Down-and-Dirty Developers Want Into the Inner City

In East Dallas, where homeowners such as myself have lived through the Era of Raw Sewage in order to greet the Dawn of McMansions, we have a very keen sense of who we trust and who we do not. In the 1980s we watched while the ticky-tacky suburban developers took over Dallas City Hall and tried to ram highways through our part of town because they thought it was a ghetto. Well, it was a ghetto. But it was our ghetto, by God, not theirs.

Last week I attended a briefing at City Hall in which it was plain that staff is attempting to seriously undermine the "proximity slope" protections that keep a developer from sticking a 12-story building across the street from my single-family neighborhood. They are also trying to use new zoning concepts to create new versions of the same old bad zoning that created blight before.

So where do we go with all of that, when we get stirred up? Easy. We go straight to Neal Emmons, our plan commission member, and to Angela Hunt, our city council member. They try to strike a balance between our demands in the neighborhoods and the city's need to encourage good new development. But between the two of them, they are the fulcrum.

It's that way in every city council district. That is why, except in the most extreme cases, the city council almost always honors the wishes of the council person from the district where a proposed zoning change would happen.

At the March 26 Dallas City Council briefing, Mayor Tom Leppert and North Dallas council member Ron Natinsky tried to bust the rule. They asked the council to vote down Angela Hunt on a routine zoning matter. Hunt was actually in favor of the development in question but wanted to send it back to the plan commission for tweaking.

With Leppert's backing, Natinsky moved that the council refuse to send it back. He and Leppert were defeated in a 10-5 vote, and the issue went back to the plan commission.

To us in East Dallas, the move by Leppert and Natinsky looked like an attempt to write a new everybody-but-Angela rule. And why would we would be paranoid about that? Because over the years the bad development interests, the rip-and-run boys, the in-and-outers, have tried to blow out every strong representative East Dallas has ever sent to council, from Hunt to Veletta Lill all the way back to Lee Simpson in the early 1980s.

They always think the same thing. Get rid of that East Dallas council representative, and the walls will come tumbling down. Then they think they can have their way with East Dallas, whether it's ramming highways through to get people out or tossing up cheap multi-family housing to get people back in.

On April 1, the Morning News editorial page castigated the council for not going along with Natinsky and painted the council members who had voted against him and with Hunt as crumby little ward-heelers: "Unfortunately, the independent-minded still appear to be in the minority on the council," the editorial sniffed. "Too many city leaders are loath to rock the boat on issues in other districts, lest their colleagues interfere with their own pet projects."

The most important point here is that zoning questions in the inner city are not the pet projects of council members. They are my pet projects. My neighbor's pet projects. We watch this stuff like hawks, all of us, and you better believe we let Emmons and Hunt know if we don't like what we see.

I talked about this last week with Michael Jung, an attorney at Strasburger & Price who represents both homeowner groups and developers on zoning questions. "Angela Hunt to a degree is, believe it or not, more business-friendly than some of the homeowner wing of her constituents," Jung said. "And she agonizes over that."

He agreed with me that getting rid of Hunt, stuffing her somehow, isolating her on the council, is not going to calm anybody down or make things easier for any developers.

"Angela is not whipping otherwise calm East Dallasites into a frenzy," he said.

Believe it. We bring the frenzy.

Nothing drives people in my part of town crazier than the assertion that we should be grateful for any new development we can get. That's the "gift horse in the mouth" argument.

We know too well, based on too long an experience, that the creature bearing gifts is not always a horse. Sometimes it's a wolf. We know exactly what that coded language on the Morning News editorial page means when they say, "...we'd be better served by leaders who favor a citywide vision rather than parochial protocol."

It means people who don't get our part of town at all will ram cheap development down our throats, undo decades of hard-fought progress, scoop up quick profits and then run for the border.

The hell, we say.