mayor, had loved the wildlife and the easy, quiet style of old-time Addison and had wanted no part of modernization. Neither had the city council.

But Redding felt sure that the proponents of an old-time Addison had their eyes closed if they thought a country lifestyle could continue in Dallas’ north fringe. Addison was very quickly becoming Warehouse North for Dallas. Soon the depot monstrosities would stand dock to dock along Belt Line Road. Dallas County was going to grow north, and it wouldn’t grow around Addison. It would come right through the town.

“If we could have kept the country atmosphere, maybe we would have done it,” Redding says now of those decisive weeks in 1975. “But we concluded that development of some sort was inevitable, so we decided we had better take control and see that it developed in the way we wanted it to.”

Jerry Redding does not project the dynamic image of a town builder. A shy man who eschews crowds and hates speeches, he speaks softly and doesn’t know how to force a laugh. He readily admits he was put forward as a mayoral candidate because he was “about the only Addison businessman in 1975 who lived in Addison.”

Redding, along with new council members Faye Edmiston and Leon Henderson (all in their mid-thirties), campaigned on a progressive, almost “throw-the-bums-out” platform. They wanted change, but once they had won, they had no idea where to start.

They did four things – all of them right.First, they set out to draw in the threeholdover conservative members of the citycouncil (average age: mid-fifties) to builda united team. Second, they sought out- iside expertise. Third, they hired a citymanager. Fourth, they convened a seriesof planning workshops.

During these informal jeans-and-san-dals sessions, the ideas were hatched that would make Addison famous: A solution to the water and sewer problem was basic to everything else; the city’s future lay in retail business; zoning ordinances could be used to configure the city exactly the way ; the council wanted it, acre by acre, block by block; guidelines for development were needed to ensure that quality was built into every square yard of future concrete.

To finance the changes, the council decided to seek liquor revenues: 1 per cent sales tax on package store sales, and 1 1/2 per cent mixed drink tax. This would be a source, they thought, of $150,000 a year – a ridiculously low figure as it turned out.

The mayor and the three new council members formed a Citizens for Change Committee to promote a local option election on the sale of alcohol.

With this bare outline of a plan, people began to notice the fine lines of Cinderella’s cheekbones hidden underneath all that soot. The sewer and water lines that had never been laid in 70 per cent of the town were suddenly an advantage: The land was undeveloped, malleable, and ready for the hands of master planners. And Dallas’ unrelenting northward push, previously a dreaded juggernaut, now looked like a golden opportunity. Addi-son was surrounded by some of the most elite -and dry -residential neighborhoods in the Dallas area, and all of them weighted down with discretionary income.

From the beginning, Redding and his council sought the advice of Addison’s business community. The Addison Business Association, a body whose primary function is to advise city government, had been active in pressing Redding to run for mayor.

They have been Redding’s brain trust. As one member of city government put it, “I really don’t think that most school boards and city councils have a lot of real bright business minds. Most of these types are heading major corporations. Fortunately, our council realizes this, and when we get into a sticky problem, we form an ad hoc study committee from the business community.”

Redding’s first request of the city council came at the urging of the A.B.A.: Hire a city manager. Bill Cook had spent 40-hour weeks in the (non-paying) mayor’s office, handling the day-to-day business of the city.

“We didn’t know what we wanted in a city manager,” recalls Redding, “but we felt we needed someone who was as much a public relations man as an administrator. We knew we had a selling job ahead of us.”

They settled on C.J. Webster, from the North Central Texas Council of Governments. He was a powerful influence in the early planning workshops, and, along with Redding, is credited with turning the city council into a unified entity that knows how to say yes and no in the right places.

Webster remembers “harsh words and split votes” during most of the first year. “Our first order of business was fence-mending,” he recalls. The three holdover members of the council were rock-ribbed conservatives with a morbid fear of developers. They viewed Redding’s ideas in the same light as Armageddon.

Bridges were built during the following weeks as the older members saw the urgency of Addison’s situation, and Redding learned to build consensus decisions. In the spring of ’76, when the three older members were to stand for reelection, Redding went to each of them and said, “I want you to run again. I’ll help you in any way I can.” End of confrontation. Two of the three did run and were reelected. Mayor pro tern Bob Ross, an articulate arch-conservative, stepped down. He was replaced by another young progressive, WFAA advertising representative Terry Roberts.

The spiniest point of contention during the council’s first year was a skirmish over an exchange of 400-acre land sections between Addison and Dallas. Since the acquisition of this land was a necessary part of the negotiations with Dallas to gain a long-term outlet for sewage, the deal had to go through. Conservatives were not anxious to solve the sewer problem-they knew that it would put the developers in business.

At the time, Dallas was contemplating the annexation of the city of Renner and wanted in the land swap with Addison a certain block of Addison real estate on the Collin County side of the line, which would become a part of its future Renner expansion.

Coincidentally, Addison Business Association President Daryl Snadon was plotting a wet/dry liquor referendum for Addison and had learned that Texas law forbids a city to go wet if it straddles two counties and one of them is dry. Snadon had already advised the city to disannex its Collin County acreage.

Addison agreed to make this parcel part of the land swap, and the city’s biggest development hurdle -sewage disposal -was solved. The bond issue was approved by voters in September 1976.

One developer calls the bond issue “the most important thing the city did in its early planning.” Webster puts it more dramatically: “Renner was annexed to Dallas because it couldn’t work out its own water and sewer needs; and in my personal opinion, had leadership not changed in Addison when it did, pressure for development would have become so great that Addison would have been annexed to Dallas, where utilities are available.”

Meanwhile, Snadon’s Citizens for Change Committee had gathered the necessary signatures to call a local option election on the sale of liquor. County authorities, however, dragged their feet on setting a date for the election. (Some say that liquor store interests did not want the expense of new store construction and applied pressure against a local option election.)

During the delay period, the Addison city council had time to think through the prospect of legalized liquor in town. The conservative members grilled Snadon, forcing him to produce safeguards for the community. From these sessions, a strategy emerged for a controlled legalization of alcohol that has allowed Addison to be wet -but not wild.

“When we proposed going wet,” says mayor pro tern Terry Roberts, “apartment people were worried that liquor stores would locate across the street, businesses were worried that the town would go to the dogs with honky-tonks everywhere, and church people were worried that violence would break out. None of that happened.”

The reason none of this happened was a series of ordinances designed to calm everybody’s fears:

– Mixed drink permits are issued onlyto establishments in which the primarypurpose is food service. In other words, notaverns or beer halls.

– Persons seeking special use permits toserve alcohol must convince the council onmore than location; architecture and landscaping details must be top quality as well.

– Package stores were restricted to oneside of one vacant block of Inwood Road,pinched between the Addison city limitsand Belt Line, with railroad tracks acrossthe street.

The last two ordinances were challenged in court-by developers who didn’t need the grief of aesthetics and by a landowner who had a juicy parcel at Belt Line and Addison roads. “They were surprised at the way we protected our ordinances,” says Redding. “We were more determined than they were, and they stopped appealing.”

The “one side of Inwood” ordinance would only partly resolve anxieties before the referendum. It was also devised, as Redding puts it, “so you can drive through Addison and not see a liquor store and yet have liquor only five minutes away.” Webster lists another factor: “Liquor stores are cheap retail. Nobody spends much in liquor stores. We knew we would load up every intersection with liquor stores if we threw it open. There would be no Quorum and no Sakowitz Village today if we had. Quality retail doesn’t fit in where liquor stores are all over the place.”

In September 1976, the wet/dry referendum passed, 242-70, and Addison was wet. Nobody anticipated what would happen as a result. “At the time,” says Redding, “we said, ’Maybe we’ll get a Steak and Ale out of it someday.’ As it turned out, there was a massive scramble by major restaurants. We were North Dallas, and they could serve drinks. And they abided by our ordinances.”

The scenario had begun. An axiom of urban development states, “Restaurants and retail shops follow density of population”-not the other way around. Ad-dison did it the other way around. Posh restaurants sprang out of the ground and changed the city’s image overnight. Ad-dison became known as a “classy city.” This paved the way for offices, hotels, retail shops-even residences.

A crescendo of land sales started immediately that hit a peak, according to the Roddy Report, in 1979, when Addison and surrounding portions of Dallas accounted for 23 per cent of all land transactions in Dallas County.

And after the restaurants came offices. Businesses liked the airport, they liked the SO eating places available within a five-minute drive. And they liked the prospect of Addison’s future.

Then came the retail shops. Preston-wood Town Center, through no design on Addison’s part, is located in a tip of Dallas that borders Addison on two sides. Retailers, who flock together like restaurateurs, quickly appeared in the city’s brand-new shopping centers. And all those office workers running loose at the noon hour caused a collective smack of the lips from specialty shop owners.

Addison is a developer’s dream. At the time of its awakening, land was held in large parcels, measurable in acres and even hundreds of acres – chunks big enough for developers to sink their teeth (and their money) into. At its completion the Quorum office park, on 167 acres at Dallas Parkway and Belt Line, will house more than four million square feet of offices and landscaping. The Spectrum, now under construction, will be even larger.

Perhaps even more important to developers than the large land parcels is the city government’s “no hassles” policy as long as the developer plays by the rules.

Webster says, “We basically believe in the marketplace. As long as a guy stays within our guidelines, we say let him do whatever he thinks is marketable. If he thinks an office will succeed on a given piece of ground, it’s his risk. And besides, Addison is different from other cities because we don’t have much residential area to protect.”

Developer Snadon says, “You don’t have to Tight the government in Addison; you can get on with development.”

Developers have, in fact, been among the closest advisors to the city council, and the council is not naive about its motives. “It’s impossible,” says Redding, “for a developer to advise a council without weighing his story in his favor. But we can usually sift out bull from fact.”

Snadon unabashedly pursued self-interest when he headed up the Citizens for Change Committee that brought in alcohol. He and his associates owned considerable land at Belt Line and Midway roads, and he owned an acre at the corner of Inwood and Belt Line, where he later built a Centennial Liquor Store.

Addison doesn’t care-as long as the developer proceeds according to the city’s guidelines for quality.

In Addison, everything is measured by quality. Two years ago, the city decided it needed a capitol building. Other cities have city halls; Addison has the McEntire mansion, Texas Homes magazine’s “Texas Designer Home of the Year” for 1979. You almost expect Scarlet O’Hara to bounce down the staircase swinging a picnic basket.

From the beginning, space was reserved in city master plans for single-family residences, mostly because a classy city needs to have its classy neighborhoods. It isn’t easy to build houses when land is seven dollars a square foot, but over 100 houses have been completed in two subdivisions, each one costing more than $100,000. When the dust from other projects has settled (including one massive, 261-acre development by Snadon and Herbert Hunt and several high-rise condominiums) the city expects a population jump from the present 8500 to 30,000.

The time of completion is not far away. While quiet pastoral scenes are still to be found, most of Addison is in transition. Over 25 per cent is now developed, and considering Addison’s compact size and the efficiency of the developers, C.J. Webster projects that the clang of heavy equipmenl will be out of the city before the end of this decade.

The raw statistics of Addison’s pros-perity are hard to believe. Sales tax revenues have reached $2.2 million; they were $300,000 in 1976 (in those days measured heavily from the sale of aircraft at the airport). Mixed drink taxes will be over $180,000 for the 1980-81 fiscal year; they were $17,400 in 1977-78. There were over 600 building permits issued in 1980 compared to 11 in 1973. There were no restaurants before the local option election; there will soon be more than 100. And – lady in the ditch, take note – all city streets are being reconstructed over a two-year period.

Somebody recently asked Jerry Redding if Addison is unique, or if any city could experience Addison-style growth by going wet. Yes, he answered, any city can do what Addison did – if it is made up of undeveloped farmland and is located in the middle of the richest part of North Dallas, with Prestonwood Town Center across the street, and no liquor for miles.

Yes, and Cinderella’s glass slipper willfit any old size 5AAA.