THE CITY PLAYING THE ZONE

DALLAS HAS one of the most sophisticated and complex zoning ordinances in America, with 29 different classifications for property within the city limits. Houston has no zoning laws at all. Drive through Houston and then drive through Dallas, and you’ll quickly discover that there is no difference in the way the two cities have developed.

The difference between the two cities is philosophical: Houston is much less pretentious about letting developers do as they damn well please. Dallas, on the other hand, has a zoning board and a city council to interpret zoning laws and modify them before the developers may do as they wish. Dallas’ system is much more parliamentary and democratic.

Huge money is involved in decisions about zoning – fortunes for landowners and developers, financial prosperity for additional thousands. Many people argue that the future of Dallas depends on the zoning decisions of the next few years. Therein lie the political land mines.

Ordinance changes are made according to civic need and outcry. If a teetotaling landowner doesn’t want his property to be used for the sale of alcoholic beverages (by someone who leases it to operate a restaurant, for example), or if a frightened neighborhood wants to protect itself from a proposed supermarket, either can request that a suffix “D” be added to the zoning designation of the land, thereby making it legally “dry.” The key is for the “drys” to have more pull with the city council than the “wets.”

If someone in your neighborhood turns his house into an auto repair shop or a beauty parlor, a phone call to the city zoning inspectors will shut him down and even force him to haul old auto litter out of his yard. Auto repair shops and beauty parlors aren’t the family activities expected in this zoning classification. Your neighbor can’t even have more than two garage sales a year without being classified as a business and therefore out of line with residential zoning.

And, if your neighbor is into moon rockets and the roar of the engines is keeping you from your Sunday nap, you can likewise petition the city government about that. Assuming it’s an isolated case, the council will likely apply the catchall public nuisance ordinances; but if your rocketeer is part of a growing movement, a zoning ordinance can be passed restricting rocketing to parcels of land measured in acres.

Boom periods in a city, like the current one in Dallas, put zoning ordinances under great stress. A developer makes his living by providing what the city needs in new buildings. His purpose is to construct offices, apartments, condos, and shopping centers. These are highly intensive uses of land – uses that some people feel are not in the city’s, or their neighborhood’s, best interest.

In order to build what he wants, the developer must often get the land rezoned to a more intensive classification – from R-16 (residential with 16,000 square-foot lot size), for example, to a classification allowing town houses.

In Dallas, the 29 different zoning categories (or “districts,” as they are written in the law) range from A (for agriculture) to 1-3 (heaviest industrial). Every inch of Dallas land has a zoning classification, noted officially on zoning maps in the Department of Urban Planning.

This is not to say that zoning in Dallas has much to do with planning. The zoning ordinances and the zoning maps are all that exist: There is no master plan for the use of land here. As a result, zoning designations are far from permanent. Requests to rezone land come to city hall daily. Decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, often in the atmosphere of a crisis. As a result, developers (especially those with contacts and power) have historically prevailed. The Wall Street Journal once labeled Dallas “the developer’s city.”

On paper, zoning stands in the developer’s way until the city is sure that his development will not create an undesirable impact on traffic flow and neighborhood integrity. But as a general rule, zoning has not proved to be much of a hurdle. The city council of the Bob Folsom era, in essence, let the zoning chips fall where they would. It rezoned North Dallas land extensively, even though the council had been told in the seven-volume Far North Dallas Study by the Dallas Department of Urban Planning that it would take over $100 million to make the city’s road system adequate for “anticipated land use” under zoning the way it was. Now, with Dallas still booming, pressure for rezoning land north of the Trinity increases all the time.

The opposition to rezoning is increasing just as steadily. As downtown threatens to spill across Woodall Rodgers Freeway into residential Oak Lawn, organized neighborhood groups are assuming counter-strategies. The same organized opposition might be expected in North Dallas, too, with the encroachment of the LBJ corridor, but so far there has been no opposition. (Some theorize North Dallas’ docility is a result of the transient population there – that these people from places like Chicago and Boston view Dallas problems as kid stuff compared to the problems back home.)

The City Plan Commission, and ultimately the city council, must decide between the two interests. A sizable block of every week’s council agenda is devoted to items that, as Councilman Rolan Tucker puts it, “deal with the rights of the people to use their land and the rights of the people who live around them.”

Before either group gets a crack at a zoning request, it incubates for a while in the cubicles of the Department of Urban Planning’s Zoning and Development Administration. The head of this division, Gary Sieb, is Dallas’ man in the middle.

Anyone who has attended a city council meeting has felt a twinge of compassion for this articulate, nasal-voiced Yankee who presents the recommendations of the City Plan Commission. He explains the rationale for the commission’s opinion on each case (and often adds his own), then fields on-the-spot questions from the council about any matter of zoning.

Gary Sieb’s daily world is full of cross fire. From eight to five, he walks a no-man’s-land between high-risk people whose livings depend on being able to change the face of the city and low-risk people who love the city’s face as is.

Sieb’s problems are compounded by a zoning code he calls “the most complicated I have ever worked with.” Dallas’ 29 zoning categories (versus 24 for Boston and 19 for Atlanta) include seven different residential categories, four multifamily categories, three industrial categories, and two office categories.

To these can be added the “D” suffix, an “H” (for historic) suffix, and an “FP” (for flood plain) prefix – further designations that limit what can be done with land.

Another complication is the “deed restriction,” a practice illegal in some states, but big in Texas (in lieu of zoning, Houston relies on them altogether). In this method of getting rezoning approved, some landowners will volunteer to restrict the use of land to that which is specifically requested, foregoing other uses that the new zoning classification would allow. City planners prefer the Planned Development (PD) zoning district, in which every detail is spelled out in the zoning -not written into the deed – before approval is granted.

To make matters worse, Sieb’s cross fire takes place in a virtual mine field. Thanks to the “accumulative” zoning ordinance system -a throwback to zoning ordinances recommended by the federal government in the Twenties, when Dallas’ first comprehensive ordinance was established – nobody is ever sure the classification assigned to a piece of land by the city council will, in the end, be the one used. Under the system, a higher more intensive zoning classification includes all the uses allowed under lesser classifications. If a parcel of land is zoned “GR” (general retail), for example, the owner is not bound to develop it for retail. The GR classification is a high one, so the land can, without rezoning, be used for offices apartments, duplexes, or single family dwellings. City officials say that surprises in land use are not uncommon.

The system exists for the benefit of the landowner; if a user cannot be found to develop his property for one purpose, he can have enough flexibility to develop it for another purpose. It also allows mixed-use developments, such as a high-rise building that has retail stores at ground level, offices on lower floors, and apartments or condominiums on the higher floors.

But as a result of accumulative zoning, the land is sometimes used for things that are not in the interests of the city or the neighborhood -things that might not have been approved if they had been included in the original request for reclassification.

Suppose, for example, a landowner requests that his 20 acres be zoned “SC” (shopping center), and his request is granted. Then suppose four or five years pass and nothing is done to the property. In the meantime, the need for a shopping center in that area has diminished. The property owner can then develop the 20 acres for apartments, which is technically a less intensive use of land. At the time of the zoning change, everybody was looking forward to a shopping center that would serve the community. Instead, the neighborhood gets lots of new people and the city gets extra traffic and crowded schools. When Richardson wrote its zoning ordinance in 1954, the city council wanted no part of the accumulative system and adopted an exclusive zoning ordinance system.

Gary Sieb’s staff of 18 is one of the largest at city hall -and perhaps the one under the most pressure. “We are always caught in the middle between the developer’s interest and the homeowner’s interest,” says John Kimbrough, Sieb’s zoning administrator. “The one tells us he has to have the property rezoned to a higher classification in order to justify the economics of his development. And the other side puts pressure on us to control the density of their neighborhood. Besides the deadlines we put on ourselves, we get constant pressure from the applicant for zoning change, who tells us all about how he is paying interest and wants things expedited.”

Both sides are potent. Homeowne come to open hearings en masse and apply the pressure of numbers. Organized neighborhood groups have learned the rules of the game and now know how to win the compromise.

Celeste Guerrero began six years ago defending her own Perry Heights neighborhood in Oak Lawn; now she is a powerful advocate for preserving all inner-city neighborhoods.

“There is a great deal of neighborhood involvement in city decisions now,” she says. “The business people aren’t saying, ’We want this and we want that’ anymore and getting it. I think that era is past. There’s cooperation now.”

Louis Nichols, an attorney in zoning matters for 35 years, agrees; he calls increased neighborhood involvement in the zoning decisions the most important change to come along in years. He adds, “It’s healthy if you think neighborhoods should decide what happens around them -but it can prevent planning for the general welfare of the city, too.”

Neighborhood involvement may be growing, but the developers’ side is still overwhelmingly formidable. Developers and their lawyers have a lot of experience with the ins and outs of rezoning, the tactics of negotiation and stonewalling, and maximizing their reputations and their families’ reputations. And it is the norm for one developer to speak on behalf of his “competitor” in public hearings, lauding the quality of his work and speaking philosophically for greater intensity of development. He knows that a victory for rezoning today is a smiling precedent for the rezoning he will ask for tomorrow. The opposition calls this the “camel’s nose-hump-hump-rump theory.”

And most significantly, developers very often belong to the powerful elite of Dallas, a city where the “Any Wealth Is Good” syndrome has always applied. Developers have historically had the contacts and the economic power that could easily frustrate the homeowner lobby.

However, this may be changing. Mayor Jack Evans and his urban planning staff are working to put developers and neighborhood groups in contact with each other in an effort to establish communications and an atmosphere of negotiation -a sort of ounce of prevention in expectation of tense years ahead.

The areas most likely for rezoning during the next few years are the inner-city Oak Lawn neighborhood, the North Dal-las-LBJ-Addison area, and the new Dallas addition of Renner (where developers want to change existing residential and holding-pattern agricultural classifications into something more intensive for housing, while planners scream that they won’t be able to fit anybody else on the highways).

The City Plan Commission, an appointed body of 15 private citizens that represents both homeowner and real estate developer interests, sifts the evidence carefully, visits zoning sites, and makes recommendations to the city council. From here, favorably recommended requests are forwarded to the city council’s Wednesday agenda for final action, along with appeals of requests denied.

The rezoning process is an uptight, extremely serious matter. Zoning Inspector Rose Piper says that little snickering goes on in the enforcement section either. Not that the zoning dilemma doesn’t have its light side:

According to the zoning code, you can park your boat on your lawn, but not your car. A car, the reasoning goes, moves in and out and leaves unsightly ruts, while a boat just sits there and at worst gathers weeds. Chief Zoning Inspector Ray Couch says this is the most common area of zoning violation, the point where neighbor most often squeals on neighbor. Since the ordinance speaks of parking on “unapproved surfaces” (that is, grass), one man in Pleasant Grove avoided citations by paving his front yard. With the law on his side, he can now line up his three boats, one recreational vehicle, and numerous cars right on the “lawn.”

Everything involving the keeping of farm livestock is strictly defined: how big the lot must be (three acres, the definition of a “farm”), how far a horse on a residential lot must be from property lines (20 feet), the required size of buildings and grounds for one horse (100-square-foot stable and 800-square-foot corral), how frequently manure must be removed (daily) -even what an animal is. For example, “The term pig shall be inclusive of all swine; cows inclusive of all bovines.” (City folk need to be told this sort of thing.)

And then there is the “Ban the Bee” caper.

Keeping bees is a legal and honorable pastime in Dallas. Apiaries are banned in Los Angeles (except on land zoned agricultural) and in Boston, but not in Dallas; hives are to be found in yards throughout the city. One of them is at Reagan and Holland streets: Tom McCullough’s place.

McCullough has been an Oak Lawner for 36 years and a serious beekeeper even longer. From his days as a Boy Scout in San Antonio, the bee lifestyle has fascinated him and has been a source for the earthy anecdotes he spins about the bee. He has 25 hives on the grounds of his Mobil agency in Corsicana and one hive of 200,000 bees in Oak Lawn.

When times are hard, like on a cold day in January or the 100-degree days of summer, they sometimes have to go as far away as Turtle Creek for their water (bees won’t drink chlorinated pool water) and to One Main Place for their nectar.

But, alas, bees have an image problem. People remember their mothers swinging brooms and shrieking, “There’s a bee in the house!” (A bee is a huge disruptive force in the home; people tend to like their honey in sterile plastic squeeze bottles, not on the hoof.) So complaints to city government developed concerning the winged horde…and the wheels of zoning ordinance change started grinding.

One day last summer, Councilman Don Hicks reported to the council that he was receiving protests from his constituents that more bees than usual were buzzing around their homes. Other councilmen had received similar complaints, so the members of city council (presumably remembering their own mother’s shrieks and swinging brooms) gave a collective nod of concern and asked the city staff to look into the matter.

When the question started its path toward becoming a law, a preliminary step was necessary before the plan commission saw it. Because an amendment to the city’s zoning ordinance was at issue, it was reviewed by the Zoning Ordinance Advisory Committee, another citizen group.

Gary Sieb’s staff had heard a note of worry in the instruction from the city council to look into the threat of beehives, so the guidelines they drafted came down negative. They forwarded a recommendation to the ZOAC to alter the existing definition of “farm livestock” in the zoning ordinance to include bees. A bee would then be a farm animal, and it would take three acres to keep a hive. Tom McCullough’s Oak Lawn bees were in trouble.

But then came the rain. By the time the negative recommendation reached the plan commission, the heavy spring rains of 1981 had come to Dallas. The city’s bees were all busy close to home with the mimosa and ligustrum blossoms and they didn’t bother anybody. At the time of the public hearing, the atmosphere had changed, and nobody was excited about bees anymore. At its final meeting in May, the plan commission denied the motion to amend the ordinance to zone out bees.

“Did you know that the city was about to zone bees out of Dallas?” I asked Tom McCullough a month later.

“The hell they were!” he roared. “I’d have been down there at the public meeting-and so would professional bee men who go to zoning meetings all the time to speak for bees. Bees don’t hurt anybody – and besides, you can’t really keep bees out of the city.”