You might say Dallas City Councilman Paul Ridley has been bearing the weight of the world — or at least the future of single-family neighborhoods if ForwardDallas has anything to say about it.
The City of Dallas’ comprehensive land use plan heads to the City Council on Wednesday for a public hearing and possible vote after a long and arduous battle of boards, committees, and town halls. For Ridley, ForwardDallas has been living in his head rent-free, you might say, for over a year.
The plan hasn’t been updated since it was originally penned in 2006 and most agree it’s time for a new vision document as the city changes in the face of a housing affordability crisis. Earlier this year it looked like ForwardDallas 2.0 might be doomed, as homeowners mobilized to fight density that they believed could encroach on their single-family neighborhoods.
The District 14 Councilman, who represents Downtown, Uptown, and portions of East Dallas, was hailed a hero by some when he introduced several compromise amendments at a Sept. 3 meeting of the City Council’s Economic Development Committee.
We sat down with Ridley last week to talk about why he didn’t just ax the housing component, what his amendments will do to protect single-family neighborhoods, and how he thinks the vote will go on Wednesday. Here’s the latest draft of ForwardDallas 2.0.
CandysDirt.com: What do you want your constituents to know about ForwardDallas 2.0?
Paul Ridley: ForwardDallas is a comprehensive plan, which means that it’s a policy document that establishes what the city’s vision is for the future land use development of Dallas. It is not a zoning document. It does not by itself change any zoning in the city.
There is a set process for changing the zoning, which requires public hearings before the plan commission and the city council before any particular piece of property can be rezoned to a different use. That is not the function of ForwardDallas, that is the function of our development code, which provides for the different zoning districts.
That’s a fundamental distinction that people must realize. In terms of what FowardDallas does, it’s really an update of a previous version of ForwardDallas that was adopted by the council in 2006. This was needed to update the previous plan because of changing development trends, increased population in Dallas, and increased development in general so that we can adapt to the changed conditions going forward.
CandysDirt.com: There was a lot of concern about housing density and multifamily use in neighborhoods. How did you respond to that and how did you come up with the compromises that you introduced earlier this month?
Ridley: I listened to the input from residents of my district and frankly from across the city, people who are concerned about what ForwardDallas would mean for the stability and preservation of their neighborhoods. After talking to many people through meetings, both face-to-face and virtual, I developed a series of amendments to ForwardDallas that addressed their concerns.
CandysDirt.com: What do those amendments do? How do they address the concerns?
Ridley: They insert language that explains the function of the land use matrix. That was something that many people objected to, thinking that it allowed any kind of land use in any kind of zoning district. The specific revision that I added to the matrix itself was a footnote that said this is a land use matrix; it is not a zoning matrix. It doesn’t translate to zoning.
For example, it contains a series of placetypes. Placetypes are not zoning districts. They are general land use categories. The one that people were most concerned about was Community Residential. Community Residential was never intended to be a single-family district. It instead encompasses all types of residential uses in addition to some commercial uses such as neighborhood retail, neighborhood office, and institutional uses such as churches and schools that are currently permitted in single-family-zoned districts. Those complement the existing neighborhood structure by providing needed facilities and services for the residents of those community residential areas.
In addition to that I added language in the narrative portions of ForwardDallas that go to explaining the purpose of the placetypes and their distinction from the zoning categories that are lumped into those placetypes.
CandysDirt.com: What kind of response are you getting to that new language? There was a little flurry of “Ridley saved the day,” then as we’ve given it a little time for people to process, I’ve come to find out that some people … don’t know if this will make a difference.
Ridley: I’ve heard similar sentiments and I think that comes from perhaps a misapprehension between placetypes and zoning districts. There was a call earlier this summer to convert the Community Residential placetype into a single-family placetype. That is not only not necessary, but it’s counterintuitive. This is not, as I said before, a zoning document. Single-family residential is a zoning district. That, by its very nature, excludes other uses that are complementary to single-family such as schools, churches, local commercial, and other types of housing.
While that is a very important distinction to make and single-family zoning is something we need to preserve and protect from incompatible uses, I think there was a conflation of the Community Residential placetype with the single-family zoning district. People wanted it to be exclusively a single-family zoning district but that is just not the purpose of this land use matrix.
CandysDirt.com: There was some discussion about wiping out the housing component of the plan altogether. Was that something you gave any consideration to?
Ridley: No I didn’t. I have tried to salvage ForwardDallas because I believe that we do need to update our comprehensive plan from 2006. We need to do that periodically, to make sure it’s still a relevant document to our current needs. I saw that as just kicking the can down the road. There are other components of ForwardDallas that haven’t been particularly controversial, such as the environmental justice section, which is important to protect existing residential areas from the threat of toxic contamination from adjacent industrial uses. [It’s] very important to get that portion adopted.
I didn’t want to see this document piecemealed. Some people suggested that we wait to consider housing until after the next election. That’s just avoidance of the issue. We need to address the issue head-on now. If we don’t like what’s in the plan for housing then we need to change it, and that’s what I attempted to do.
CandysDirt.com: Did this become a political issue and is it risky, in a climate where many of the council members will be announcing their re-election bids soon, to take on something like this?
Ridley: Well, just about everything at City Hall is political on one level or another. This one is an issue that affects so many people in the city and that’s why we’ve seen so much input throughout the process starting with the plan commission and now at city council. People have their largest investment in many cases in their homes.
They’re concerned that property values may be affected if infill, dense housing goes in right next to them. They’re also concerned about the practical effects of more people living on their street in terms of traffic and safety for children playing in the neighborhood, for parking capacity. Will more people be parking on the street, making it difficult to have guests over because there’s no place for them to park? Will it affect the tree canopy by increasing the land development coverage ratio in what were single-family lots to tear down a lot of legacy trees? Will it overload the utility system that was designed in some cases decades ago, in some cases 100 years ago, that wasn’t designed with the capacity to accommodate multiplexes? These are all legitimate concerns.
CandysDirt.com: What are your thoughts on how this was handled by staff?
Ridley: It could have been improved.
CandysDirt.com: Do you think you have eight votes? Do you think this will be voted on Wednesday and if so, is it going to pass?
Ridley: It will be on the agenda so it will be up for discussion. It is scheduled to be approved based on the recommendations of the Economic Development Committee, where I first introduced my proposed amendments to the plan. The Economic Development Committee, I believe, unanimously approved the changes and thought this was the correct direction to go. The council usually follows the recommendations of its component committee. That is something I would like to see happen on Wednesday.
I think everybody is ready to make a decision on this issue. I think the whole community is looking for certainty as to just what form ForwardDallas is going to take. I think the issue is ripe for decision.
I’m hopeful we can come to a consensus to adopt the plan with the safeguards that I have suggested and that the Economic Development Committee approved.
This is a plan that was not intended to sit on the shelf. It will be a reference document for the City Plan Commission when they consider applications for rezoning. It will be a guide for the staff as to what are appropriate recommendations on rezoning applications. That’s its function in large part, to direct the decision-making that we make in the future in order to implement the policies that are contained within the ForwardDallas comprehensive plan. There will be additional time and resources devoted to adopting the recommendations contained in ForwardDallas so that it stays a relevant document and doesn’t just gather dust.
CandysDirt.com: Can you speak to the value of starting conversations, mobilizing neighborhoods, getting people involved in this process, and familiarizing themselves with a comprehensive land use plan that maybe they weren’t even aware existed prior?
Ridley: That’s a very healthy process. Although it may have caused some angst in neighborhoods, it was great to see the kind of activism that we have seen in many parts of the city about this document. People in Dallas need to know what a comprehensive plan is and what it isn’t. They need to know its function in the development process, and they need to be comfortable with the policies that it reflects the future development of our city.
I applaud all of our residents who came to City Hall to offer their input, who wrote letters, who wrote emails. I have never seen such an outpouring of interest in one document at City Hall. That’s part of the democratic process and I was very pleased to see that so we could factor those comments into how the document was shaped instead of waiting until after it was adopted and hearing nothing but complaints.
