"The folks who come down now are interested in more permeability," he said. "I think they feel the suburbs where they grew up were so vapid that they're wanting to come down to be infused into the city.
"They're down here to soak up the culture. They're not necessarily here to change the culture. It's a real happy bargain in Oak Cliff and I imagine in other parts of town."
Jared Boggess
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We ventured out into the triple digits for a stroll — I swear North Oak Cliff is cooler than other parts of town even when it's sizzling — and Spence introduced me to Megan Wilkes, a partner in a little pie shop called Emporium Pies. Spence is the owner and developer of a Bishop Arts bungalow now undergoing conversion to become the home of Emporium Pies when it reopens in September. Wilkes, by the way, is 25.
"Our generation isn't like my parents' generation, who just really loved the idea of taking something and making it better," she told me. "We weren't taught that when Christopher Columbus came to America he made it better. We were taught that he stole it from the Indians."
She said she and her friends don't want to steal anything from anybody. "If you're going to move somewhere, you do your best to make it better by adding something that's valuable to the community, but I'm not going to try to take any part of that community away. I think that's different. We want to interject our gifts, but we don't want to tell anyone else to change theirs."
She couldn't have known to what degree her words melted my own desiccated heart, but I nearly swooned when she told me she and her husband had a hard time deciding whether to settle in Dallas or Detroit. They almost decided on my own benighted hometown, the Motor City, because, "You could do anything there. It's like the only frontier left in the universe."
But Dallas won out, because they thought it might offer a somewhat more predictable return on investment. So it's not like they're totally un-shrewd, is it?
According to Spence, the new urbanistos have a much greater tolerance for this principle he calls permeability than did the boomer pioneers. It's OK for small commercial establishments such as Wilkes' pie shop to be cheek by jowl with residential areas, as long as they're cool, but it's also fairly OK for the residential area to rub shoulders with people we would have considered extremely uncool back in the day.
"I almost never have to apologize to my tenants anymore for the ruckus next door where the five roofers live," Spence said.
I also talked to Scott Griggs, the city councilman whose district includes North Oak Cliff. He agreed with Spence that there is a finer weave, a more braided and complex texture in the community rising up in North Oak Cliff than what came before. He summarized it as an ethic: Most things are acceptable as long as they come from within the community rather than being imposed from without by invisible forces.
"It's seen as people building up their own community, versus someone coming in," he said. "You see a lot of local ownership. If you know the people, you actually know their faces and you see them, it changes the whole dynamic. There is much more trust."
When I listen to voices like these, walk the streets of North Oak Cliff and see what's being done, all of a sudden it makes sense that this new city weaving itself together all around me would have so little reference to the central institutions of the old city.
It's not that they don't know about City Hall. They know all they need to know, mainly that they want to do everything they can to avoid it. My generation's first impulse was to run down to City Hall and start beating our heads against it. Instead, people are faced in the other direction with a finger to their lips, more like, "Pretend it isn't there and maybe it will go away."
Could that work? Would it make my head feel better? Not sure. I think by now I sort of need the impact. But I'll say one thing. The view is sure better out that side window than what I look at every day through this damned windshield.
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