Gentle Gentrification Eases Its Way Into Southern Dallas

The Brentwood neighborhood in southern Dallas is made up of a series of dead ends, as if a city planner long ago forgot about the area halfway through paving it.

Those dead ends overlook a rocky and steep descent to a trickling stream called Cedar Creek, which has contributed to the landscape’s erosion. Overgrown foliage creates a dark canopy along the neighborhood’s edge. Through the trees, a clear view of downtown Dallas peeks out.

The view, if you can find the right vantage point, stretches from the western bridges over the Trinity River to Fair Park. It’s startling, the way it comes out of nowhere, visible only as you approach and then descend the ridge that Brentwood is built on. Once you take in that full look of Dallas from east to west, you wonder how it took this long for construction crews to sweep in en masse.

“They’re all trying to get this view,” says Paul Carden, a deep-voiced developer from Oak Cliff, as he navigates his car along Compton Street on a warm June day.

On both sides of the road, men wearing hard hats dart in and out of half-built, towering homes. Each structure rises taller than the last, with oversized balconies decorating the second and third floors of the homes’ northern facades. Some of the men seem to recognize Carden, who has long, curly, salt-and-pepper hair and wears black-rimmed glasses. The neighbors certainly recognize him.

As he approaches the point where Compton Street gives way to forest, he parks. A gap in the foliage that cuts up the ridge is the only indication that a trail system weaves along the creek. The trail is quiet today, but typically, Carden finds kids from the neighborhood playing in the area. That’s how he likes it, as perhaps the only developer in Dallas who hopes people walk onto his property.

“When we started building this out, I had to remove hundreds of tires. And the trick was I couldn’t just clear cut [the path], because I’m trying to keep as much of this canopy intact, so we had to just go straight up jungle bushwacker,” Carden says, hiking up the incline. “When I got this site in 2016, I was paying more for my note on this than I was paying for my full rent in Old East Dallas.”

Carden had a plan, one that considered development in Brentwood as part of a bigger system contributing to the neighborhood instead of a cash grab.

Over the last decade, he has amassed parcels of land all through Brentwood and planned a system of townhomes and multi-use developments that will be connected by the trail system he built. Rezoning the plats from single-family homes to multi-family has taken some time, but in that time, he’s held neighborhood meetings to get comments on design, started a neighborhood watch program and helped clean out lots that were used for dumping.

At this moment, he owns eight acres, but that fluctuates somewhat frequently. Each time he sells a piece of property, it comes with strings attached, or at the very least, an interview to ensure the buyer’s vision is consistent with the broader system he’s working towards.

While developers across Dallas are typically met with distrust, Carden snuck into Brentwood under the radar.

“At the time that I started investing in Brentwood, nobody was really paying attention. Certainly, the west side [of Oak Cliff] wasn’t paying attention,” Carden said. “The idea that some kid, essentially, would at one point become the largest property owner and then start rezoning things and setting up a whole vision in a neighborhood that has struggled for decades, no one really believed that was gonna happen.”

Then came the Brentwood boom. Over the last three or four years, high-end, custom-built houses have started popping up across the neighborhood. They’re being bought by doctors, engineers and “people with SMU degrees,” Carden said. And because single-family zoning doesn’t inherently limit home designs, there is no built-in incentive for the developers of those homes to consult with neighbors before designing a project.

Carden, in need of a rezoning for his land, did have to consult with neighbors. His willingness to work with the neighborhood, juxtaposed with the other changes cannibalizing Brentwood, helped some skeptics come around on his projects.

“I’m more than warmed up to [Paul]. … A lot of these homes that are going up, to me, I’m looking at them and they look cheaply built,” Daymond Lavine, president of the Brentwood Trinity Heights Community Action Group, told the Observer. “They’ll put anything up there to sell that view.”

The Problem of Displacement

Displacement and development seem to go hand in hand, and across Dallas, communities of color have been sounding the alarm on the former for years, warning that development often comes at the expense of existing residents.

The recently released Anti-Displacement Toolkit, published by the advocacy group Builders of Hope, found that more than 40% of Dallas neighborhoods were either susceptible to or experiencing some form of gentrification as of 2021.

The toolkit lists Brentwood, which census data shows is primarily Hispanic and Black, as one of the most at-risk neighborhoods in Dallas for displacement. The neighborhood is recording accelerating home values, the report found, and the gentrification stage is listed as “dynamic,” a step above early levels, but not impossible to recover from.

For Carden, displacement is personal. He grew up an Oak Cliff kid; his grandparents lived on the eastern border of the Wynnewood neighborhood, so close to Interstate 35 that the highway acted as a boundary when he and his cousins played football in the summers. His parents grew up in Oak Cliff, too, but around the time Carden turned 8, they started looking to move because the neighborhood didn’t provide the type of environment they wanted to raise kids in.

“Everyone wants to live on safe streets, in a safe community, have nice housing and access to retail. [When that doesn’t exist] it’s almost like effectively being displaced,” Carden said. “Because you’ve got an education and then you end up doing well, and there’s a sense of ‘I can’t really do as much here with it.'”

His parents ended up moving out to Mansfield, and, bouncing between the suburbs and his grandparents’ home, he grew up wondering why you had to leave southern Dallas to get to all the good stuff, especially when southern Dallas is where you’d rather be.

Then, for a while in his 20s, he lived in Vancouver. He’d decided to follow the Chinese exchange student he’d met in high school, who is now his wife, and lived the “typical immigrant experience,” where he worked a normal job with a half-finished degree for a few years. Vancouver was a utopia from a zoning and city planning perspective, he says, albeit an expensive one.

“It’s still single-family, but it has a ridiculous walk score. And yeah, it has its challenges. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, it’s a very, very expensive cake,” he said. “But one thing I noticed was that no one who grew up there wanted to leave Vancouver. … And I kind of wanted to have that.”

He came back to Dallas in 2015, living first in Old East Dallas and then Oak Cliff. Wanting to “do big things,” he began working on the Southern Gateway Citizens Taskforce, which provided early design feedback on the I-35 deck park. Inspired by his grandparents’ adjoining home, he advocated for community-oriented design standards like noise mitigation walls. It was around that time that he started scooping up land in Brentwood, too.

Tucked between two DART rail stations and the adjacent Dallas Zoo, Brentwood is a bit of an enigma. Off the bat, any city planner would tell you that dropping single-family zoning between two mass-transit ports is less than desirable, Carden says, because transit stations are typically seen as a place to build density.

But even if you ignore that and take Brentwood for the single-family neighborhood it is, things are disjointed.

In most Dallas neighborhoods, homes were built around the same time period, and an overarching aesthetic thread runs through the streets, giving the area a cohesive look. With proximity to transit, Brentwood should have exploded the way every other part of Dallas has. Instead, it’s been a slow growth, with homes going up a few at a time through the 1910s, the ’30s, the ’50s, the ’70s, the ’90s. The randomness, Carden said, has become part of the culture of Brentwood.

But it also had made the area difficult to preserve.

A duplex can sit next to a ranch-style home, next to a craftsman-esque house, next to a three-story modern box. Because there is no overarching form that defines Brentwood, it would be difficult for the neighborhood to pursue a conservation district or historic district status, which protects nearby neighborhoods, like the 10th Street Historic District, from teardowns.

City data shows that demolitions have been happening in Brentwood since the 1980s, and in many cases, those lots sat empty until the last decade.

While gentrification in other parts of Dallas may look like an old home getting bought up by a developer who “makes it cute and adds flowers,” Carden said, there is very little restoration happening in Brentwood. Instead, empty lots and crumbling homes are being replaced by oversized, modern homes that sell in the high $400,000s and low $500,000s.

Think about that: In historically underserved southern Dallas, where you have to cross a highway to get to the nearest grocery store, in a district where the median household income is $43,573, according to city data, homes are selling for half a million dollars. The custom builds sell for even more, Carden adds, and the snail’s pace growth that defined Brentwood through the 20th century has quickened exponentially over the last five years.

“There is a very disproportionate amount of well-to-do [minority] professionals moving here. Very disproportionate,” Carden says, pointing at a sparkling-new home that is owned by a Black doctor. “Which tells you that it wasn’t like people didn’t want to be here. There was a complete mismatch between what people thought [and what Brentwood is.]”

It’s the inverse of the decision his parents made so many years ago. Instead of moving out to the suburbs, educated Dallasites of minority communities are choosing to return to a neighborhood that Dallas has historically relegated them to. Theoretically, that’s Carden’s driving goal. The city planner in him, though, knows that sooner or later, if something in Brentwood doesn’t give, it’ll be at the expense of long-time, more vulnerable residents.

An Opportunity Waiting to Happen

When Carden first came to Brentwood, he saw a neighborhood that the city of Dallas had written off as a “C” student, investing in the area as such. But he believed that the neighborhood had the potential to be an “A” student if given the right resources. Winding back down Compton Street and taking in the new buildings and “for sale” signs scattered everywhere, he’s changed his assessment.

All the student needed was some CliffsNotes, and it got there on its own.

“Dallas hasn’t really talked about if a neighborhood is being gentrified, not by white communities, like we’ve come to expect. What if it’s being gentrified by wealthier people who may have had some kind of connection to the community, and now they’re coming back, but they’re coming back for something drastically larger?” Carden, who is white and Black, said. “How does that conversation go? That hasn’t been something that has played out, and that tells you we still have some biases to work out.”

For Lavine, the founder of the neighborhood’s action group, the word gentrification has become associated with the baggage of displacement, but he’d like to reframe that thinking.

Born in Opelousas, Louisiana, Lavine, who is Black, attended school in New Orleans and received degrees in physics and electrical engineering. He lived there for a few years while working at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, but decided to move to North Texas in 2015 for better career opportunities. He bought land in Brentwood that year, even though he was living in Grand Prairie at the time.

He started a brand consulting business, dabbled in real estate and life coaching, and, in 2022, built his dream home on the empty lot in southern Dallas he’d purchased years earlier. All that to say, Lavine encapsulates the type of career professional moving into the neighborhood, and he’s had to reckon with his role in the changing landscape.

“I look at it as I am part of the evolution. … I put the onus on me to represent that and to also remain rooted in the community,” Lavine said. “The way gentrification has typically happened, it’s not been evolutionary. It’s just been a disruptive change right out. Societal evolution, that’s different because we’re all meant to evolve, right? We just have to embrace the evolution and understand how we fit into the change.”

When Lavine first came to the area, he saw the neighborhood as an “opportunity waiting to happen.” He was at the beginning of the multi-story modern home owner wave (his second floor has a view of downtown), and he started the community action group as a way to address the concerns he shared with neighbors. Issues like prostitution, loitering and dumping were things he knew would be taken more seriously by the city if they were backed by an organized neighborhood group.

“I think people didn’t quite know how to refer to this area because people had forgotten about it,” he said.

Carden held a community meeting in the summer of 2024 to talk with Brentwood neighbors about his plan for the system, and immediately, Lavine was on guard. As a developer interested in providing housing diversity, Carden had planned for a mixture of townhomes, studio apartments and one-story units to accommodate anyone from a young professional to a senior with mobility issues.

The neighborhood, though, didn’t like the idea of apartments contributing to the already transient environment they’d worked to counter. Leaving the meeting, Lavine took one of Carden’s business cards and said, “I’ll be giving you a call.”

When they spoke, Lavine explained that the neighborhood hoped to see more permanent housing types that would encourage residents to become “stakeholders in the community.” While housing advocates across Dallas are pushing for an influx of affordable housing, the Brentwood neighbors asked for something more elevated to bridge the half-million-dollar new builds and the historic single-family starter homes.

“It was a tough conversation. I had my opinion and then he had his, and what I can honestly say is the conversation went really well because tempers did not fly,” Lavine said. “I think the reason why these projects don’t [typically] go like this is because the developers are not talking to the community and the community is not talking to the municipality and the city of Dallas is [not talking to the developer]. … We live in a society where communication is just hard and it breaks down and it seems like it’s just getting worse.”

Carden adjusted the plans after a series of neighborhood meetings. The “Grant Street trio” – three sets of townhouses built at Grant Street’s dead end that is connected to the trail system – will have 38 units instead of the 67 Carden initially planned for. Twenty-two of those will be for sale, with the rest for rent. The townhomes are three stories tall, with two or three bedrooms in each.

He was “cool with pivoting,” he says, but the tradeoff was eliminating studio and one-bedroom units that could have provided more affordability. The annual income needed to qualify for the townhomes will be $90,000.

“The idea that a community that is a primarily minority neighborhood could want more elevated housing choices, it’s something Dallas has to kind of reconcile,” Carden said. “Urban and Black and nice can all exist in one community.”

Carden also started building community cleanup funds into the budgets of each of his projects. While those have sometimes gone toward literal cleanup efforts, they can also go toward projects that the community asks for, such as a neighborhood security program. He’s installed security cameras that have thermal and infrared capabilities and cost $3,000 a month to maintain on his empty lots. Block captains throughout the neighborhood have access to monitor them, and footage can be pulled if needed for a criminal complaint or police inquiry.

He’s threading a very small needle with the program. Carden said he isn’t blind to the history of overpolicing that Black and Hispanic communities have endured, and in the wrong hands, an agreement between a private developer and a police force could become problematic quickly. That’s why the system, while sponsored by Carden, can be accessed and controlled by the neighborhood.

Lavine also emphasized that it’s a concept that could “go left or right” and that Carden’s building a foundation with the community was crucial for the program’s success. In general, the program has been met with pleasure and “some dismay,” Carden said.

“I don’t believe I have to be a nonprofit to do good things. And I don’t think this is something that has to be a charity case. I just think it’s straight-up good business to say that my property values and my sales prices and my rents benefit if everyone feels safer,” Carden said. “As long as the overall system is doing well, I do well.”

With Progress Comes Baggage

On the afternoon of March 26, the Dallas City Council chamber was full of frustrated Dallasites dressed in yellow shirts emblazoned with “NO.” They gathered to make a final stand against a developer who neighbors claimed had ignored their wishes. The developer claimed the neighbors never brought forward a good-faith agreement that would work for both sides.

Later that evening, those neighbors would leave City Hall feeling ignored and trodden over as the City Council voted 10-4 to approve the Pepper Square redevelopment. Within weeks, a neighborhood coalition would file a lawsuit against the city. The rezoning case was a live wire that turned the District 11 City Council race into a single-issue election centered on development and density.

In the lead-up to the flurry and fury that was Pepper Square, three rezoning cases along Grant Street in Brentwood were overshadowed. As each case was announced, Carden stepped up to the microphone and outlined his plan for the neighborhood, his hope that the city could become interested in the adjoining trail system he started, and the need for the city to implement design standards for smaller-scale streets, which are traditionally located in underserved neighborhoods. Lavine voiced support for the projects as they were listed.

The irony of Carden’s proposal being overshadowed by Pepper Square is that his plan mirrors what neighbors in North Dallas say they’d hoped for: pockets of owner-occupied townhomes balanced with greenspace, and plans for mixed-use retail sprinkled in.

At a time when initiatives like ForwardDallas and cases like Pepper Square have ignited Dallas’ conversations about development, Council member Chad West described Carden as “exactly the kind of person we need.” All three of Carden’s cases were approved, but not before District 4’s Council member Carolyn King Arnold, in the final throes of her time at the horseshoe, issued a warning.

“Stay woke on this project, seriously. Because people promise us things,” Arnold said, motioning towards where Lavine sat in the audience. “We need to understand that promises are just that. Promises. And that is why I believe this community has lost faith in the system. … Victimized by progress. But we’re going to try it.”

While she voted to approve the rezonings, she said her “heart was heavy” to do so. She encouraged Carden to take displacement and increased crime seriously while moving forward with his development.

Carden is OK with the skepticism. He’s been dreaming of Brentwood for 10 years, and finally, the vision is within spitting distance.

The Grant Street trio is in full design phase and should break ground this time next year. While he has early design ideas for a mixed-use development that will sit across from the Morrell DART station, the mockups are preliminary. He needs to go through the community feedback process, then a rezoning application, before construction can start.

A smattering of townhomes that will sit on the ridge, along the tail system’s western edge, will begin construction in late 2026. A smaller mixed-use residential development located at the intersection of Clarendon Drive and Ewing Avenue, just to the west of Brentwood, will break ground in September.

“I want to create a place where people want to live, while also making sure the people who want to stay can stay,” Carden said. “I want the kids in that community to be able to go anywhere in the world, but despite having all those skills and resources, I’d want many of them to still choose to stay here.”