You can go home again

Since the report came out, the downtown and close-in residential market has grown even more heated, maybe overheated. Greg Willett of MPF Research, a real estate market-study firm, says there are 2,538 rental units now under construction and reconstruction in the close-in area, enough to increase the existing supply by almost 30 percent when they all open their doors to renters by late this year or early next year.

That's so much supply so fast that it's probably a little ahead of the demand, Willett says. "We're taking a hit on rent growth, especially in the in-town area. In-town rents went down recently, about 1 percent in the year that ended with the last quarter. Obviously that's not a big hit, but rents had been growing by 4 to 5 percent a year previously."

Even with all that growth, living downtown still requires a certain missionary zeal: Things like grocery shopping and car repairs involve treks back out to the land of shopping malls and fast food. Downtown has the big culture of the symphony and opera but precious little small culture, like movie houses and book stores.

Robert Shaw's projects in Uptown have been built around courtyards and common rooms, a concept borrowed from the suburban model of New Urbanism, in order to create a sense of community. But, of course, even the best "sense of community" isn't quite the same thing as community.

In a way, all of the new back-to-the-city developments so far tend to re-create the basic circumstance of the suburbs. Because it's all so new and instant, there has been no time yet for the subtle layering and accretion of schools, shops, bars, parks, churches, temples, mosques--all the fabric and detritus that make a place a real community. For at least the next few years, the new downtown rental market will be another moon colony waiting to feel like home. But for the new apartment people moving into North Oak Cliff, the fabric of community is already in place and wrapped all around them.

When MPF Research turns on its real estate radar, Spence and Bartosh don't show up at all. North Oak Cliff is not even included in MPF's in-town study area. MPF's general Oak Cliff study area, from the west side of Interstate 35 and south of downtown all the way to Loop 12, shows zero. Nada. No new units completed at all. Nothing going on. In upscale rental market terms, this is the great void.

David Spence chose North Oak Cliff as the place he wanted to live and work for basically unbusinesslike reasons.

"I was studying for the Bar exam in Waco. I drove up here on I-35, got off, took a right on Clarendon, and all of a sudden I was in this neat little community with all these ice cream [pushcart] guys all over. They have those guys all over Guatemala like gnats."

He and his wife had served in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. The very things about Oak Cliff that might be off-putting to a white-bread suburbanite appealed to Spence because they reminded him of special times. "Especially if you're a Latino-philic person, this is an attractive place," he says.

Son of a Waco physician and businessman, graduate of A&M with an English degree, Spence later picked up an MBA and a law degree at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill with specialties in both poverty and corporate law and in private-sector and nonprofit management. He came to Dallas in 1992 to work for Jim Reid, executive director of the Southern Dallas Development Corp., a nonprofit set up by the city to recruit and help launch businesses in the city's southern sector.

Spence says his father had imparted to him a strong commitment to community service. The two years he and his wife spent in Guatemala persuaded him he probably would spend most of his life working for nonprofits helping the poor. But brief stints with SDDC and another nonprofit convinced him he was wrong. Something hadn't clicked. Spence, a product of the educated white upper middle class, says his commitment was a little more cerebral and less visceral than, say, the manner of Reid, his boss, who glides over social boundaries like a bird over stone walls.

"Apparently I lacked the first-hand emotional connection to the target population," Spence says.

Determined to set off on his own, Spence still hadn't brought himself around entirely to the P-word--profit. He began drawing up a proposal for a nonprofit enterprise engaged in housing in the inner city. With the meticulous habits of a scholar, Spence set out to interview a number of people in the community, seeking their perspectives on inner-city housing. High on the list was Bennett Miller, who owned the space where SDDC's office was. For the last 20 years, Miller had been taking junked-out but sturdy brick industrial structures and turning them into hip loft space.

"When I talked to Bennett, he scolded me for doing this as a nonprofit. He said, 'Why would you want to put up with a board?'"

Spence had worked with boards before and didn't especially mind them, but Miller's next argument struck home.