Neighborhood concerns persist as ForwardDallas land use plan heads to Dallas City Council

The Dallas City Plan Commission advanced a long-range future land use plan designed to guide how and where the city grows by a 10-4 vote Thursday night.

The vote came after hours of public input and debate from the 15-member CPC and more than eight months after ForwardDallas 2.0 was unveiled to the public.

The document has received considerable opposition from neighborhood groups across the city concerned it would lead to the end of single-family zoned neighborhoods.

District 4 CPC member Tom Forsyth said 90% of people living in single-family homes feel the plan targets their neighborhoods.

“You are enabling the very strong opposition to this plan to continue and to bring that opposition in front of the council,” Forsyth said. “I will be speaking against this plan when it’s brought before council.”

According to the city, ForwardDallas 2.0 recommends how public or private land in Dallas can be developed.

On Friday, neighbors and homeowners continued to express concern about the document as it is currently drafted.

Dalton Pfiffner of East Dallas says there are many parts of ForwardDallas she supports, like the focus on environmental justice and addressing affordable housing, so she doesn't have a "No Forward Dallas" sign in her yard visible in some yards nearby.

"I do see there’s a lot of good things in the plan," Pfiffner said. "But, I have big environmental concerns that will be exploited by development in the area.”

Pfiffner says she would like to see specific recommendations added to ForwardDallas that would help protect tree canopies and porous and permeable surfaces that can be jeopardized by large concrete-based developments.

"A duplex or multiplex, the developer will want more square footage than a single home can provide which will then take away the green space that we do have," Pfiffner said.

Andrea Gilles, deputy director of Dallas' recently reorganized Department of Planning and Development says ForwardDallas allows the city to update how it looks at housing and think about how people are housed at all points of their lives.

"The city fully cherishes and supports and wants to preserve those stable, single-family neighborhoods," Gilles said.

"A lot of these recommendations, and a lot of the language that’s in the plan, the draft today, has also been in the plan since 2006."

The original version of ForwardDallas was adopted in 2006.

The most recent draft was released in June and underwent additional edits on Thursday during the CPC meeting.

District 2 CPC member Joanna Hampton said the number of edits adopted necessitated the CPC to wait until the public could review the changes before advancing it to the city council.

“It gives me pause that we’re considering moving forward a document this important for our city without having it in front of us and not allowing the public an opportunity to read the document we’re proposing to move forward,” Hampton said.

District 3 CPC member Darrell Herbert said he was ready to advance the plan to the full council.

“It is clear single-family only zoning is a relic of a discriminatory past, artificially inflating housing costs, fostering segregation and limiting our community’s potential for diversity and inclusivity,” Herbert said.

The Dallas City Council is expected to review ForwardDallas, make edits and decide on approval later this fall.