An Attempt to Look at North Oak Cliff Gentrification through Census Data
*Important Note: all data comes from PolicyMap.com which uses Census data. I am not sure if it's 100% accurate. I am aware that the 2020 census undercounted Latinos, but the undercount isn't nearly large enough to explain the numbers detailed below. If anyone knows of any further issues with the data, please let me know.*
This post is the second part looking at North Oak Cliff. For part 1: read here.
Yesterday, I examined how the demolition of an entire block of apartment complexes could have been prevented as well as what it tells us about Missing Middle housing. Since I am a big believer in increased housing supply helping to reduce housing costs, the other thing that caught my eye about Shearer's post was him talking about how the promise of more housing and density leading to affordability has not happened in North Oak Cliff. This got me to thinking about how much new housing has actually been added to North Oak Cliff. I went down the rabbit hole and decided to look at the seven census tracts that make up the area roughly between Jefferson Avenue, I-30, I-35, and Hampton Road. What I found is in the table below. Disclaimer: I don't live in North Oak Cliff so I am not an expert on the exact neighborhood names.
What sticks out to me about this is that Dallas SUCKS at gentrification. Like, absolutely sucks. If a neighborhood is going to gentrify and cause the displacement of long-time residents, the city should see a large increase in the number of units and population in that area. That flat out has not happened here. If these numbers are accurate (and again, they are from the Census so I am not sure where to get more accurate ones), then North Oak Cliff has added a net total of 500 units in the past 20 years. In that 20 years, the population has plummeted by more than 8,000 people as Hispanic families have been replaced mostly by young white professionals. To be honest, these numbers kind of shocked me. The area that people talk about the most when describing a new more urban Dallas has seen its population plummet in the past 20 years. All of the new development has yielded an increase of only 500 more units in the area, an increase that pales in comparison to the amount of upheaval the neighborhood has undergone.
I am not sure exactly why the number of units has gone up by so little, and I would appreciate any insights that people have into what has happened. It does appear that a developer, INCAP, demolished 1,500 apartments before going belly up in the 2008 recession. Much of the land they owned is still undeveloped or ended up being built with townhomes and single-family homes in its place. That is an unmitigated disaster. It's possible there are other situations like this one where older apartments have been torn down and replaced with less units. This has happened in other places in Dallas (the Lake Highlands town center is the other big one I can think of), and it is a big reason why any sort of new development in Dallas is seen as a negative. Swapping out old housing units for new more expensive housing units is a terrible thing for the city to do. The focus of city policy should be on expanding housing supply which means targeting the places where currently isn't a lot of housing. Those places are in rich single-family neighborhoods.
These numbers should give pause both to anti-gentrification people and urbanists/YIMBYs. For urbanists/ YIMBYS, the plunge in the Latino population shows that in Dallas, development and displacement do often go hand in hand. Developers are not interested in increasing the supply of housing necessarily. They are interested in maximizing their profits. City council does have to take an active role in making sure that those two interests coincide and don't end up clashing up against each other. On the other hand, the limited increase in units should cause anti-gentrification people to stop and recognize that development in North Oak Cliff could have gone a different way. North Oak Cliff might have had less displacement if there truly had been more units added to the area instead of luxury units replacing existing more affordable ones. Achieving this is a bit difficult in practice, but in general, if there is ever a proposal to create housing where there is currently something else there, it's a good thing.
Looking at the numbers at a neighborhood level, it is clear the Kessler Park has not been building any new housing. The increase in units in East Kessler Park is concentrated along Zang Avenue, something that I could see when I looked at block level data. The other parts of Kessler Park have seen a decrease in the amount of units. Almost all of the new units are concentrated in the Lake Cliff Park area, but that increase in units couldn't stop the area population from dropping by a huge amount. The decrease in units in the Southeast Jefferson Ave area did catch me by surprise. This is the part of Jefferson Ave that curves up from east-west to north-south and includes Adamson High school in it. I'm not sure why the area has seen such a significant decrease in units, and I would appreciate any insights into that. Another thing that did surprise me is that the number of units in Bishop Arts also fell.
Current Day Population Density of North Oak Cliff (Kessler Park is the lighter shaded area)
Looking forward, Shearer and Valderas are sounding the alarm on the West Oak Cliff zoning plan, They worry that the plan will upzone more areas and create a similar situation to what has happened in Bishop Arts. I don't live in Oak Cliff, and I do not know enough to talk about the plan in detail. I am not sure that stopping upzoning will shield West Oak Cliff from increased home prices and demographic shifts, but I understand the argument given what has happened in North Oak Cliff.
Going back to the original post about the apartments in Bishop Arts, Shearer and Valderas have also talked about the replatting (the process of combining all of the lots of the original apartments into one where the new apartment complex will be) as the place where the city could have stopped the development. Stopping the replatting could save the existing buildings, but the chances are slim that it would stop the rent in the buildings from becoming unaffordable. If the replatting was stopped, the new apartment owners would likely have ended up renovating the buildings and increasing the rent, pushing out the old tenants. That is unfortunate, but I think it's a fact of the current housing market in Bishop Arts.
Where I do align with Shearer and Valderas is about the underlying role that zoning plays in where new housing and development happens. Valderas commented on the original Facebook post that "There is never a discussion to add density to wealthy neighborhoods like Kessler Park. Imagine if the city went into Kessler and decided to unilaterally upzone for density?" Here, Valderas is 100% correct. Kessler Park is well overdue for more housing in the neighborhood. Before there is any talk of changing the zoning of West Oak Cliff, it does seem more appropriate to upzone the areas of North Oak Cliff that are closer to downtown and the Oak Cliff Streetcar. Kessler Park residents have benefitted greatly from the changes in Bishop Arts through higher property values and better restaurant/shopping options. It is time for Kessler Park to pull its weight and legalize the kind of housing from Shearer's post which is about to be torn down.
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