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Real Estate: The Hottest Neighborhood in Dallas

Let us let you in on a not-so well-kept secret: Shorecrest is hot. As recently as 2002, the average price per square foot in this neighborhood in the shadow of Bluffview was a mere $140. Now prospective home buyers can expect to pay $200. Here’s why.
By Christina Rees |

HOT STUFF: 4104 Shorecrest Dr. (above) is a 1950s house on an oversize lot with a hefty price tag$348,000, as of press time.

On a recent sunny Sunday, a North Dallas couple pulled up to an open house in Shorecrest in their shiny new Thunderbird convertible. The house, built in 1953, was a white-brick, ranch-style home sitting on a massive spread of healthy St. Augustine shaded by half a dozen towering oaks. Before stepping into the three-bedroom, two-bath house—which listed for $348,000—the couple looked hopeful. They took turns ticking off items on their wish list. “We want something close to downtown,” he said. “The hills and winding roads around here are nice,” she added. “We like big, older trees and established landscaping.”

The couple was in the process of discovering a not-so-well-kept secret: Shorecrest is hot. The neighborhood—just east of Love Field, south of the Northwest Highway, in the shadow of Bluffview—has enjoyed a resurgence, to say the least. As recently as 2002, the average price per square foot was $140, but now the Thunderbird couple and homebuyers like them can expect to pay $200. When you consider what the neighborhood has to offer, it’s easy to understand why.

Location, Location—and Location
The holy trinity of real estate is powerful in Shorecrest. A triangle carved out by the Northwest Highway, Lemmon Avenue, and Midway Road, Shorecrest is a quiet, centrally located neighborhood, where greenbelts, schoolyards, and extra-wide lots buffer the noise from those high-traffic, easily accessible streets. The neighborhood is an oasis of calm 10 minutes from downtown. Plus, the surrounding affluence of Preston Hollow, University Park, and Bluffview rubs off on Shorecrest, and its commercial district is the thriving Inwood Village and the shops and restaurants along Lovers Lane—from antiques (Inessa Stewart’s) to barbecue (Sonny Bryan’s).

Skeptics would point out that Shorecrest is uncomfortably close to Love Field (with its noise) and Bachman Lake (with its crime). But the north-south orientation of the airport’s runways keeps planes out of the Shorecrest sky. And as for the crime around Bachman, read on.

Second Thing: Safety First
A thirtysomething woman stands on her neatly landscaped lawn as she struggles to keep a large gray wriggling cat in her arms. She’s lived in her renovated Shorecrest bungalow for about five and a half years and feels entirely safe.

“I’ve never had a problem,” she says. “I’ve never had a break-in, and I’ve taken walks in this neighborhood at night, between 9 and 10. No problem.”

She points to something about Shorecrest that doesn’t make it unique in Dallas but certainly makes it unusual: the neighbors actually know each other.

“These garages around here don’t have openers,” she says as she gestures toward her and her neighbors’ attached one-car garages. “You have to get out of your car to open the garage door. So you end up saying hi to your neighbor. And most of the backyards around here have chain-link fences instead of those tall privacy fences. So you end up having conversations with your neighbors over the fence.”

She has a point. Sociologists say that a lower crime rate in a neighborhood is directly linked to its sense of shared community and emotional investment. When a string of burglaries broke out in the Shorecrest-Bluffview area in 2002, homeowners started a community crime watch. Now they say incidents have dropped to near zero.

And now that residents have lobbied to keep apartment buildings out of Shorecrest, homeowners feel even safer. How did they do it? Glad you asked.

L’il Help from City Hall
Just last year, some of the smaller houses of Shorecrest were sitting on land zoned “MF2,” for multifamily housing—a throwback to the 1960s, when city planners assumed Love Field would need go-go apartments for its pilots and flight attendants. Janet Maddox, an owner of a charmingly refurbished pre-war cottage in this zone, remembers developers who planned to raze her house and all the houses around her to build an apartment complex. “’We’ll make it real simple,’” she says a developer told her. “’If you don’t sell, we’ll build a three-story complex around you on all three sides.’”

The good news was the developers offered her double what she paid for the house a decade earlier. The bad news, said Jeff Neal, one of the area’s busiest real estate agents at the time, was that the house was worth about twice what the developers offered.

To Shorecrest residents, the zoning was about more than just money. Apartments would mean high traffic, overpopulation, and crime. Showing off their sense of shared community and emotional investment in the neighborhood, Maddox and her like-minded neighbors banded together to lobby City Hall to rezone the land for single-family dwellings. They held passionate meetings in people’s homes. Hundreds of residents joined the cause, making phone calls, writing letters, and posting signs in yards. Community spirit surged, and they won the case.

That’s not all. City Hall has also been shutting down bars and strip joints running along Bachman Lake’s north corridor and is planning a multimillion-dollar overhaul of the lake and its parks, which is an indirect boon for connecting neighborhoods. It seems city leaders are newly aware of Northwest Dallas’ potential. And what’s good for the dicey neighborhoods near Shorecrest is good for Shorecrest.

Size Matters
Lot size, that is.

The house the Thunderbird couple pulled up to was on a lot 115 feet wide by 116 feet deep. That’s about a third of an acre, or about twice the size of a standard, 50-by-150-foot Dallas lot. If you want to build a custom house with a lap pool or just want a place your neighbors can’t reach out and touch from their kitchen window, 50-by-150 may not be big enough. And a turf-eating McMansion will swallow most of a lot that size, nature be damned.

Dave Perry-Miller, a top Dallas real estate agent, estimates that a tear-down house on a third- to half-acre lot in Highland Park could set you back $600,000 to $1 million and up, and a similar lot in Preston Hollow could go for as much as $600,000.

But in Shorecrest, lots more than 100 feet wide and 100 feet deep are common (though the smaller cottages are on 50-by-150-foot lots). And, as of press time, a handful of listed properties in Shorecrest and even the southern section of Bluffview Estates claim at least a third of an acre
and are priced between $250,000 and $360,000. When asked if they were looking for a tear-down so they could build or an older home they could appreciate, the Thunderbirds both shrugged. “Depends on the house,” he said. “As long as the lot is good,” she added.

Baroque Backwash
But wait. The Thunderbirds, a North Dallas couple, are looking to move south? Isn’t that counter to documented patterns of yuppie migration?

Actually, it’s part of the cycle of gentrification. While our metropolitan area’s most visible growth of the last 20 years has spurted north of LBJ—and then farther north past the George Bush Turnpike—a quieter, more recent boom has hit closer to the city center.

Perry-Miller has been watching this particular cycle for the past five years. “It’s the baby boomers, the empty nesters who are still pretty young,” he says. “The kids have left home so the school district isn’t important anymore. People are tired of the long drive into town. They want to be closer to the action.”

He calls it “infill.” It’s the opposite of—the reaction to—white flight or suburban sprawl, that wagon train of yuppies moving from older, central (and, by default, urban) neighborhoods to shiny new outer communities. The new trend of baroque backwash isn’t just culture-hungry baby boomers; it also consists of young hipsters escaping the homogenized suburbs of their adolescence and urbanites relocating from other states. Those are the people who remake the nearly forgotten neighborhood of Shorecrest.

Like Briarwood, Hollywood Heights, and other “rediscovered” Dallas neighborhoods before it, Shorecrest has its real estate stars aligned: the right combination of people, place, and price.

Of course, the residents of Shorecrest, the ones like Janet Maddox who’ve lived there for years and who don’t plan to sell, don’t really think of their neighborhood as hot. They just think of it as home.

Photo: Courtesy of Virginia Cook Realtors

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