You can go home again

But isn't it fair to wonder, then--wonderful though this building may be--how all of this fits in with Spence's original idea of helping the poor? Nobody poor lives in Bishop Green. Poor people probably did live here back when it was still junked out. So isn't this just gentrification and displacement, even if it's happening at a gentler pace than what went on in East Dallas in the 1980s?

Walking down Bishop Avenue, a broad thoroughfare that slopes gently down toward Methodist Medical Center, Spence argues that what he and Bartosh are doing will not become the fatal Yuppie nose under the tent--the beginning of the displacement of the people who are already here--because in this neighborhood, he says, those people aren't going anywhere. Their fortunes are improving, too, he says, and as that trend continues they will dig in deeper and improve their own properties.

"The Hispanic population is so strong, so upwardly mobile," he says. "I hope nobody has the hope that we are going to turn this into Yuppieville, because that is not going to happen."

On another day in another conversation, Trey Bartosh expresses pretty much the same view. If anything, he sees the increasingly Hispanic population in the area since the mid-1980s as its own form of gentrification.

"It's amazing how the demographics have changed. It was much more white, mainly little old couples." Most of them, he points out, were beyond the point in life when they could do much for their houses.

The Mexican-American families who have moved in, he predicts, "will continue to achieve more economically and will be able to reflect that in their houses and their yards."

Lupe Garcia, proprietor of Calvario Funeral Home on West Davis Street and a pillar of the Hispanic community in North Oak Cliff, says the Hispanic people he knows applaud what Spence and Bartosh are doing because they see it as enhancing their own property values.

"What they're doing, they're taking these decrepit buildings that are boarded up and waiting for the bulldozer, and they turn them into a beautiful piece of jewelry that melds with the surroundings. But inside, it's the state of the art."

On another walk through the area, Spence points out all the houses that have been painted and fixed up by the families that live in them. Silent midday streets roll gently up and down through tidy green lawns. At moments there is a strange sense of dislocation. The sharp towers of downtown are in full view across the river, and yet the neighborhood itself is velvety quiet like a small town, an odd, appealing, elfin little town exactly midway between Mexico and Mayberry.

Devon San Filipo says two friends of hers had seen Bishop Terrace on a home tour three and a half years ago and told her about it. She drove over on a lunch hour from her job as an administrative assistant.

"It was incomplete. The front yard was all muddy. I looked in the window of an apartment on the ground floor, and I said, 'This is mine.' I crawled in through the window in a business suit and high heels."

San Filipo bikes and walks throughout the neighborhood. She's a member of the neighborhood organization. She is especially happy not to be in the suburbs.

"When I was married, I lived in the suburbs in New Jersey and Mississippi, quite a few different places. This is peace.

"There are bird feeders out in front and a wrought-iron table and chairs. On Sundays I sit out there for an hour with my coffee and my newspaper. I hear the church bells ringing all over Oak Cliff. I see parents walking their children to church. It's that old neighborhood feeling."

The church bells and the parents walking their children may not be everyone's cup of tea, of course. But for the market of people who do find that texture appealing, it's a hard thing for the New Urbanist developers to reproduce, short of using elaborate animatronics or hiring actors. In fact, the special quality both Spence and Bartosh try to evince and then sell in their properties is love of the terrain--a difficult thing for anyone to fake.

"There was an article in the paper," Spence says, "about a real estate guy who bought a building downtown. The guy said, 'I violated a cardinal rule of real estate. I fell in love with my building.'

"I thought, what's wrong with falling in love with your work? I can't imagine not falling in love with a building I'm going to spend a year of blood, sweat, and tears on."