Oak Cliff has a healthy distrust around redevelopment going back at least 40 years to when the City of Dallas wanted to turn our neighborhood into apartments and high-speed one-way streets.

The Oak Cliff thoroughfare plan would’ve made streets wider and sidewalks narrower as a way to replace the single-family homes of north Oak Cliff with apartments. In 1980, neighbors formed the Winnetka Heights Historic District, bringing it into focus that homes in these neighborhoods have irreplaceable value.

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But bad development was still coming for us in the way of this thoroughfare plan. Keep in mind that this was before Dallas had single-member districts; all City Council members were elected at-large.

In 1983, the City of Dallas wanted to go forward with part of the Oak Cliff thoroughfare plan to widen Edgefield and turn Davis and Seventh streets into one-way “couplets.” The City of Dallas is currently undoing the one-way couplets of Tyler and Polk, as well as the 12th Street cutoff, which  were earlier parts of the thoroughfare plan.

Watch this archived KXAS story from 1983 (starting at the 20-second mark) for jaw-dropping nuggets, including:

  • A tractor on West Jefferson, where the reporter is standing in front of Sunset High School, with the L.O. Daniel mansion in the background.
  • “The homeowners are upset about it. Nothing unusual about that, except this is Oak Cliff, and the homeowners are coming down here tonight to Sunset High School to fight it, and that is unusual because this area of Dallas is not generally known for its complainers.”
  • “Oak Cliff is about the only area in Dallas with trees. These would be cut down to widen Edgefield…”
  • That City Council was in a hurry to get this done to meet the demands of the year 2000.

Disrespectful moves like this and the Trinity tollroad plan are why no one in 2021 would say that Oak Cliff is “not known for its complainers.”

Apartments, townhomes and new commercial development were allowed to take hold in the Bishop Arts area because of the Bishop/Davis zoning plan, which was written over 10 years ago, before most commercial real-estate investors had any interest in Oak Cliff. Now there are investors from New York that have bought up blocks of north Oak Cliff.

We’ve come a long way from then to now, with the West Oak Cliff Area Plan, which City Councilman Chad West says originated from neighborhood-lead initiatives such as the Jimtown Neighborhood Association and Elmwood homeowners who wanted a plan for their “downtown” commercial district.

The conversation in that case has been around how to get more people in Oak Cliff involved with the plan.

In speaking about why the plan is needed, West has given the example of CVS, which was allowed by right to replace a historic urban building on Zang and Davis with suburban retail form. That was just outside of the Bishop/Davis and Oak Cliff Gateway zoning, which set standards for how things can be built. And it was also just outside of the demolition-delay area, which could’ve given neighbors some leverage in its redevelopment as well.

It’s an example of how mapping out a zoning plan is probably a good idea for neighborhoods where new development is likely and that we don’t want to miss certain snippets. So keep complaining, Oak Cliff.

(Start video, via the University of North Texas Libraries and the Portal to Texas History, at 20-second mark.)