The Berkley Room of the Cooper Hotel in North Dallas filled with brokers, community leaders, journalists and homeowners, all waiting for a late panelist: Doug Newby.
The Metroplex had just finished a classic Texas fall weather fakeout, and it was hot. In a week, the City Council would vote on adopting ForwardDallas 2.0, a highly contentious land use plan, and those in the room were stewing, anxious to hash out its potential ramifications.
Newby, a preservationist and expert in Dallas architecture who has sold homes in the city for over 40 years, trod down the aisle at 10 minutes past 2 o’clock, towering above the audience members clumped together in groups.
The panel kicked off — finally — as Newby took a bold dig at the YIMBY movement in the city.
“This is just a national ideological movement to eliminate single-family zoning and increase the number of renters,” Newby said. He began drumming up opposition to the plan last year, emerging as someone who knew how to use his sway to unite critics and direct their attention to City Hall. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, we’ve made compromises.’ Excuse me, we’ve made the neighborhoods more protected.”
A growing faction of Dallas homeowners believes the city plan will trigger an anything-goes upzoning of single-family neighborhoods. Though City Hall calls the plan “advisory,” a legally disputed section says that “zoning regulations must be adopted in accordance with the comprehensive plan,” per the Texas Local Government Code, Newby explained.
The crux of the argument can be found in a bit of city-planning-speak: The word “placetypes.” The city’s Land Use Committee is using it to delineate, well, types of places, as described by their intended uses, hoping to inform eventual zoning in a way that could ease obstacles for future affordable housing developers. But residents interpreted it differently.
The new city plan, then, became a complicated Rorschach test. Its opponents see ForwardDallas as a neighborhood killer, while city officials and other YIMBYs see a chance to upzone a city known for its Texas-sized suburban sprawl amid the increased scarcity of affordable housing.
It’s the latest front in a national battle over the future of American cities: With housing in urban areas in short supply, governments want to find a way to build more. But people — especially homeowners — do not like change. Transport that tension to Dallas, a city that has long pursued growth and consensus over partisanship, where the already enormous metropolitan area added more people between 2021 and 2022 than anywhere else in the country, and you get a battle more heated than the late September weather.
A week after the meeting at the Cooper Hotel, the council voted 11-4 to pass ForwardDallas 2.0.
Austin and San Antonio both adopted YIMBY policies this year despite pushback from residents, but whether Dallas will lean further in favor of development depends on whether the city can quell the tidal wave of dissent and anger spurred by the legislative process and its outcome.
Zero-sum game
Nearly half of Dallas households live in single-family homes; for decades, they were a political force.
Newby has been here before. He was part of a coalition of East Dallas neighbors in the 1970s who defeated Dallas’ multifamily-oriented vision for Bryan Place, now a neighborhood of mostly historic, single-family homes. The mayor at the time put his weight behind Newby’s proposal to downzone the area to single-family at a time when city officials were moving to create massive swaths of multifamily zoning.
The city ultimately backed the Newby plan. For 45 years, many similar downzonings took shape across old Dallas neighborhoods.
This history plays in the background when Newby, along with a handful of other homeowners who were around for that fight, hear younger city officials say that every neighborhood in the city must “share the burden” of multifamily housing.
“They tell us we don’t know how land use works — we lived land use,” Newby said.
“There’s almost no political chance at all that the city council would approve a rezoning of an established neighborhood like that. It just wouldn’t happen.”
The city desperately needs affordable housing, and city staffers told residents the plan could address this, but many Dallasites are not exactly eager to take them at their word. Conspiracy theories and accusations spread as waves of residents poured into City Hall meetings and took to social media, alleging that developers and investors are lining the pockets of zoning officials, who tell them they “can’t change” what’s coming.
Members of the Land Use Committee — who are appointees of appointees and not elected themselves — are agenda-driven outsiders, some said. Perhaps most galvanizing is the contention that city leaders want to make Dallas the latest notch on a national urban renewal belt.
Yet ForwardDallas is unlikely to change the regulations around upzoning requests. Notices will still be mailed to residents within 200 feet of any site where rezoning is proposed, and public hearings will be held with the City Plan Commission and City Council.
“There’s almost no political chance at all that the City Council would approve a rezoning of an established neighborhood like that,” Tommy Mann, a land use attorney with the Winstead law firm, said. “It just wouldn’t happen.”
The need for affordable housing in Dallas is overstated at best, Newby said. Population growth in Dallas proper has stagnated, according to Census data, he points out. Dallas also has 140 square miles of undeveloped parcels, the most in the country.
The backstory of ForwardDallas
Unbridled growth in Texas is eating its own tail.
The state comptroller sounded the alarm last year, saying demand for housing was outpacing construction and that housing affordability was declining in most Texas metros.
The Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex led all U.S. metros in population growth and net domestic in-migratio between 2020 and 2023, and median home prices have jumped 55 percent since 2020. Not a single neighborhood in Dallas saw price depreciation in the last five years. Even though multifamily construction in the Dallas area was the second highest in the nation this year, the least expensive homes in Dallas were increasingly unaffordable to most, according to the city’s market value analysis.
City officials launched a comprehensive land-use study in March 2021, saying the first version of ForwardDallas, released in 2006, sorely needed updating since the city needed more housing.
After the draft plan was released last fall, five council members requested a meeting, but only one of them, Adam Bazaldua, was actually available on the meeting date, right before Christmas. Most of the council members present were against the options presented, and against the discussion itself. Some homeowners felt the timing was intended to avoid the public’s notice. Bazaldua said the scheduling was “clearly an attempt to stifle the democratic process we have in our city.”
Developers are asking for upzoning more often, city planners responded, and Dallas is late to the game on rewriting its land-use policy. In the past two years, developers increasingly requested zoning changes with housing elements, notching 30 percent of zoning cases, of which 30 to 50 percent asked for either “gentle density” or single-family zoning, planners said.
“There are cities that addressed this 10 years ago, and we are now just starting to have the conversation,” Dallas’ Planning and Development Deputy Director Andrea Gilles said. “The reality is, the pressure on our neighborhoods is not going to change if we don’t change anything. Our city is changing, so how are we going to adapt to that change?”
Her department considered allowing duplexes or accessory dwelling units on any lot and updating minimum lot sizes. But with little balance in the discussion and the public beginning to review the city plan’s latest draft, the suspicion that the city was targeting single-family neighborhoods took root.
Chaos at City Hall
Dallasites in blue shirts with “Dallas is big enough for everyone” flooded into the City Council’s chamber on the day of the September vote, alongside fellow residents wearing red stickers that said “Save single family neighborhoods.”
Officials felt the pressure as citizens took the mic. Applause, boos and shouts of “amen” would reverberate over the next four hours.
“If you can keep outbursts or responses, one way or another, to a minimum, that sort of helps us get through this more expeditiously,” Mayor Eric Johnson said.
Pollution and equity, density and displacement, corruption and governance: These were the words of the day as residents presented data, narrated experiences and re-hashed arguments.
At last came the vote, and ForwardDallas 2.0 won out.
“The final version of ForwardDallas 2.0 is exactly what it should be — a good compromise where everyone feels a bit dissatisfied but can live with the results,” Council member Chad West said.
It was a heavy blow to opponents.
“The City Council vote to make duplexes and attached single-family a primary use in every single-family neighborhood reverses a 50-year positive trend for Dallas and the City Council support for single-family zoning,” Newby fumed.
Whether ForwardDallas will reshape Dallas for the better or unravel it at the seams depends entirely on whom you ask — and on a new contingency: whether residents’ lack of faith in their government will make the plan backfire.
People will be voting for City Council members who will respect their wishes to maintain their single-family zoning, Newby predicted.
What will rise first: new multifamily developments or the barriers of the public’s distrust?