DALLAS — Every street of the Elm Thicket-Northpark neighborhood, east of Love Field, tells the same story.
The game is mostly over for this northwest Dallas community, where racism relegated Black residents almost 100 years ago and newcomers’ million-dollar McMansions today tower over once-affordable traditional frame cottages.
Elm Thicket-Northpark is now the developers’ neighborhood, not that of the generations of Black doctors, lawyers, musicians, elected officials and everyday families who raised their kids here.
In the five years that City Hall has stumbled along in efforts to stabilize this community and protect its working-class housing, investors moved at lightning speed. It’s the Dallas way — new razes old, expensive replaces affordable.
The sins of the past will land in the lap of the City Plan Commission Thursday when it hears the racially charged Elm Thicket-Northpark zoning case.
Supporters of the changes — which include reducing the size of a multi-story structure’s footprint and imposing height restrictions — say the proposals will save what’s not already been stolen from their neighborhood. The opposition says the revisions rob all the neighbors, old and new, of their property rights.
Both say they have substantial support among fellow residents. Both have accused the other of lies, bullying and race-based rhetoric. Both claim they have extended olive branches to the other side — only to see them broken.
If plan commissioners approve the restrictions, it’s true that future houses will be a little smaller and shorter — but they will still be expensive.
Nonetheless, Elm Thicket-Northpark neighborhood association president Jonathan Maples told me this will be a victory for longtime residents of the area bounded by Lemmon Avenue, West Lovers Lane, Inwood Road and West Mockingbird Lane.
“We want a say in what the housing stock looks like in our neighborhood going forward,” Maples said. “We want to preserve our history and not be herded somewhere else yet again.”
The elders of Elm Thicket-Northpark recall a community with freedman’s town roots whose people prospered in the mid-twentieth century despite no running water, paved streets or public transportation. Among the neighborhood’s proudest moments was the 1950 ribbon-cutting at the Hilliard Golf Course, among the first municipal courses in the South open to Black players.
The city first hacked away at Elm Thicket in the mid-1950s for Love Field’s expansion — demolishing the golf course, ripping up more than 300 Black-owned homes and businesses, and pushing residents east.
In recent years, the low-cost neighborhood landed on the endangered list again. This time it was investors and builders smelling opportunity after the 2014 lifting of the Wright Amendment allowed Love Field to fly beyond Texas’ four neighboring states.
Elm Thicket residents, determined not to be run off again, enlisted the help of then-City Council member Adam Medrano, and in 2017, waded into a City Hall-led process to create a vision for its future.
A key piece of Elm Thicket’s Strategic Neighborhood Action Plan was to look at zoning changes that would stabilize and maintain affordability there. After the pandemic and multiple staff turnovers, those proposals finally are ready for the plan commission.
Along the way, according to the city’s June presentation, the number of people of color has dropped from 80% of Elm Thicket’s population in 2010-2014 to 60% in 2015-2019. Median real estate taxes have increased at least 33% between 2005 and 2019.
Included in that report was the staff assessment that the large percentage change in the median value of an owner-occupied home in Elm Thicket “demonstrates [the] need to address displacement pressure.”
In June, plan commissioners took a bus tour of Elm Thicket, seeing the scores of traditional frame cottages dwarfed by humongous contemporaries with slate and timber accents and tall, wide windows.
They also saw streets dotted with yard signs marking neighbors’ opposing points of views about the zoning proposals.
Jennifer Brower, a graphics designer, is one of the three white neighborhood women who lead the “Stop Zoning Changes in Elm Thicket Northpark” group, which formed in April 2021. The group grew to more than 300 in 30 days, she told me, and is 600 strong today.
Jennifer’s husband, Doug, who owns Gem Realty, was a dissenting voice on the steering committee appointed to come up with proposed zoning changes. The Browers began buying Elm Thicket property in the 1990s and moved into a new home there in October 2017.
Doug said the steering committee work convinced him that the residents who initiated the process for change “don’t represent the neighborhood” and their proposals won’t solve whatever aim they are pursuing.
“This whole process is simply punitive in nature,” Jennifer said.
Newer residents get the sense “we don’t belong here because this is a historic Black neighborhood and we need to pack up our stuff and go somewhere else,” she said.
That won’t happen, Jennifer said, because “this is our neighborhood too. ... We are a formidable group with the resources and determination to see this through to the end.”
The “Stop Zoning Changes” group circulated a fund-raising request Tuesday night that said, “Our professional team of lobbyists and attorneys’ costs are mounting. Please consider donating to help keep the team working to fight this downzoning case.”
People were encouraged to donate to a GoFundMe account, which has raised almost $16,000 of what was initially a $5,000 goal, or write a check to the Jackson Walker law firm.
The Browers said their side has no choice but to get legal help to fight back. “We’re getting railroaded by the city,” Jennifer said.
She also addressed the posting on the “Stop Zoning Changes” website of a photo of a modest home in the neighborhood with the tagline, “What are they really trying to save?”
Jennifer said she meant no disrespect to that homeowner but wanted to make the point that no historic or architecturally significant structures exist in Elm Thicket.
Supporters of the zoning changes saw it as mocking the neighborhood’s traditional homes and its modest-income senior citizens. When they demanded that Jennifer remove the image, she did.
Maples told me this incident — and the anti-zoning side’s frequent question of “what is the benefit of these zoning changes to our neighborhood?” — illustrates a lack of understanding of the community.
Kemeshia Richardson, a CPA and cloud software engineer who has lived in Elm Thicket for more than 50 years, said she and many other Black residents were shaped by this neighborhood’s sense of family and community.
A member of the neighborhood association’s leadership team, she sees the proposed zoning changes as critical to protect Elm Thicket. “They can be modern homes,” she said. “But we want zoning that is respectful to the history and character of the neighborhood.”
Richardson believes the restrictions would allow people in the smaller homes to not feel suffocated by “humongous ones that are so big and tall that you can’t see anything out of your windows and even have water runoff issues.”
Maples, whose several public-service posts include sitting on the Dallas Community Police Oversight Board, also grew up in this neighborhood.
“It burns me to the core,” he said, that the city had nothing in place to protect not just Elm Thicket but neighborhoods across Dallas.
“It took forever to get this done, which means that in the meantime the developers made sure they kicked it into high gear,” he said.
By far the biggest developer in Elm Thicket is Lou Olerio, who previously lived in the neighborhood for 15 years and has plans for a new home there.
In December 2020, he bought an entire block of 1940s duplexes on March Avenue that originally were military housing for the airbase that predates Love Field. “Those duplexes were pretty much rundown slums,” he said. “The condition they were in when I bought them was barely livable.”
Olerio knows the city doesn’t have enough housing that’s affordable, but he said that’s the case everywhere between Interstate 635 and downtown. “Saying that this pocket is somehow different than anywhere else in Dallas is incorrect,” he told me.
Asked what he says to longtime residents who feel they are losing their neighborhood to developers, he said the better question is why they would support zoning changes that, by restricting home size, will cut into generational wealth.
He said when he began buying Elm Thicket properties for teardowns, he paid $40,000 to $50,000 and today those homes might sell for $500,000. If the zoning restrictions go through, builders would be stuck doing “a tract-home community,” Olerio said.
The City Plan Commission is in for a long day, with so many speakers and potential wrinkles that it’s not certain they will vote Thursday. Then comes City Council action.
