(Candy’s Dirt) – The process of updating Dallas’ comprehensive land use plan — for the first time since 2006 — has been an arduous, often contentious process for the City Plan Commission, a panel appointed by Dallas City Council members to represent each of 14 geographical districts.
There have been many accusations that the plan is a low-key effort to shoehorn dense multifamily development into single-family neighborhoods. Those who support the plan say the future land use document will provide much-needed housing options throughout the city, and they’ve repeatedly pointed to the fact that the document does not govern zoning.
Opponents, however, say ForwardDallas, as it’s written today, will make it easier for developers to get rezonings granted for dense development in areas where that’s not compatible.
The City Plan Commission last week — after yet another marathon meeting and dozens of amendments — voted 10-4-1 to recommend the document to the Dallas City Council.
The council, which has been on recess for the month of July, could take up the matter in August or September, but some are speculating that, due to the political polarization it has caused, a vote could be postponed until after the May 2025 municipal elections.
A briefing of the updated ForwardDallas 2.0, as revised and recommended by the CPC, is scheduled for a briefing at the City Council’s Economic Development Committee on Aug. 5. An agenda has not been posted but such meetings usually start at 1 p.m. and are streamed live through WebEx.
A Change of Plans
Dozens of 11th-hour amendments were made during Thursday’s CPC meeting. Some were housekeeping items; others were significant.
For example, language was updated to state, “In its earliest application, zoning in the United States was intended to protect White single-family neighborhoods from the encroachment of common nuisances and people of color” and, “As a result, nearly half of the areas in the city designated as racially, ethnically-concentrated areas of poverty by the federal government have industrial uses near them or in their midst.”
In reference to industrial uses near residential, preference should be given to the use that was there first, Commissioner Tabitha Wheeler-Reagan suggested. Industries should be protected when developed in areas not surrounded by housing, she said. Planning and Development Assistant Director Andrea Gilles said that’s where “placetypes” are for.
“It is the placetypes that we have put in place that have said we now need to start being more intentional about where the different uses go,” Gilles said. “That’s what the placetype map does and the recommendations with that. This just says overall we recognize that there’s a problem and so we have to start measuring that we’re making improvements to that problem.”
Watch the July 25 City Plan Commission meeting. Read below for more on what each commissioner has said about ForwardDallas 2.0.
District 1
Christian Chernock is a green builder and owner of Christian Chernock Properties. He’s been a vocal proponent of gentle density and avoiding a watered-down plan. He further stated that Dallas is facing a housing catastrophe and action must be taken.
“As we go into this discussion I would like everybody’s mind to be oriented toward what would be the state of our communities given the current trajectory,” Chernock said in May. “We are on a 10-year crash course for becoming a highly, highly unaffordable city. If that continues, what will it look like in 10 years?”
District 2
Architect Joanna Hampton voted against ForwardDallas because she wanted to see a clean copy that included all the latest revisions.
“It gives me pause for us to be considering moving forward a document this important for our city and the direction of our city without having it in front of us and not allowing the public an opportunity to read the document that we are proposing to move forward,” she said. “I think we owe it to all the folks who have spent so much time with us, supporting it, concerned about it, to be able to have an informed conversation before we move it forward to council.”
District 3
Darrell Herbert is the owner of D. Chris Photography and an organizational development manager, according to his LinkedIn page. Herbert was raised in New Orleans and gave a heartfelt speech on Thursday about how change is necessary to eliminate discriminatory policies of the past.
“It is clear single-family-only zoning is a relic of discriminatory pasts, artificially inflating housing costs, fostering segregation, and limiting our communities’ potential for diversity and inclusivity,” he said. “You restrict the homes or the ability for people to grow — children, people with disabilities, and especially low-income individuals, no matter their color.’
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District 4
Tom Forsyth, a salesman for DataBank IMX, voted against the plan and said the CPC is not being transparent with the public.
“The staff should go back and incorporate these changes, come up with a final draft, and that should be presented and the public should have two weeks to review it,” he said. “We shouldn’t be in a hurry on this.”
Ninety percent of the people who live in single-family neighborhoods believe this plan puts a target on their backs, Forsyth said.
“If this body is not targeting single-family neighborhoods, then we should make it clear in the language of this document, but we have failed to do that,” he said.
District 5
Tony Shidid, a partner with Tessa Investments Inc., has served on the Plan Commission for over a decade and chairs the panel. Although he lives in District 11, he was appointed by D5 Councilman Jaime Resendez.
Shidid did not offer comments Thursday on why he voted for the plan. In a CPC meeting earlier this month, the chairman corrected a resident who suggested the commission rubber-stamps zoning cases based on guidelines in the land use plan.
“That’s not what happened here at the horseshoe today,” Shidid said at a July 11 meeting. “You implied that our hands were tied by the information in the plan, and I can tell you after voting on thousands of cases, that’s absolutely, categorically incorrect.”
District 6
Deborah Carpenter served as vice chair of the Comprehensive Land Use Plan Committee (CLUP) which was empaneled 2.5 years ago and wrote the first draft of ForwardDallas 2.0. She has provided extensive revisions to the document over the last several months and voted against it because she wanted to see a clean copy that included the latest revisions.
“I would like to see a complete revision of everything we have voted on,” she said. “I personally wouldn’t be comfortable voting on something that the whole commission has not seen.”
District 7
Tabitha Wheeler-Reagan said she is studying urban planning at the university level because she’s been so inspired by the process and the Dallas city planners who have guided it.
Wheeler-Reagan said the CPC has done the best it can do.
“If you’ve ever worked in South Dallas, you know that we are an island,” she said. “There are a lot of points of view, a lot of yelling and screaming, there’s distrust. I think this is the first time that I can say I’ve had older members of my community out here fighting.”
District 8
Commissioner Lorie Blair, a board member of the Bishop Arts Theater Center and former managing editor of Elite News, made the motion to approve the plan as amended. She suggested that it was not perfect, but the panel was beginning to suffer from “editing paralysis” and needed to move it forward and “let our bosses do what they get paid to do.”
“One of the things I want to make sure we recognize is that, when it comes down to single-family residential, we heard the residents,” she said. “We heard the community. We put in place all the protections. We rewrote it, we dissected it, and we wrote it again to make sure that single-family detached had prominence. It had an area within the city that we know that we’re not going to immediately start putting in things that residents don’t want. This is a plan. This is not zoning.”
District 9
Commissioner Neal Sleeper voted to move the plan forward but did not provide additional comments at the time of the vote. Sleeper was appointed by District 9 Councilwoman Paula Blackmon, who said in February she hoped ForwardDallas would correct injustices created by downzoning in the 1980s that “harmed a lot of communities.”
District 10
Architect Tipton Housewright said he was happy to support a “forward-looking plan.”
“I have learned that I don’t ever want to show Commissioner Carpenter anything I have ever written,” he said with a laugh, referencing his fellow commissioner’s attention to detail in editing. “That’s just not going to happen.”
He shared a quote from a former plan commissioner: “Everyone has spoken. Everything has been said, and everyone has said every thing.”
District 11
Commissioner Matthew Eppler voted for the plan but did not make any public comments about it. The young commissioner was appointed by District 11 Councilwoman Jaynie Schultz, who recently announced she will not seek re-election in 2025.
In a recent newsletter to constituents, Schultz championed the CPC’s decision to change multiplexes from a primary to a secondary use in the comprehensive plan’s Community Residential and Small Town Residential placetypes.
“This decision addresses the worries that some of you had about the potential increase in density within your neighborhoods due to their inclusion in the Community Residential placetype,” Schultz said. “While ensuring that everyone in Dallas has a place to live is crucial, it is equally important to protect our established neighborhoods.”
District 12
District 12 Commissioner Aaliyah Haqq is the senior vice president of Northview Company, a boutique real estate firm.
Haqq was not present when Thursday’s vote was taken. The District 12 council member, Cara Mendelsohn, said in February she would not support a ForwardDallas plan that does not “protect single-family neighborhoods.”
District 13
Commissioner Larry Hall said he supported the plan and trusted staff.
“They’ve done an outstanding job so far on this document,” he said. “They’ve been under a lot of pressure. We’ve been under a lot of pressure. We’ve made our edits. We’ve read this thing to death. They’ll do the corrections that we talked about tonight. Let’s push this on to Council.”
Since 2006, the city has operated under the original version of ForwardDallas, which contains similar language as it relates to single-family neighborhoods, Hall added.
“In those 18 years, single-family neighborhoods did not disappear, nor were they seriously threatened,” he said. “Nothing’s going to happen to single-family neighborhoods with this document.”
District 14
Attorney Melissa Kingston renovates and manages property with her husband, former Dallas Councilman Philip Kingston.
Kingston voted against the plan, noting that the CPC spent over six hours on Thursday making hundreds of changes “that I have not seen and the public has not seen in an updated version.”
“While I believe that there are numerous good aspects of the plan, as much time as we have spent on this plan, I decided that we owed it to the public to review the revised document before voting on it,” she said.
Prior to the vote, the commissioner said she didn’t think ForwardDallas “has the level of import that some people ascribe to it.”
Kingston has previously implied that rezonings are often granted — and denied — regardless of the land use suggested in the comprehensive plan.
Place 15
CPC Vice Chair Brent Rubin, an attorney, chaired the CLUP Committee and said the plan has been characterized as a conflict between developers and homeowners or a way to address hypothetical problems with future growth.
“The fact is there are tons of residents of the City of Dallas right now whose housing needs aren’t being met by the current market,” he said. “[This plan] isn’t just addressing hypothetical future problems but it addresses an urgent problem that we have today. We are going to have some difficult discussions in the future about how we meet our housing needs but it doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be trying here and it doesn’t mean that our neighborhoods shouldn’t be part of the discussion.”