North Oak Cliff residents seek to preserve neighborhood architectural charm through city designation, regulations

As growth and redevelopment inch closer, a North Oak Cliff neighborhood is seeking zoning regulations to conserve their community's charm.

The Stevens Park Village neighborhood is off Hampton Road, minutes from downtown Dallas.

Some residents fear its prime location will lure investors willing to tear down and build ‘inappropriate development.’

Resident Donovan Westover is leading the neighborhood committee exploring the designation of Stevens Park Village as a ‘Conservation District.’

“We’re in Oak Cliff, right on 30, we’re seconds from downtown. The land here gets more valuable every year and the land will eventually get more valuable than the small homes on it,” predicts Westover. “That’s when investors come in and they want size, because that’s how you get a return on your profits, you have to build homes. We’re just trying to stop the giant boxes from coming in added houses being demolished and being set into our neighborhood we want to maintain this feel.”

This is what neighbors like Trudy Newton want to protect.

She lives in a cottage built in 1941 with original wood floors, new solar panels and a backyard oasis full of native Texas flowers.

“I chose this area because of the architecture it reminded me so much of growing up in Nebraska,” she said.

Newton says her neighborhood with about 141 homes is “a mosaic” of charming 1940s minimal traditional and ranch-style homes worth protecting.

Westover and a group of residents have been rallying support to designate Stevens Park Village, a conservation district zone by the city of Dallas.

According to the city, a conservation district is a zoning district preserving an area’s physical attributes through additional development and architectural regulations.

The majority of homes in an interested neighborhood must be at least 25 years old.

The committee proposed boundaries representing the original subdivision as laid out in 1939 containing cottages primarily built before World War II in similar architectural styles, according to city documents.

Neighborhood committees are required to obtain at least 58% support from the impacted community through verified signatures.

They have one year to gather signatures.

Westover says they have secured well over the required signatures but will continue to go home to home explaining their effort with hopes of demonstrating a more united front to the city.

If enough signatures are verified by the city, the process will involve several neighborhood and city committee meetings before potentially going before the city council for a vote.

There are currently 8 Conservation Districts in Oak Cliff, out of a total of 18 districts, according to a city spokesperson.
King’s Highway, Kessler Park, Stevens Park, Bishop Arts/Eighth Street, North Cliff, Greiner, Page Avenue, and most recently South Winnetka Heights.

Not everyone is supportive of the effort, including Steven Shnayder and his wife Cinthia.

They moved to the neighborhood in 2021, especially because of the tree-lined streets and its proximity to downtown Dallas.

“From a basic property rights standpoint, conservation district is based purely on aesthetics,” said Shnayder. “It’s one person’s opinion on their aesthetic sensibility. One person likes one thing, another likes a different thing. Just fundamentally, it doesn’t make sense to me why someone who likes one thing is going to overrule another person who may have a different sense of esthetics.”

Shnayder says he supports preserving ‘beautiful buildings from the 17-or-1800s,’ but balks at the idea that even neighborhoods with 75% of homes built as late as 1999 could seek this designation.

“I just think people should have their property rights,” he said. “If they want to demolish a house and build a so-called McMansion they should be allowed to do so. I may not be super happy if one of my neighbors built one, but at the same time I don’t think it’s my right to do so.”

The Shnayders are also critical of the process of residents ‘blindly’ signing a petition without knowing what specific regulations the conservation district entails.

Per the city process, detailed regulations are to be sorted out in future neighborhood meetings.

“If I could get a written guarantee saying: the only thing we’re going to include in the conservation district is: we won’t allow three-story homes and we won’t allow the home to come up all the way to the curb, I would sign it immediately,” he said. “But because we don’t know what we’re signing that’ll be voted on after the fact, after the signatures are gathered.”

According to the city’s planning and development department, conservation districts seek to regulate everything from garage location, landscaping features, paint colors, and window size and locations.

The Stevens Park Village committee has told the city they are seeking less stringent regulations, specifically: protect architectural styles • ensure compatibility of materials used in remodeling and new construction • protect lot coverage • protect consistent setbacks • single-family land uses • regulate height of structures • regulate number of stories.

While the process may appear to mirror HOA regulations, Westover says it is not.

When asked to respond to critics who believe property owners should have the right to do what they deem fit for their own properties, Westover said:

“This is a democratic process, and anybody has the right to oppose it,” he said. “However, it is a democratic process, and we have the right to do this. The city says we do, and they’ve laid out all these rules, and that’s what we’ve been doing following the rules.”