Losada is among many residents who have heard a rumor that local developers have knocked on doors offering to take over elderly people's mortgages in exchange for acquiring the properties when the homeowner dies. Eva Elvove, the co-chair of the La Bajada Neighborhood Association, says she's noticed that developers have stopped knocking on neighborhood doors since neighbors supporting the overlay have become more vocal.
Though Losada is concerned about staying put for the remainder of his life, he is not against progress. "It's going to be a lot of fun for those who will get to enjoy it," he says of the neighborhood's imminent growth. He just doesn't want to be blindsided. "I've got one foot on the grave, and another on a banana peel," he says, smiling.
Danny Fulgencio
Danny Fulgencio
Many properties owned by West Dallas Investments are easy to spot because they're painted in neon colors.
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The part of West Dallas across the river from downtown is unknown to many and extremely dear to some. From the time Losada moved to the area—about the time the area's most infamous residents, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, were making their names—the largely industrial neighborhood had been written off as high-crime and generally undesirable. Few people who don't live there go there, and with few businesses, there has never been much reason to venture across the river. Throughout its troubled history, West Dallas has been consistently overlooked by mainstream business-minded Dallasites. That's why critics of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, have often dismissed it by asking "Where is this bridge going?" ("Nowhere" is the unspoken answer.)
"Nowhere" is now both a business opportunity and a neighborhood to preserve at all costs. At the very least, all agree the area harbors much room for growth. With that in mind, the city designated the area bordered by Canada Drive along the river, Interstate 30 to the south and Sylvan Avenue to the west as the first project of a new City Hall-based urban design initiative, CityDesign Studio, started in October 2009. The studio's plan for West Dallas is a guideline for development and was unanimously adopted by city council on March 9.
Funded by donors and intended to focus on neighborhoods along the Trinity, CityDesign Studio is led by architect Brent Brown of buildingcommunityWORKSHOP, a nonprofit aimed at designing "livable" communities. Brown is known for his bcWORKSHOP Congo Street project, for which his team joined with neighborhood residents to renovate homes along a rundown area a few blocks north of Fair Park. That project included residents in the process, a move that seemed almost revolutionary in a city where development often means pushing out poor people in favor of sky-high buildings with pretty views of other sky-high buildings. As the director of CityDesign Studio, Brown must balance the needs of residents, real estate investors and entrepreneurs. It's as though this initiative is meant to right the city's past wrongs.
"I don't think we think a whole lot about sustainable communities," Suhm says of the city's history. With CityDesign Studio putting a new process in motion, she hopes development will increasingly take into account streets, transportation and "sustainable relationships."
"It's participatory," she says of the approach.
Sitting at a planning table in the studio's City Hall office, an open light-filled space lined with colorful drawings of what West Dallas could be, Brown speaks with the measured assurance and depth of knowledge of someone who listens closely and reflects before acting. "It's a vibrant small neighborhood. We took the time before planning to engage in public discourse," from "living rooms to boardrooms," Brown says of La Bajada, looking the part of the progressive architect from his thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses to his striped socks and leather clogs.
To preserve La Bajada, the plan creates a north to south "spine" of businesses and higher-density residential buildings running from Singleton Avenue along Herbert Street to West Commerce Street. Expansion is positioned to run from east to west, keeping the higher density area from encroaching on La Bajada. The area south of Singleton Avenue would also host high-rise buildings with businesses on the ground level, and just south of Commerce Street, along Beckley Avenue, would be a high-density residential area (i.e. apartments). The plan focuses on usable public space and includes three underpasses for cars and pedestrians to cross the Union Pacific Railroad. The CityDesign Studio's "urban structure and guidelines" is a mixed-use model where people will live, work and play in close proximity.
Larry Beasley, a renowned urban designer credited with revitalizing Vancouver, is a CityDesign Studio consultant. Also assisting is Chalonda Jackson-Mangwiro, the community engagement coordinator who describes her job as translating design-speak into language the community can understand.
"There was maybe, I don't want to say 'fear'...uncertainty, because of things that happened before," Jackson-Mangwiro says, acknowledging the worries that West Dallas would become the new Little Mexico or Freedmans Town, once vibrant low-income minority neighborhoods near downtown that development wiped away seemingly overnight.
The 18-month process of trying to balance the desires of residents and developers didn't start smoothly. "It was set up where somebody's going to win, and somebody's going to lose," Brown says. The studio's role was to ensure everyone benefits. The defensive undercurrent to the initial meetings dissipated when the studio presented drawings of plans for the area. Brown also had to overcome community backlash over the controversial bridge. In the early stages of the project, he remembers having to flat-out tell a group at one meeting, "We didn't ask for that bridge." CityDesign Studio is charged with making the best of the plans already in place and countering the perception that it's a bridge to nowhere.
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