She calls southern Dallas the most topographically appealing part of the city. “It’s a beautiful area that, if ForwardDallas passes, may not be so pretty after all,” she said.
ForwardDallas, the city’s comprehensive land use plan, has many people hopeful for the future of the city. Meanwhile, likely just as many people are up in arms about what that future could look like for single-family neighborhoods. Sanders said she sometimes feels bad for city staff working on the plan “because they’re more or less caught between the devil and the deep blue sea here.”
“That job is difficult. I get that,” she said. “But we made a covenant with the city when we bought our homes where we bought them. We bought them in single-family neighborhoods. That was the deal that we made. It’s not fair to come back and try to change all of that. And, yes, we are rebelling against it.”
The city adopted ForwardDallas in 2006 to establish guidelines for how public and private land should be used and what Dallas should look like in the future. These plans are generally updated about every 10 years, but now, 18 years later, the update is overdue. The plan is currently with the city plan commission and might not be ready for City Council members’ eyes until this fall.
“It is a vision or a guide for how the city of Dallas should grow over the next 10 to 20 years, and it’s a way for the community to get involved in that discussion,” Andrea Gilles, the interim director of Dallas’ planning and urban development department, told the Observer in March. “ForwardDallas looks specifically at future land use, and how that is developed or looked at for the long-range vision for Dallas.”
There are five overarching themes in the plan: environmental justice and sustainability; transit-oriented development and connectivity; housing choice and access; economic development and revitalization; and community and urban design."And, yes, we are rebelling against it.” – Anga Sanders, Oak Cliff resident
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The city has changed a lot since that first iteration of ForwardDallas was adopted. There has been a lot of growth in Dallas since then, and the revised plan intends to help accommodate that growth. According to usafacts.org, Dallas County grew 9.6% between 2010 and 2022, from 2.4 million to 2.6 million people.
Patrick Blaydes, chief planner for the ForwardDallas project team, told the Observer in March, “I think a lot of what ForwardDallas has looked at is ‘OK, how has the market changed and how do we need to be intentional about what that change looks like?’”
The goal is to make sure the needs of communities are met, attract new businesses, protect environmental and natural resources, assist with infrastructure planning and provide a transparent planning process for residents. A main way the plan will be implemented will be through zoning. Once the new version of ForwardDallas is adopted, it can still be amended through other city policies, zoning changes or the adoption of smaller area plans.
The plan includes items called land use themes and placetypes. Land use themes will lay out how a community wants land to be used.
But one of the main bones of contention right now is the placetypes. Placetypes are what they sound like — types of places throughout the city, such as residential neighborhoods. There’s one placetype that has people particularly concerned, however: the community residential placetype. This placetype would include single-family homes as well as possibly multifamily developments.
That’s where the controversy lies. Sanders said the city is proposing placing multifamily developments of up to nine units in single-family neighborhoods. She said this could alter the character of the community. City staff will say that these multifamily developments will be context-sensitive, meaning they will resemble what’s already in the neighborhood. But Sanders isn’t so sure of that.
Sanders said some, particularly young people, think the increased density in single-family neighborhoods could usher in some housing affordability for the city. She isn’t so sure about that either. “It’s not about making housing more affordable for people, and I really wish they would stop telling this story,” she said.
Instead, she thinks ForwardDallas could just bring more unaffordable homes to the city and lock people out of homeownership. Sanders said many Dallas homes have been bought by investors in the last few years instead of by homeowners. Some 30% of Dallas-Fort Worth homes were purchased by investors in 2022, according to The Dallas Morning News.
“Investors are not buying these houses to rent them out cheaply,” she said. “That’s not going to happen. Investors are not that altruistic. They are profit-minded, and good for them for being profit-minded. But let's stop the nonsense and tell the truth about it. Packing multifamily units into single-family neighborhoods is not going to make any housing more affordable.”
Not everyone agrees with Sanders on that topic, of course. Mike Grace, an economic developer and certified urban planner, wrote in an opinion piece for The Dallas Morning News that higher land use in the form of smaller homes and lot sizes, accessory dwelling units, condos, multifamily and townhome developments and their close proximity to employment centers, “presents opportunities to create mixed-income communities and lowers housing costs.”
Bryan Tony, a political consultant and the lead organizer of the Dallas Housing Coalition, said he would call himself a proponent of adopting a new comprehensive land use plan like the latest iteration of ForwardDallas. “This is an important document for any city to have,” he said.
He said one of the most promising aspects of ForwardDallas is how it discusses the need to accommodate more housing throughout the city. He doesn’t view ForwardDallas as an attack on single-family neighborhoods.
“We absolutely understand and appreciate all those who have come forward to advocate for their neighborhoods, and we believe in neighborhood planning, and everybody should be involved in that process,” Tony said.
But he believes that there has been a lot of misinformation floating around about ForwardDallas and what it will do to single-family neighborhoods. In is view, the plan won’t affect these neighborhoods as much as people may think.
“The true fact of the matter is that this document is saying that at least much of the housing should be focused along some of our transit corridors, some of our transit-oriented developable areas around DART stations and buses,” Tony said.
Additionally, Gilles told the Observer, “There aren't recommendations within the plan to make changes to our established residential neighborhood. It discusses where can we potentially add some more housing in the future.”
Tony believes that what troubles people the most is their lack of understanding of the plan and some of the definitions in it. The plan mentions attached single-family homes and multiplexes, for example, and people may not know exactly what these look like.
“So, I think it requires a lot of just education,” Tony said. “But, you know, it’s one huge solution to the future of our city.”
He thinks the concern over multifamily developments in single-family neighborhoods is a bit overblown because before any changes can happen, they would need to go through the normal zoning processes. “These projects all go through city processes for rezoning before they could be built,” he said. “This isn’t a zoning document. This doesn’t mean that a more dense product will be built in the middle of your single-family neighborhood or right next door to you. That is, from our perspective, more along the fear-mongering side.”"This doesn’t mean that a more dense product will be built in the middle of your single-family neighborhood or right next door to you." – Bryan Tony, Dallas Housing Coalition
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He added, “We need to be able to have thoughtful conversations with one another and not just say ‘no’ to something when, in reality, there are a lot more protections that come along after this.”
However, some are worried that if the plan is adopted in its current form, it will just give city staff, plan commissioners and council members one more reason to support such zoning changes – because it aligns with the plan.
ForwardDallas isn’t the be-all and end-all for the city.
“It does cast that vision that we want to be a community," Tony said. "We want to welcome more neighbors and we can increase our tax base by building more thoughtful housing.”
Some of Tony’s thinking about ForwardDallas is that it could increase housing options in the city and potentially make housing more affordable. He also knows that some people are concerned that these other housing options will be just as unaffordable as other types of housing in the city.
“We’re trying to help people understand that increasing the supply of housing will actually slow down the rising cost of housing,” Tony said. “Hopefully, that slows down some of the actually rapidly increasing property tax values that people are getting back.”
To him, it’s simple supply and demand economics. “We’ll have more housing being built, and that just filters throughout the economy.”
If more units are allowed on a single lot, some worry developers will just build multifamily projects to multiply their profits, making nothing more affordable. But Tony doesn’t think that will happen and said he knows developers who are willing to build with affordability in mind. He thinks ForwardDallas could pave the way for a better future for the city.
“I think we can all agree what we want at the end isn’t, hopefully, what we’re currently experiencing,” he said.
On top of her other concerns, Sanders also believes that ForwardDallas has its eyes trained on the southern half of the city.
“They’re saying ‘Let’s look at southern Dallas,’” Sanders explained. “But they’re not looking at southern Dallas to increase homeownership. That’s the problem.”
She said it has been known for decades that homeownership is one of the best tools for building generational wealth, but that ForwardDallas is proposing more rental housing instead.
Sanders has been trying to eradicate food deserts in Oak Cliff for about 10 years now. She’s spoken to grocery corporations and has been told some pretty condescending things over the years. One is that her part of town doesn’t have enough of the “right kind of rooftops.” She took that to mean there were too many renters in the area for a grocery corporation to feel comfortable setting up shop there.
“So, the more apartments and multifamily units that are built do two things,” Sanders said. “They lock people out of homeownership, thus locking them out of generational wealth, and they continue the proliferation and survival of the food desert because they’re [grocery stores] not counting those spaces when it comes to counting how many people they need to sustain a store. It’s a cyclical thing. It’s almost like a snake eating its own tail.”
There are other places to develop multifamily housing besides single-family neighborhoods, she added, such as around DART stations. Indeed, there are plans included in ForwardDallas to develop housing near DART stations. These are called transit-oriented developments, which Sanders thinks are a good idea. There are also vacant retail spaces and strip malls that can be turned into multifamily housing.
“Nobody would complain about that,” she said. “But ForwardDallas is taking aim at single-family homes, single-family neighborhoods. It makes no sense, except if you look at something that they recently revealed, which is how much taxes the city collects from multifamily units versus single-family units. So, they said the quiet part out loud. It’s about the money.”
Sanders understands that the city needs more money, but doesn’t think this should happen at the expense of single-family neighborhoods. She's also worried that what makes Dallas a desirable place to own a home might be destroyed.
“Just place these multifamily developments that they’re pushing so hard in places where they make sense and where they will not disrupt single-family neighborhoods," Sander said. "Because this is some kind of municipal suicide in my opinion.”
