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GREAT EXPECTATIONS

Will development spoil Oak Lawn?
By George Rodrigue |

There is a cartoon above the drafting table of John Mullen, an architect who lives in what remains of the Vineyard section of Oak Lawn. In the cartoon are two men, walking past a construction site. “There was some talk of preservation,” one tells the other, “but the developers had a protest march.” Mullen’s neighborhood was transformed into mud and tree stumps last year by the Campeau Corporation Texas, in anticipation of a 23-acre office and condominium development. He really likes that cartoon. He relates it to the Great Big Battle Over Zoning Rights, which was fought on January 28 and resulted in a rout of the preservationists. ?Not far from Mullen lives Mack Turner, a small-scale real estate investor who looks like Ben Franklin in a business suit. Every morning, Turner has to fight a little skirmish of his own. As he drives to work through Oak Lawn’s Bowser Street area, he has to pass a lot of unpleasant signs. They are bumper stickers, really, glued to traffic signs. They say, “Save Oak Lawn, Shoot a Developer.” Turner has to keep himself from ripping them down. ?Oak Lawn, a 2.4 square-mile sliver of old Dallas pinned between Central Expressway, the Dallas North Tollway, the Central Business District and Highland Park, has become the city’s hottest real estate market. Land prices have doubled or tripled during the last three years in much of the area; a fortunate few holdouts have been offered up to $70 a square foot for land they could have purchased at a dollar or two per square foot 20 years ago. And property is changing hands faster than playing cards on a troop transport.

Between record-high interest rates and uncertain local markets for both residential and office space, no one knows exactly what will be springing from Oak Lawn’s soil or when. But Oak Lawn is hot, and more than a score of developers have bought hundreds of acres of very expensive land there. They can’t afford not to do something with it. So city planners confidently predict that within 20 years all hell will break loose in Oak Lawn. Its living and working populations will more than double -to 45,000 residents (up from 22,000) and 207,800 workers (up from 96,600). Its streets will be choked by two or three times as many cars as they are designed to carry; some of its residents will be surrounded by grim monoliths of glass and chrome; others will be driven from their lifelong homes by soaring rents or bulldozers. A relative few will grow very, very rich.

Pondering all this, The Dallas Morning News opened an article on the area last fall by proclaiming that “Oak Lawn, as most Dallasites have known it, is on the brink of extinction.” It was a bold statement, but certain questions came to mind -like “Really?” and “So what?” The answer is maybe -it’s too early to tell how good or bad the development will be, though there are more than a few hints-and that Oak Lawn’s experience could set the pattern, or teach the lessons, that will allow all the inner-city neighborhoods either to be nurtured and made more livable or merely exploited.

The stakes are high enough to hold one’s attention even if one worries only about Oak Lawn itself. What will happen to its pedestrian, 24-hour lifestyle as ingratiatingly low storefronts and restaurants on McKinney and Cedar Springs are replaced with buildings of 10 and 20 stories? As offices are packed around the Melrose Hotel? What will become of Oak Lawn’s gingerbread Victorian houses, some dating from 1880, as land values pass $50 a square foot-already a common quotation near Woodall Rodgers Freeway – and reach $70, as has some holdout property near Campeau’s still ill-defined Vineyard development? What will happen to its ethnic and economic diversity as it fills with $450,000 condominiums and $l,000-a-month apartments?

Doug Waskom, the city planner who is responsible for baby-sitting Oak Lawn, worries a lot about those sorts of questions. His anxiety is only slightly relieved by the knowledge that he can do very little about the situation. He does not laugh at the central irony of his job: That largescale developers, attracted by Oak Lawn’s character, are quite likely to destroy it; that the things that make Oak Lawn so attractive make it especially unable to defend itself. Oak Lawn is going every which way at once. It contained, as of the 1980 census, 15,375 whites, 3,432 blacks and 3,312 “others,” mostly Hispanics. It is zoned roughly half for residential use (primarily apartments) and half for commercial and office use. Much of that commercial property, however, is settled only by shacks or single-family houses, making redevelopment of the property cheap and simple. Oak Lawn has one of the city’s few natural attractions in Turtle Creek and has some of the region’s finest antique shops and art galleries in the Quadrangle and the Routh-Fairmount area just north of Mc-Kinney Avenue. Many of Dallas’ best restaurants are within walking distance of each other along McKinney, and the city’s largest collection of Victorian houses lies in the reviving State-Thomas neighborhood, centered at Routh just north of Woodall Rodgers.

That’s plenty for anyone to worry about, but the painful fact is that all of Dallas has a stake in Oak Lawn. Its demise should shiver the spines of neighborhoods throughout the city, as would the death of a parent. Down through the years Oak Lawn has been the precursor to trends that eventually affected all inner-city neighborhoods. Everything has happened to Oak Lawn first.

It was the city’s first exclusive suburb when it emerged in the 1880s, straddling Cedar Springs Road, which connected Dallas to the separate village of Cedar Springs. It contracted the first known case of “urban sprawl” in the 1890s, when streetcars allowed wealthier Dallasites to live in distant subdivisions such as the Bowser-Lemmon area. At the turn of the century, it was the social center of Dallas, with 99 homes on the city social register, mostly from neighborhoods along McKin-ney, Thomas and Colby, south Maple Street and Cole Avenue.

It suffered the first wave of “white flight” beginning about 1910, thanks to expanding streetcar and train routes, the new horseless carriages and the establishment of new, exclusive suburbs such as Highland Park and Munger Place. “Exclusive” meant that the new developments were far away from Freedmanstown and Little Mexico, the black and brown ghettos that pushed at the Thomas-Colby area from three sides.

By 1920, Oak Lawn had some of the city’s first and most prestigious apartments, thanks to the streetcar routes along McKinney and Cedar Springs, Throck-morton and Cole. Some of Dallas’ finest homes were located along Turtle Creek, and McKinney was a booming in-town commercial area, catering to commuters from Highland Park and North Dallas.

By 1930, the older south Oak Lawn neighborhoods had been emptied of wealthy persons and their fine old homes subdivided into boarding houses and apartments. Forsaken by the old Dallas establishment, which had fled north across Turtle Creek if it remained in Oak Lawn at all, the area contained some of the city’s most pitifully dilapidated housing.

By 1950, Oak Lawn was a full-fledged victim of urban decay, thanks to the construction of Central Expressway and Harry Hines Boulevard. Those new arteries severed Oak Lawn from the rest of the city, and hacked its black and Mexican neighborhoods in half. They also deprived its businesses of their old commuter clientele and hastened the rush to the suburbs. And yet Oak Lawn had the first of the city’s positively, absolutely exclusive apartment high-rises, 3525 Turtle Creek Boulevard, built after land prices in the creek corridor soared to an unmentionable $2 a square foot.

In the Sixties, it was given a dose of blanket-zoning, in which huge slabs of decaying residential land were opened to apartments, office buildings and stores. “If one zoning wouldn’t revive an area, they’d use a higher zoning on it,” Waskom says. So Oak Lawn hosted one of the city’s first redevelopment booms, as everyone from small families to huge corporations swooped in to renovate old houses or to raze them and replace them with garden apartments.

Oak Lawn is a community of contrasts, and the back-zoning affected different areas in different ways. The conventional wisdom at City Hall, and even among some developers, is that hindsight has proven its overall effects to be negative. “If there is a villain in all this, it is not us or the other developers, it’s the zoning,” says Jim Anderson, director of commercial development for Campeau Corporation Texas, which razed more than 40 old-and sometimes decrepit – houses to ready the Vineyard for its construction crews.

As the Seventies rolled around, Oak Lawn was on the upswing. Garden apartments were replacing some substandard housing, and renovation and rehabilitation were saving other houses. But there was an obvious problem: Though many of Oak Lawn’s 1,557 acres had been rezoned, only a fraction of that land had been redeveloped. Whole neighborhoods were left under the dangling sword of apartment or commercial zoning.

Such property was, depending on one’s point of view, either a golden development opportunity or a time bomb awaiting only the right economic tremors to set off an explosion of speculation and spot development. The late Seventies, with $1.40 gasoline and a new awareness of how good inner-city life can be, triggered that boom.

One can’t blame the developers for taking advantage of promising land and a thriving local economy. Nor can one place a sensitively designed condominium that comfortably houses four families -and replaced a decrepit boarding house with bad plumbing -in the same class as war, pestilence and psoriasis. But the transition can be tough, even in the best-treated of development areas, and the new vision of Oak Lawn is considerably different from that held by many longtime residents. Anderson can appreciate their feelings. “I’m not certain that O-2 zoning [24-story offices] is inappropriate for this area -with Woodall Rodgers coming through and all that,” he says, “but it’s in the eye of the beholder. If I owned a renovated single-family house on Howell [amidst the Campeau holdings], it would be another matter.”

David McAtee, a longtime Oak Lawn resident and a member of the City Plan Commission, sees his area in danger of slipping into business district-like sterility and losing its friendly pedestrian-oriented face. “If you go out there now you see buildings that are out of scale, that just jar one’s senses,” he says. “A six-story garage opposite a small antique store.” The 2501 Cedar Springs building is one example; there are others.

Ariel Peugh, who for 12 years has lived in a house at Holland Avenue near Lem-mon, predicts “the complete demise of single-family housing in Oak Lawn” within a matter of years, save for the upper fringes near Highland Park. She is not convinced that the small condominium developments that have been built in her area, known as the Golf Grounds, will be a lasting benefit to the neighborhood. “If the neighborhood is not stabilized, does not look snazzy, the original buyer of the condominium will leave,” she says. Should enough owners take that tack and rent their apartments instead of selling them, “You could have an apartment building with six managers. And that would be a disaster. No one would want to own property in a building like that.” Even worse, she says, would be replacement of the Oak Lawn residences with businesses and commercial institutions. Waskom sees the same danger, based on early plans by several of the larger developers. “Simply put, it could just become a business community rather than a residential community,” he says.

If those fears sound alarmist, they do have some factual support. The Central Business District is already skipping across Woodall Rodgers at Field Street, where Keith Cecil and Associates is developing 24 acres of industrially zoned land. Its buildings could reach 25 stories; total value of the project could reach $1 billion. Two-tenths of a mile to the northwest, the Clark Brothers have staked out 23 acres of land and announced that their first structure will be a 23-story office building. Next to the Clarks at Cedar Springs, Maple and McKinney is a 10-acre plot owned and developed by the Rosewood Corp. and architect Phillip Shepherd, who plan to build about $300 million worth of low-rise retail, low-rise hotel and high-rise office space -up to 1.3 million square feet. Two blocks north of the Rosewood tract, between Routh and Allen streets, are 23 acres of land owned by Campeau, which could fill the property with 23-story office towers but has signaled its intentions to build some residential condominiums and town houses. In the middle of Campeau’s acreage lie 1.5 acres of land owned by Vernon and James Smith, who plan an office tower for the site and a separate office building nearby where the remains of Trinity Methodist Church still stand.

Some of those projects, such as the proposed Rosewood Trust/Shepherd project, have been praised for their sensitivity toward their surroundings. Others, such as the gray-and-black box erected by Cor-rigan Properties at Oak Lawn and Lem-mon, belong with their ugly cousins in the Central Business District, if they belong in Dallas at all. What worries the natives and led to the Great Big Battle Over Zoning Rights is that few of the property owners in Oak Lawn have to show any sensitivity for their neighbors or the local heritage. Most of them need only construction funds to build their concrete pillbox parking garages and plastic high-rises. “Most of them have all the zoning they need for whatever they want to build,” Waskom says.

His boss, chief city planner Jack Schoop, is more blunt. “There is nothing the city can do to control growth in Oak Lawn,” he says. “It is a market run wild, a conflagration.. .it’s just a free-for-all.” Many of the local homeowners – preservationists, mostly-don’t like feeling that they have no control over their neighborhoods. Which explains the Great Big Battle Over Zoning Rights. Early in January, the planning staff decided that it might be good if zoning in Oak Lawn reflected actual land-use patterns. Speculation would be slowed and land prices would stay more reasonable, they figured. So they designated 21 small areas of Oak Lawn for zoning adjustments. Six areas were highly commercialized and were to be zoned to higher uses. But 10 areas would be zoned back, so that any land with a house on it could not be valued as if it could contain an office tower. The community reaction was quick and hostile. Developers who had paid Office-Two prices for their property were not about to let it revert to Multi-Family One; neither, as it turned out, were many small-property holders, who hoped to sell to a developer someday. “Of all the areas that we recommended for back-zoning,” Waskom says, “I’d be surprised if two were approved.”

The Oak Lawn Development Strategy study went before the City Plan Commission in late January. The commission, beset by property owners who claimed that back-zoning would cause them to lose their shirts or at least their mortgage loans, adopted only one recommendation from that document: It stipulated, in a 9-4 vote, that no property would be back-zoned in Oak Lawn Dallas without the consent of the owners of at least half the property in the relevant area. One square foot, one vote.

The commission’s vote did not make anyone completely happy. Some, such as Mack Turner, were alarmed that the city could spend their tax money cooking up a scheme to send them to the poorhouse. Others, including Dave Braden of the city’s Urban Design Commission, thought that back-zoning should require 100 percent approval of the affected property owners. But the loudest, most-anguished cries came from the plan commission’s minority of “Pro-Planning” members, also sometimes known as preservationists, neighborhood advocates and, no doubt, communists.

“The fifty-percent rule takes us back to seven years before the Magna Carta,” McAtee complains. He, Celeste Guerrero, Richard M. Dooley and Mary Ellen Deg-nan were the plan commission members who opposed the guideline. Ms. Guerrero says the rule will give large developers veto power over whole neighborhoods, based solely on their land holdings. Indeed, a Campeau-sized developer would have the same voting power as 130 homeowners on 7,500-square-foot lots, if the plan commission grouped the two areas together for the purposes of a back-zoning vote. And McAtee notes that the 80 to 90 percent of Oak Lawn residents who live in rental housing would have virtually no “ability to influence the process.” Nor, for that matter, would any Dallasite living outside the area in question. Nor, if the City Council adopts the plan commission’s policy, would any voter in Dallas. The city would be asking property owners to pick their own zoning. And, McAtee notes, “The very same people who argue that we should not detract from the value of a parcel of land without owner consent are the same people who vote -without even owner notification -to substantially detract from the value of residential property by road widenings and construction of major road projects.”

Pushed ultimately, he says, the 50 percent advocates are holding a position that would mean the elimination of meaningful city land-use planning. Architect Mullen argues, as a professional planner, that matters of zoning and land use are not always best handled by democratic votes. “I’m not saying who’s right and who’s wrong because everyone has a point, but I think that the city has got to get in and roll up its sleeves and say that ultimately it is the decision-maker,” Mullen says. Back-zoning is legal and has worked well in East Dallas, and Schoop says that it might serve portions of Oak Lawn well, also. But, he adds, as a practical matter of politics it will not succeed unless the landowners want it.

By now, the landowners don’t want it because the landowners are the developers. But there was a time when Oak Lawn was a neighborhood, like East Dallas, and thought it controlled its own destiny. How it got from there to 1982 is a story of bad luck, bad planning and bad results. To control its surroundings, a neighborhood must have clout and must be committed. As a whole, Oak Lawn hasn’t met that description for ages.

A strong neighborhood needs to be cohesive, with a strong sense of identity and homogeneous interests. From the start Oak Lawn has been host to mansions and shotgun shacks; white and nonwhite; ghetto dweller and would-be suburbanite. The recent additions of two new categories-straights and gays and developers and residents – fit neatly into a pattern of disunity.

Even in as homogeneous an area as McKinney Avenue, it’s hard to chart consistent policies. For years the city has worked with property owners who said they wanted to keep their area small, quaint and distinctive. To set off their Victorian storefronts, they asked the city to install turn of the century-style streetlights and to keep McKinney narrow, preferably restoring its old brick pavement. But when the owners in that area were asked recently whether they wished to protect those quaint storefronts by rolling back their high-rise light commercial zoning, neighborhood activist Chapman Kelley recalls, they voted by roughly a 98 percent margin to keep the higher zoning.

Difficulties grow when one tries to deal with larger areas of Oak Lawn. Kelley’s neighborhood association, the Routh-Fairmount Property Owners Association, is supporting the efforts of the State-Thomas neighborhood to reroute traffic now using Routh Street onto a proposed connector between Woodall Rodgers and Maple Avenue. The idea came from master urban planner Vincent Ponte, and both State-Thomas and Kelley’s group feel that it is essential to the survival of their neighborhoods. But McAtee and Ms. Guerrero, who usually are allies of any neighborhood effort that’s not insane or criminal, virulently oppose the idea. They argued that it would increase traffic farther north on Maple, endangering neighborhoods and shopping centers in that area.

Besides a sense of identity, a strong neighborhood needs to be committed to its own survival. Which means that it needs middle-class homeowners, as a rule. Rich people can insulate themselves from un-pleasantries or move; poor people tend not to own their own houses. A middle-class mortgage-payer, however, is cornered. He is a dangerous political animal. Oak Lawn never has had too many of those beasts. It was settled before World War II brought federal mortgage assistance, and was suffering from serious suburban-flight problems within a few years of the VA and FHA programs’ establishment. Indeed, its percentage of owner-occupied homes peaked about 1950. And when, in the Fifties and Sixties, Oak Lawn homeowners became an endangered species, the city did little to encourage them.

By building Central Expressway, which opened in 1952-53, and Stemmons Freeway, which opened in the late Fifties, the city was, in effect, telling Oak Lawners to get the heck out of there. Some, namely the poor, were thrown out to make room for the highways. Others needed only the encouragement of shorter commutes from the country to head for their suburban tract homes. As they left, the city fathers did not cry, “Come back! City living is great!” They did not take steps to improve Oak Lawn’s residential neighborhoods to the point that they could have held their own against the charms of Richardson. Instead, they decided to turn Oak Lawn into a land of garden apartments and commercial enterprises. They blanket-zoned. They gave up.

The blanket-zoning did not stabilize most of Oak Lawn. Its southeastern quadrant, south of Haskell between Turtle Creek and the Central Business District, was changed from light business and residential zoning to intense business zoning: Heavy Commercial, Light Commercial, General Retail and Office Two, for instance. But because the area was so poor, so run down -and so black -no one did much of anything in the area until two years ago. “That zoning probably did not help us much,” Waskom says.

The Turtle Creek corridor was zoned up from low-rise residential and business to high-rise. “It probably would have thrived anyway,” Waskom says. The net effect of that change, then, is that some of the corridor’s natural beauty has been lost but more of Dallas’ wealthier citizens get aerial, air-conditioned views of the creek, and the city’s tax base is higher than it would be otherwise.

On the south side of Turtle Creek, west of Lemmon Avenue, the homes were less worthy of salvage and the deterioration marked enough that, in the mid-Sixties at least, up-zoning seemed like the sanest move possible. Some of the projects completed as a result of that zoning shift are less than magnificent, but then so were their predecessors.

In northwest Oak Lawn, from Lemmon Avenue and environs north to Highland Park, the zoning was changed from single-family residential and low-density apartments to low- and medium-density apartments. The effects are hard to calculate. North of Wycliff the change was probably unnecessary, even harmful. The area is much like several East Dallas neighborhoods that revived themselves handily without apartment construction. Its homes were valuable enough that their owners could be expected to try and save them, and the neighborhood was comfortably close to Highland Park. On the other hand, what development has occurred in that portion of Oak Lawn has tended toward the tasteful, even if it differs from the previous character of the neighborhood.

Finally, the zoning changes sent a plain message to homeowners in all of Oak Lawn: “Your Neighborhood Is Unstable.”

Apartment zoning is not conducive to family homesteading; the new apartment residents tend to be young and transient, and the older homeowners tend to resent being surrounded by apartments and parking lots. Landlords, meanwhile, see a chance to sell their property for development and worry less about long-term maintenance. And the city did not bother to install buffer zones between residential and commercial uses. Hence, Roswell Street, the most magical block in Oak Lawn, consists of colorfully renovated houses stuck against the noise and garbage of one of Cedar Springs’ junkiest shopping centers.

Blanket-zoning’s sneakiest trap is the speculation that arises when land values exceed the prices of houses and apartment buildings. That speculation drives prices steadily higher each time the land is sold, until it reaches a value at which no one can afford it or is developed or inflation catches up to its purchase prices. Oak Lawn property now sells for $8 or $9 per square foot in State-Thomas, which is zoned for town houses, and $40 to $50 a square foot in surrounding areas zoned for offices or commercial developments. Even in north Oak Lawn, prices of $15 to $20 a square foot are common, says Realtor Erle Rawlins Jr. “This means that they have to build high-density developments on their property, and that worries many of us who care about Oak Lawn,” he says.

Another possible result of the land speculation in south Oak Lawn absolutely terrifies property owners there. “We just quake at the arson problem around here,” says Chapman Kelley, who can reel off more than half a dozen suspicious fires within a few minutes’ walk of his Victorian art gallery. One of Kelley’s friends, Russ White, turned down several offers to sell his flower shop at McKinney and Leonard. One Wednesday evening last fall, at approximately 6 p.m., he was in his living quarters at the rear of the building when he saw smoke coming from the front, where he kept no flammable liquids. The fire department extinguished that blaze. On the following Saturday night, White was sleeping in his bedroom at the rear of the store. He heard “a crackling noise” and looked up to see flames rushing at him from the front of the house. He escaped through a window, but his 80-year-old house was destroyed.

There were 11 arson fires in Oak Lawn in 1979-80, and although the fire department’s arson squad has not established a pattern there, Fire Marshal Jerry Lambert has some opinions on the matter. One developer, he says, was invited in for a “frank” discussion in which investigators pointed out a pattern of fires involving properties in which that developer, whom he would not name, had an interest. Arson becomes a potential problem “any time somebody somewhere could perceive that the land would be worth more without the building,” Lambert says. “It could be the owner, an investor, a developer or a real estate agent who wants to make a commission.” In general, he adds, arson for profit fires-as distinct from accidental fires, which are common in older buildings – are set for two reasons in boom areas: “The homeowner will not sell out and a developer really wants that land, or the homeowner wants to collect twice for his property, with the developer paying him for his land and the insurance company paying him for his house.

“We have not been able to make any connection between the arson fires,” he says. “We have put people in jail who we know set the fires, but we have not been able to put any connection between them.”

Aside from making the area less desirable and more dangerous, the back-zoning made Oak Lawn harder to regulate. By giving away zoning instead of telling the developers to come and ask for it, the city was losing its power of suggestion over the builders.

Which brings us back to the matter of neighborhood clout. In Dallas, clout means city council votes. Most parts of the city got a lot more clout when Dallas switched to single-member council districts in the Seventies, but not Oak Lawn. It was carved into three separate council districts. Its political power was as fragmented as its identity.

And yet groups in Oak Lawn have managed to win their way with city government. In 1978, McAtee helped lead a revolt that killed the idea of using the MKT railroad tracks right-of-way that bisects Oak Lawn as a bus route. Chapman Kelley and his fellow artists and shop owners managed to stave off the creation of a one-way street network that would have turned their Routh-Fairmount area into a quasi-expressway. Judy Smith-Hearst and her neighbors in the 11-block State-Thomas area managed to get their area back-zoned and to protect it from commercial intrusion, even though it is on the very edge of the Woodall Rodgers and McKinney corridors. Celeste Guerrero and her friends Kay and Key Kolb managed to shut off the streets connecting their gracious Perry Heights neighborhood to Lemmon Avenue.

The common factor in those success stories is that each action was initiated and pushed by a neighborhood group, as opposed to City Hall. Before Schoop’s arrival in Dallas in 1979, the planning department tended to treat development as something it watched, instead of guided. The department has been more active lately -it walked right into the Oak Lawn controversy with its own recommendations-but Schoop says it still cannot get anywhere politically without a strong “constituency” for whatever program it is advocating.

If you accept the often-mouthed premise that a healthy city must have healthy in-town neighborhoods, the history of Oak Lawn has been one of missed chances, misjudgments, municipal impotence and civil discord. It would be astonishing and ironic, given all that, if Oak Lawn were to survive -or be improved by -the bulldozer crowd. There are no guarantees, but there are some reasons for optimism.

For one thing, the city is not without persuasive tools. Though most of the large developers do not need any additional zoning to build their projects, they always seem to want just a little extra. On virtually every redeveloping block in Oak Lawn, there has been a petition for some sort of zoning variance, such as extra height, shorter building setbacks from property lines or, most often, fewer required parking spaces. City planners, who privately concede that their parking space requirements are too stringent, are using the rules to encourage – perhaps bribe would be a better word – developers into mixing residential space into their projects. An office building, standing alone, would require one parking space for every 333 square feet of inside floor space. “Since one parking space in a structured parking deck requires something very close to 333 square feet, you end up with a parking garage that’s the same floor area as the office building,” Mullen says. Ponte says the Oak Lawn parking requirements are six times more stringent than those in the Central Business District. But the city has left developers an out: If they add hotels to their office or commercial projects, they can cut the total parking requirements by 10 percent. An additional 10 percent cut would be possible for projects including residential uses, Waskom says. Similarly, the city can use its power to grant setback changes as a bargaining chip in getting developers to lower their building heights or create small parks on their land.

For whatever reason, there are signs that new projects may be somewhat sensitive to Oak Lawn’s style. Campeau and the Bank of Dallas, for instance, are building condominium and office towers, respectively, that generally are viewed with distaste and alarm by their neighbors. They are not enlarged Victorian buildings; they are stunted skyscrapers. But both developers are going to the trouble and expense of building their parking garages underground, preserving the sidewalk level for people instead of autos. The Clark Brothers and the Rosewood/Shepherd development also will use underground parking, which costs about twice as much as an above-ground deck. There are economic reasons for that -underground parking allows fuller use of the land, for instance -and no doubt the extra construction costs will be passed on to those who use the buildings. But pedestrians, at least, will get a more scenic view for free.

The Rosewood Corp./Shepherd development at McKinney and Pearl has been praised by Kelley and by Judy Smith-Hearst for its park land and for its low-density development along Maple Avenue, where a line of single-story shops will meet Kelley’s neighbors and their restored Victorian houses. Indeed, Kelley says, the main office towers in that project will be recessed deeply enough into the property that they will not intrude on any of the neighbors. The project will serve as its own buffer zone.

Even Campeau, the Canadian firm that has been cursed and reviled by Oak Lawn residents for its closed-mouthed ways and generally non-Dallas methods, offered to surround the perimeter of its project with four-story town houses, so that the neighbors would be spared the sight of a two-story parking garage or a 23-story office or residential tower.

Some developers, of course, are building ugly parking garages so prominent that you’d think they were proud of them. The garage at 2501 Cedar Springs, in fact, aroused the ire of the city board of zoning adjustment because the builders implied they would build only four stories in return for a 10-foot setback reduction, and then built the decks six stories high.

The real estate and financial markets, which helped get Oak Lawn into this mess, may also help it get out. The buried parking is one example; when land costs $3 million an acre, one uses it wisely. Every inch not occupied by a car can be used for trees (which make a property more appealing) or the office or residential building that is supposed to be the property’s chief attraction.

A subtler benefit, according to broker King Laughlin, is that when “the cost of any development of any kind is as staggering as it is in Oak Lawn,” the marginal cost of erecting a high-quality building – as opposed to something shoddy or ugly – is relatively low. As a percentage of total cost, those high-quality amenities are cheap. And without high-quality touches it becomes difficult to rake in high sales prices or rental fees. “If nothing else, the cost of the land is so high that you just have to have a quality development for the numbers to make sense,” says Matt Roy, the financial manager of the Billingsley Company.

Even a high-quality office building, however, would not please those concerned with preserving Oak Lawn’s residential character. Since much of Oak Lawn carries the commercial, general retail or office zonings that make such construction possible, they have cause for alarm. But once again the market -thanks to dumb luck – may be riding to the rescue.

Several developers who rushed into Oak Lawn with visions of office buildings are pulling back and reevaluating their plans. Campeau went back to the drawing board in early March to take another look at its Vineyard projects (the LaTour condominium tower is already under construction). Jim Anderson says Campeau would like to start building something on its Vineyard land before the end of 1982. With both the financing and buying markets in upheaval, however, he couldn’t say that construction would begin within the year.

Lincoln Properties, which owns the Esquire Theater property at Rawlins Street and Lemmon Avenue, is also reconsidering its plans. “We originally leaned toward an office building,” says Marshall Tycher, vice president for development. “Now we are thinking about a mid-rise apartment building.” Other projects reportedly have been put on hold while would-be developers seek financing. By the time those arrangements are made, the reasons for building residential units instead of offices may be even more compelling. The Central Business District, which is only a stone’s throw from Oak Lawn, is expected to have a glut of office space within a few years. As of January 1982, it held 16.3 million square feet, 95 percent of which was leased out. But another 5 million square feet is officially on the way. The local market alone can’t absorb a 31 percent increase in downtown offices, and the national economy is discouraging outside firms from moving to Dallas. As a result, developers may find themselves holding some very expensive Oak Lawn real estate and needing to build something at a time when offices in the area are empty. The apartment market, however, is relatively tight. Unusually high rent increases of 12 to 15 percent are forecast for 1982. And the success of the prestige condominiums has proven that Dallasites will pay big bucks for “quality” urban living.

Any residential construction would ease the fears that Oak Lawn could become just another weak imitation of the Central Business District. But equally serious are the questions about whether it can survive the next few years without losing its friendly pedestrian-oriented face (no one enjoys feeling like a flea at an elephant convention), its balance of mixed uses and diverse people, its mobility and even more of its green space and its heritage.

Historic preservationists can take some comfort in knowing that some of Oak Lawn’s most sensitive areas are already well-protected. The antique shops and galleries in the Routh-Fairmount area have banded together for seven years now under the protection of a special planned district zoning law, and should remain secure for at least another seven. Their biggest asset is their eye-catching historical air. The same goes for the State-Thomas area, which also has planned district zoning at the town house level. Its lots are small, which means its residents can afford to pay taxes on them, and its houses will become increasingly valuable if the neighborhood continues to improve itself. There are plans to move doomed Victorian-era houses from other lots in Oak Lawn onto vacant property in State-Thomas; 12 houses already have been added to the neighborhood. And since it will be the classiest single-family housing within walking distance of the Central Business District-perhaps the only single-family housing in the area -it may one day be more valuable as itself than as the lobby for a huge skyscraper. That, at any rate, is the opinion of Jack Schoop. He is less optimistic about Oak Lawn’s other historic areas. “The market is too hot,” he says. “The point is to get there before it gets out of control and sort out what’s desired and adjust the zoning while you still can.”

The prospects for extra parks and green spaces also seem poor. Much of the land in Oak Lawn that currently is vacant will be developed; new buildings will sit atop relatively expensive land and will tend to cover as much of that land as the law allows. Dallas, unlike many cities its size, has no policy requiring developers to contribute to an area’s green spaces or parks, and has only a small budget for buying park land. The summer bond issue should include funds for a much-needed hiking and biking trail along Turtle Creek, but the city’s prime high-rise apartment location seems doomed to be walled in by condominium towers, barring some unexpectedly bold move by the city council to force height restrictions on future development near the creek. “There’s a call for protecting the view,” Schoop says, “but we’ve tried it downtown, struggling and struggling to get the sun’s rays on Thanks-Giving Square… and we got wholesale resistance from the marketplace, from the owners; they want no intervention.”

The problem is that Oak Lawn’s much talked-about ambiance is the pet of many and the responsibility of none. Everyone believes in protecting the view from Turtle Creek, but if one high-rise cuts into that view just a little, its owners get all the benefits of that trespass and pays perhaps one one-thousandth the aesthetic penalty.

Another aspect of Oak Lawn that seems destined to change completely within the next 20 years is its economic diversity. Either physically or financially, the poorer residents are being driven from the area.

After the Argyle apartment building was renovated, rents almost tripled for some residents. The Morning News interviewed two women whose monthly rent rose from $405 to $605 and from $475 to $750. Dallas’ tight apartment market will be felt more acutely in Oak Lawn than in other areas of the city because Oak Lawn has become so fashionable; it will be felt most acutely in renovated buildings, where landlords have a reason (or at least an excuse) to charge more.

Most of the new housing construction, meanwhile, is concentrated on the luxury condominium market. A “low-end” condominium in Oak Lawn will cost $200,000. “The Beverly, 3525 and the Warrington are all very high-status addresses,” says realtor Rawlins, who sold the land now bearing 3525 Turtle Creek. “I believe,” he says, “that there are some new penthouses in the area that will sell for $1 million.” Indeed, the Claridge condominiums at Turtle Creek and Lemmon are not ashamed to announce that they are priced “from $450,000.” Numbers like that do not lead to economic diversity. And like most new inner-city construction, Oak Lawn’s buildings often are erected on land that used to be owned or leased by its poorer residents.

Given those limitations, however, there is no reason to think Oak Lawn cannot be improved by the development surge. It may take some creative work by developers and some leadership by the City Council, but there’s at least one expert who thinks it can be done.

Jack Diamond is an urban planner headquartered in Toronto. For several months he has helped supervise graduate architecture students at the University of Texas at Arlington who are mulling the prospects for Oak Lawn. “I think this whole thing could be a marvelous opportunity,” he says.

There is nothing intrinsically evil about apartments or condominiums. They utilize expensive land better than detached homes and, properly designed and maintained, they make for more efficient and more livable cities. Apartments and condominiums are the only way to provide housing for all the people who like inner-city conveniences, or anyone who cannot afford to pay half a million dollars for a 7,500-square-foot lot.

“Some of the most sophisticated housing in the world,” Diamond notes, “is in London, Paris and New York.”

It is built at 30 units per acre and more, and has a positive “city” feel because, though it is built to the curb, it contains courtyards or green spaces and is built relatively low to the ground. Its residents can walk to stores, jobs, plays and movies -their blocks have the same features as many small towns -and can take mass transit for longer trips.

Traditional single-family dwellings, on the other hand, by their very nature keep people apart – from each other, from their workplaces and from their entertainment areas. The suburban pattern chains residents to their cars. And studies have suggested that cities actually lose money on detached housing units when the costs of servicing them are compared with the tax revenues they provide.

Students in Associate Professor Rick Scherr’s class have calculated that they could increase the housing density of Oak Lawn by 33 percent, building only on vacant or dilapidated property. They also have devised theories they believe could, with minimal intervention by city planners, keep traffic levels acceptable and preserve the pedestrian-oriented Oak Lawn style.

Diamond would have the city relax its setback restrictions and perhaps tighten up a bit on its maximum allowable density (square feet of building floor space relative to area of the property). He would avoid the dehumanizing aspects of high-rise construction by avoiding high-rise whenever he could. “What most people don’t recognize is that there are alternatives to high-rise that give the same density,” he says. By building fewer stories, taking buildings closer to the curb and designing interesting facades, he thinks architects could enhance the pedestrian quality of Oak Lawn. Instead of a steady ribbon of land around each building, he would bring the buildings close enough to the curb to have their awnings shelter the sidewalk. Some of the ground space the developer “saved” by avoiding the city’s old setback requirements would be devoted, by law or agreement, to courtyards or small parks.

The goal, Diamond says, is to entice families with children back to the city. Children can play in vest-pocket parks or in courtyards, he notes, but not in the streets or at curbside. And small parks foster a sense of community in neighborhoods. “These families are the most-sensitive [urban dwellers] and they have flown to the suburbs; we want to bring them back,” he says. “Bringing them back is the most important issue facing North American cities.”

In commercial areas, he would use some of the same techniques to reduce the height of buildings. Where they had to be kept tall for economic reasons, Diamond would set the taller part of the building back from the sidewalk and perhaps use a three- or four-story facade to meet the pedestrians. From the curb, it would appear that the building was only three or four stories tall. Shops and restaurants would occupy the lower floor. Parking would be underground or hidden behind the main streets, instead of cluttering up the front of the streetscape.

“Buildings that are up to the curb and have social animation are safe places to be,” he says. “They can provide weather protection from sun and rain by having arcades that overhang the sidewalks.”

Dallasites, Diamond says, are too worried about urban densities and too hung up on high-rise buildings. “If you look at Amsterdam, it’s about one-fifteenth the land area of Dallas and has the same population. And it has no high-rises and is a hell of a lot more livable.

“Having recognized that you can accommodate those kinds of densities, it also means that you can support public transportation,” he adds.

Some sort of transportation improvements will be needed in Oak Lawn within the next two decades; the streets will not be able to handle even the minimum predicted growth. Waskom, however, predicts that feasible street improvements could boost traffic capacity by only about 20 percent. Street widenings and new roads are, by and large, too costly to be attempted, Diamond says.

That leaves mass transit, which throughout most of Dallas has two problems: The population is not dense enough to warrant it, and everyone wants to head somewhere different. Oak Lawn, once it is fully built out, may be the first inner-city neighborhood dense enough to warrant, say, a rail line. Though the area alone would be far too small to warrant its own rapid rail system, it could serve as an ideal transit corridor for lines going north from the Central Business District. And a well-developed, healthy Oak Lawn would serve as a model for other inner-city development.

Tom Ryden, a senior transportation planning engineer at the North Central Texas Council of Governments, says that as a rule of thumb, a full-fledged rapid rail system is feasible when population densities of 8,000 dwelling units per square mile are sustained for 100 to 150 square miles, and there is a central destination point containing more than 50 million square feet of non-residential space. Downtown Dallas already qualifies as a destination point, but most of the city is far too sparsely settled to support heavy rail systems such as those in Washington, D.C., San Francisco or Atlanta. Even a light rail system, requiring only 6,000 dwelling units per square mile for a 25-square-mile area, could not yet be supported in Dallas. Oak Lawn, for instance, has about 5,230 dwelling units per square mile. If the inner city continues to attract new apartments and condominiums, however, and if the Central Expressway corridor maintains its growth rate, some sort of rail system could become feasible, though expensive. (Current construction costs are about $15 million to $18 million per mile of ground-level light track and $18 million to $22 million for heavy rail systems. Costs would double for an elevated system.)

In the meantime, Diamond says, Oak Lawn’s transit needs could be met with a bus system. He might even suggest reducing the traffic-carrying capacity of some streets to protect their pedestrian orientations. “Streets can be for cars or for people; they can’t be for both,” he says. And, he adds, for reasons of good sense and traffic flow, areas still zoned for housing should not be zoned up for commercial use.

Whether those suggestions will be followed by many Oak Lawn developers remains to be seen. But several of the plans unveiled thus far have used some of those techniques, and some of the projects – the renovations of the Mansion and the Mel-rose Hotel come to mind-qualify as serious efforts at historic preservation, as well.

The State-Thomas experience shows that alert, well-organized neighborhoods can salvage something even in bad circumstances. When DP&L wanted to build a substation in the neighborhood, Ms. Smith-Hearst and her colleagues negotiated a deal whereby the substation would not be opposed by the neighbors if it were hidden, surrounded by a brick wall that blends with the atmosphere of the block, and accompanied by DP&L’s promise to devote roughly half a city block of its land to a park. Plus, DP&L agreed to have 15 homes on the site moved onto waiting lots in State-Thomas.

On some issues, Ms. Smith-Hearst says, there should be no room for negotiation. Changing more residential zoning to commercial zoning is one such issue. But on others she believes there is room for discussion. “Gray matter can save Oak Lawn,” she says, tapping her skull. “It may not save all of it, but it can save pockets.”

Chapman Kelley agrees, and says, “Shooting a developer will not save Oak Lawn. All of us are ’developers’ to the extent that our resources allow it. All we are asking for is fairness, and sometimes you have to be very diligent to find it.”

Indeed, the history of Oak Lawn suggests that Dallas neighborhoods interested in preserving themselves or growing gracefully should watch their political power bases, work to change unsuitable zoning or road plans before market pressures make them sacrosanct, and try to agree on a set of goals that will hold their areas together. The main lesson of Oak Lawn may be that if a neighborhood wants a job done right, it had better do it itself.

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