Forty years ago, before the building was redone, Jackson’s kitchen nook was a designated sleeping area for the multi-person family that lived there. Forty years before that, the apartment was servant quarters.
Mixed-income housing is a small solution to the pervasive housing crisis that has plagued Dallas, but city officials, and the active property-owning voters who elect them, frequently oppose efforts to bring multi-family dwellings to single-family developments. But by nature of city evolution, the sordid history of servant quarters is proving coexistence is not only possible, but beneficial.
“It’s interesting the way that the neighborhood attracts people that are appreciative of history,” said Jackson.
The small studio, on King’s Highway in Oak Cliff, was built in 1926. The windows don’t seal very well, and the bathroom grout is soiled, but the ceilings are tall and the neighborhood is walkable, a rarity for Dallas. On the corner of the crossroads is another pre-war apartment complex. The street is lined with them, sprinkled in between single-family homes. The area is one of the few mixed-income settings in the city.
“Oak Cliff, historically, had stranger development patterns compared to other parts of the city,” said Jay Firsching, a historic preservation consultant. “You did tend to get patchy development, super fancy over here and the next road over, it's not. It's still that way.”
King’s Highway runs atop the ridgeline of the hills of Kessler Park. The road cuts through the neighborhood at an angle, running catty-corner to Colorado Boulevard, or “Old Millionaire’s Row.”
“The reason they called it King's Highway is because it had to be wide enough for four horse-drawn carriages to go up and down,” said Victor Aves, the owner of Jackson’s building.
The wide road is canopied by the large live oaks from which the neighborhood gets its name. Kessler is a menagerie of architectural styles. Colonial pillars hoist up the balconies of Shakespearean dreams, terracotta tiles beam in the summer glow on the tops of Spanish palacios, and quaint ranch houses, the types that stay in the family for decades, back up to the lots of mid-century glass houses.
The neighborhood is 10 minutes from downtown and seven blocks from Bishop Arts District. It’s just far enough south to be quiet at night but too far south for quick police response times.
“Apartments were usually built on the fringes to start with,” Firsching said. “Developers saw apartments as bad and lowering the property values of their development.”
Before apartments were socially appropriate, the eight- and four-plexes were built to look like regular homes, hiding dozens of people living inside. On the west side, prairie school-style homes were built for traditional nuclear families. On the east side of the six-block strip are some of the city’s original multi-family dwellings.
“There's very few old historic apartments, multi-family, blended in with the houses,” Firsching said. “There's typically not that much of that going on.”
As the neighborhood expanded, the apartments were built as temporary housing for people waiting for their homes on nearby streets to be completed. Wealthy families would hunker down in the small rooms and endure the short weeks it would take for construction to finish. By the ’20s, the apartments were used to house the builders themselves. When the majority of the building was done in the ’30s, and construction jobs dried up, the apartments became housing for the servants working in the mansions on Colorado Boulevard.
The neighborhood, once a promising, multi-income area actively battling the housing crisis of the ’20s, became an economically starved and neglected community.
The Man Who Changed It All
When Rick Garza moved into his first house in 1989, in the 1300 block of King’s Highway, his neighbors were drug dealers and gang members. Never one for rules and always one for risk, Garza bought the best house in the worst neighborhood. The 1911 farmhouse was a dream for the architect, who saw good bones and ignored the loud bangs at night.“King's Highway, at that time, was the bane of everybody's existence — guns, gangs, drugs, prostitutes,” Garza said. “We were like, well, ‘but what a cool house.'”
Oak Cliff, like many cities across the country, was hit hard by massive white flight. Black codes, redlining and racial covenants collectively prevented black families from owning property by law, and the apartments were purchased by absentee landlords who did little upkeep.
“People moved out and they left these buildings to deteriorate. Slumlords moved in, bought them for nothing, milked them, and they really deteriorated in the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s,” said Garza.
By the ’70s, the area became known for a high rate of violence. It wasn’t until the ’90s that Bishop Arts District was revitalized and began to attract an increasingly young, artistic audience looking for cheap rent.
Garza grew concerned with the constant police presence on his street after the birth of his son. The new parents decided to leave the neighborhood and were boxing up their things, but the day before their big move to Park Cities, the contract fell through and they found themselves unpacking. Stuck, Garza decided that if he couldn’t leave, he was left with one option: change the neighborhood's cultural landscape.
“It was self-preservation and [preservation] of our neighborhood,” Garza said. “As an architect, I influence the environment every single day. There's no reason we can't do it in our home.”
He started looking at property records, tracking down owners and cold calling. He put seven buildings under contract at one time without funding. Until his bank loans were approved, Garza was wiring money directly from his bank account to owners all over the country.
“My rationale was that I had to have a critical mass of change,” Garza said. “You cannot change the gravitas with one building. It doesn’t matter if you renovate one building, and everything around it is a slum. You had to have a critical mass.”
Garza started sketching new plans for the dilapidated spaces. He visited nine banks before the tenth saw the potential of the spaces.
“I’ll never forget, a woman from the bank, Cookie, called me and said, ‘Do you really think you can turn these total pieces of shit into what the rendering shows?”
Garza said yes, and the properties were fully renovated within 22 months. King’s Highway became a conservation district in 1988, so when he started purchasing buildings in 2000, he couldn’t alter the exteriors at all, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t exercise his creative freedom inside. He turned eight-plexes into buildings with two-story lofts, and transformed studios into expansive one-bedroom units, while restoring the homes to their former glory. The first building took four months to fill. Now his nine, soon to be 10, historic properties have wait lists.
When Garza bought the buildings, as many as five people were living in each micro-unit. Some tenants could stargaze through the holes in their ceilings. The walls smelled from a century of dust and mold, and the wood was rotting. In a word, the spaces were uninhabitable. To counter the displacement of so many people, Garza offered all the tenants four weeks of free rent. Then after he was done gutting the building, he raised the rent. It was the most expensive in the neighborhood at the time.
No unit is exactly the same, and the rent and layouts vary significantly. A two-bedroom, 1,000-square-foot apartment that holds four is at the highest end of the scale, and a 500-square-foot studio is on the opposite end. According to a tenant who rented in 2023, rent was between $1,000 and $2,000, depending on the unit. Comparatively, a fully loaded 600-square-foot studio with workspaces, covered parking, a dog park and a first-level pilates studio in Bishop Arts can run about $1,300 per month.
“I completely gutted the building down to the ground and redesigned it because I'm a cursed anal bastard architect,” he said.
Behind the plaster, galvanized iron pipes were replaced by their modern alternatives. In the apartments, archways were rebuilt and crown molding was replaced. Garza made kitchenettes with fully updated appliances. Cabinets that touch the 10-foot ceilings and windows that line the perimeter are nods to the commonplace construction elements from the time of construction.
A year later, on the same road, Aves disembowled his own 75-year-old building. The arched doorway of the Tudor building hides eight identical units split by a hallway that runs in a straight line from the front door to the back. Most of the quarters on King’s Highway follow the same structure, two floors of four adjacent units. The swooping curves of the roof reach high into the branches of the sprawling tree in the front yard. Jackson often worries the old limbs might crash through the windows that cover most of the front wall of her unit.
Her bed is flush with the oddly sized windows, which are peculiarly tall and not as wide as today’s standard residential windows. To the left of her bed is a wide vintage dresser, on the right is a sliding-door closet. Before Aves renovated, the closet was a Murphy bed. Aves limited occupancy to two people, but the small apartment was once filled to the brim. Mattresses covered the floors, and every inch went to use.
He bought the building from an elderly woman in the bottom unit. She charged tenants weekly rent, and rarely, if ever, checked on the condition of the apartments. Aves ripped out everything, save for the original wood flooring, or at least 85% of it, he estimates. A history buff, he poured himself into the background of the building. He rebuilt the old covered porch, even matching, as closely as he could, the old ACME bricks originally used. Aves wanted to add glass blocks to the front of the house, and the historical society made him prove they were historically faithful. So he bought old Architectural Digest magazines from the ’20s and ’30s, and now the glass block windows distinguish the building from its neighbors.
“The only building in our nearest vicinity, that’s probably in its original state, and I'm really surprised that they allow him to keep it in that condition, is the blue building next door,” said Aves.
Almost all the residences along the road have been purchased by landlords like Garza and Aves, or by single-family homeowners. The place next to Aves’ building is one of the last remaining unrefurbished buildings there. Garza has been eyeing the property for years, but he says the owners won’t sell. It’s now a dingy shade of blue with peeling paint that once was much brighter, and a “for rent” sign sitting in the front yard. It’s been there for months. Aves reported the building to the city for an illegal fence and stock piling junk in the strip of land that separates their properties. The structure still houses families.
“It’s disheartening in a way, because I had to displace some of these families who were handicapped or elderly parents, and the other people worked menial jobs,” said Aves. “I tried to do my best to help them, as a realtor, try to help them find another place. But a lot of them didn't have documentation. A lot of them didn't trust me because I was the new owner. I had to displace pretty much everybody.”
More Quarters in Dallas
The city has seemingly fought to keep disparate socioeconomic levels from coexisting to prevent renters from tainting the old money structure of the city. A city ordinance modified the code after World War II and outlawed homeowners from renting out secondary structures, or Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs), at the rear of their properties. These days, the buildings are known as “Granny flats” by city government types.Some of the spaces, in the words of the original ordinance, were “bona fide servant’s quarters not for rent,” and others are new builds. They are scattered across the city, and though a minor solution to the greater issues that make up the affordable housing crisis, many are still unused.
“There was an uproar because people did have those, and there was a need for housing,” Firsching said.
In 2018, a unanimous vote allowed homeowners to rent out ADUs if certain conditions were met. And there are lots of conditions. First, the homeowner must submit a request to the city for an ADU. Then, there’s a neighborhood commission, where at least 10 surrounding property owners gather to discuss the proposed ADU. Other stipulations include off-street parking, density, home-owner requirements, affordability and the impact on property values. So even though servant quarters exist on the back lots of old properties, legally renting them is not the simple solution that it could be.
The need for housing predates the ordinances that kept the housing shortage alive and well. When World War I ended, Dallas became a boomtown. Droves of people seeking work in the oil and finance industries flocked to the city, further amplifying the demand for housing in a city with a limited supply. Even if there had been enough housing to match the boom, people couldn’t afford it; the average downpayment in the ’20s was 50%.
“You had all these people that couldn't afford a house or people who just couldn't find a house, and there was no way to build them fast enough,” Firsching said. “It's that way now. A lot of people can't afford to buy a house because housing prices are so high.”
Across the city, young professionals with not quite enough money for a house, but still craving proximity, live in the former servant quarters. On King’s Highway and in Junius Heights, de facto servant quarters make for affordable rent, and have for decades. On Swiss Avenue, bona fide servant quarters are tucked behind Colonial Revival castles. Downtown, historic luxury apartment complexes have quarters deep in the bowels and high up in the attics. In Old East Dallas, there were small full-service apartments for servants above garages. Other homes had entire buildings tucked behind sprawling homes. The old servant quarters in both Oak Cliff and East Dallas are in conservation districts, so they remain protected.
“The rent is absolutely worth not having big apartment amenities,” Christine Pullen said. She lives in servant quarters above a garage in Bryan Place. She pays $1,300 for the 750-square-foot unit. “There is so much character in the unit and the neighborhood, and living where I do at the cost that I do is truly a gift.”
Pullen’s unit was built in 1921. It still has gas ranges, which is nice, she says, but the windows, sealed with nails and years of paint, don’t open. The wood floors are frigid in the morning and the unit is stuffy in the summer. There are lots of caveats to the antiquated units. The old wood floors bow, bathroom tiles chip, doors often jam and insulation is less than perfect, agree Pullen and Jackson.
“An old building is really charming and this sacrifice, it's worth it,” Jackson said. “I feel like it's one of those places that still seems to get the right kinds of people to it, even though it's not highly marketed or promoted.”
Jackson found the apartment on Craigslist. Most tenants find them by word of mouth, and others rely on “for rent” signs in the front yards. The quarters are one of the city’s best-kept renting secrets.
Preservation Is a Double-Edged Sword
Dallas has 27 historical districts. Each one, unique in its own way, serves as a time capsule of the past. Wraparound porches hug Victorian-style homes on the Wilson Block. Ivy climbs up the beaten bricks of Tudor homes in Greenland Hills. The facades are untouchable, protected by the conservation societies that oversee them.But preservation is a double-edged sword. New owners are required to retain the historical context of any designated building. Significant effort goes into restoring the homes, as many of them aren’t up to code. Aves spent $390,000 of his own money in 2001 to gut his property on King’s Highway.
Some of the old servant quarters are salvageable, but many aren’t. The sacrifice of living in homes that come with a hundred years of smells doesn’t appeal to everyone. The cost of preservation needs to be weighed against the evolution of the city.
“Many of our historic buildings that we hold in high regard sit on the ground where something else wonderful was before that was torn down in the past,” Firsching said. “Buildings are constantly turning over and changing and churning.”
Still, the homes tell an interesting story of the past, one that deserves remembering and one that connects young Dallasites to the generations that built this city.
“Architecture establishes a sense of place, but historic architecture creates a profound connection to the past, capturing the timeless appeal of authenticity,” said representatives of Architexas. “These buildings quietly tell stories of bygone eras, allowing people to experience history as part of their daily lives.”
The Cycle Repeats
The servant quarters are a relic of the city’s past, and in their newest iteration, they write history as we speak. The past and the present are starting to blend, and the cycle has reached completion and is ready for repetition.A hundred years ago, the tenants of King’s Highway would walk through the alleys to Davis Street and board the old streetcar that carried them into the city. It was the busiest stop for the trolley. Some would walk down the hills to the nearby mansions for work. Either way, the neighborhood was bustling with young people desperate to make ends meet in an economy that was not designed for them.
Today, more than ever, the neighborhood looks like it did a hundred years ago. Apothecaries, boulangeries and brewpubs dot the adjacent streets. With the addition of a few stoplights, the section of Dallas is a tributary to the past. A hundred years from now, the old servant quarters will be remembered as the cheapest rent in the city for starving artists.
“It’s interesting how they were built for people who serve millionaires,” Jackson said. “Now we all live here and we’re still serving the billionaires in this city.”
