CRITICAL MASS CRITICAL MASS

THE OLD “OAK CLIFF ‘OH’ ” IS OVER.

TELL A NORTHERN DALLASITE WHERE YOU LIVE THESE DAYS, and it’s more like, “Oh! I love Oak Cliff,” and then they say something about the Bishop Arts District and Bolsa.

Home prices in Oak Cliff are rising, and apartment builders are squeezing in space anyplace they can find it.

Back before 2008, developers sank their money into Downtown and Uptown. Now that the economy is turning around again, consumers still want urban living, but space in those neighborhoods is tight. More and more people want to live, shop, eat and work in Oak Cliff.

“There’s a lot of activity in West Dallas, Oak Cliff and parts east of Downtown,” City Councilman Scott Griggs says. “We want to preserve the character of Oak Cliff. The gateway zoning allows Oak Cliff to grow without losing its character.”

If city council approves the Oak Cliff Gateway plan, it will be one of the largest rezoning cases in the history of Dallas, applying new rules to nearly 900 acres of property around Methodist Dal- las Medical Center and Lake Cliff Park.

This isn’t the first time in recent history that a huge swath of our neighborhood has been put through rezoning. Just four years ago, city council approved the Bishop/Davis zoning, which rewrote the rules for 350 acres of property along the West Davis corridor from Zang to Montclair.

The Bishop/Davis zoning has helped expand the Bishop Arts District east toward Zang and west toward Tyler. But it also has caused some woes for preservationists, who rue the lack of architectural standards in the Bishop/Davis plan, and for neighbors, whose streets fill up with parked cars every weekend.

And so the new ubiquitous Oak Cliff saying goes, “We don’t want to be another Uptown.”

Overarching rezoning plans — and there are several more to come — are tools for neighbors to tell the city and developers what we want for our neighborhood. If we don’t want another Uptown, rezoning is one way to say so.

What did the Bishop/Davis zoning do?

THE BISHOP/DAVIS ZONING SET STANDARDS for building heights, architecture, and landscaping and building uses.

The Bishop Avenue corridor can have building heights of up to three stories. The distance from the building to the curb must be 20-25 feet, which the Old Oak Cliff Conservation League has said should be changed. The league argues that these “setbacks” should be about 5 feet greater so that the façades of new buildings line up with the façades of old homes and don’t visually overpower them. Office-only uses mistakenly were prohibited in the Bishop corridor, and the Oak Cliff Chamber of Commerce had to request a specific-use permit to open its new offices in a former doctor’s office.

The “East Garden District” is the site of a planned development from Farrokh Nazerian and his son, Michael. The zoning allows building heights up to five stories on Bishop and Zang and four stories otherwise. Accepted uses include apartments, duplexes, restaurants without drivethrough windows, convenience stores, parking lots, medical clinics and offices. The $100-million, two-phase Nazerian project as planned with apartments, parking, restaurants, shopping and offices with buildings as high as four stories, is allowed under the Bishop/Davis zoning. Commercial and industrial uses are prohibited in this residential district, but a restaurant without a drive-through could be allowed by permit adjacent to Kidd Springs Park.

Apartments, shops, restaurants without drive-through windows and offices are allowed in this area, where buildings can be as high as four stories.

Along the West Davis corridor, from Montclair to Polk, drive-though windows are expressly prohibited, along with tattoo, piercing and massage parlors. Buildings can be as high as three stories.

In these sections of the West Davis Corridor, buildings can be as high as five stories.

Along the West Davis corridor from Montclair to Plymouth, new buildings can be as high as five stories, unless they are directly adjacent to homes.

New restaurants with drive-throughs are expressly prohibited in this area, generally the Bishop Arts District, as well as tattoo, piercing and massage parlors. Buildings can be as high as three stories.