CRITICAL MASS THE TIMELINE continued

November 2013

Scott Griggs wins re-election in the newly drawn Dallas City Council District 1. His campaign promises to move forward on the Oak Cliff Gateway.

March 2014

The Oak Cliff Chamber of Commerce plans to buy a former doctor’s office on North Bishop for its own offices but finds the Bishop/Davis zoning doesn’t allow for office-only uses. People who worked on the Bishop/Davis zoning said that the office prohibition was a mistake and that they didn’t know how it made it to the final version.

May 2014

STOCK & BARREL opens in the old Safety Glass Co. building. The stretch of West Davis between Zang and Bishop started filling out this year with restaurants including Pier 247 and Cretia’s. Those places would be infeasible without the decreased parking requirements of the Bishop/Davis zoning.

July 2014

A city staff-authored OAK CLIFF GATEWAY PLAN goes to the city plan commission. Gateway committee members object to the plan, saying their years of work on the plan, as well as the Good Fulton & Farrell study, had been ignored. The plan calls for the zoning case to be reopened and reviewed five years after it is approved.

April 2014

February 2014

Oak Cliff residents Kacy and Dana Jones announce their plans to renovate the circa-1922 CANNON’S VILLAGE SHOPPING CENTER on West Davis at Edgefield, which they had bought in December. The Joneses are renovating the ground-floor retail spaces and converting the second story into two apartments, where they plan to live. The building has no designated parking spaces, which made the historic building almost impossible to use for a shop or restaurant before the Bishop/ Davis zoning.

Bishop Arts developer Jim Lake Cos. breaks ground on its renovation of the Jefferson Tower. Restaurants and apartments are set to open there soon.

May 2014

Cienda Partners buys the Oak Farms Dairy plant and adjacent Burnett Field with plans to resell the site to a developer who would build residences, shops, restaurants, offices and parking.

June 2014

In its “architecture at-risk list,” the Old Oak Cliff Conservation League points to the Magnolia at Bishop apartments, constructed after the Bishop/Davis rezoning, as an example of the plan’s lack of architectural standards.

August 2014

GRIGGS says that he is working on a transportation plan for the Gateway and that he intends to move the overall plan through city council by the end of the year.

September 2014

Real Estate developer Farrokh Nazerian and his son, Michael, announce a $40 million plan to redevelop 32 parcels between Bishop Arts and the Jefferson Tower into shops, restaurants and apartments with an underground parking garage.

WHY IS PARKING SUCH A PROBLEM IN BISHOP ARTS?

ON A TYPICAL WEEKEND, cars swarm the residential neighborhoods surrounding the Bishop Arts District, vying for spaces that are close to trendy restaurants.

“You just wouldn’t believe how many cars are parked on a Sunday afternoon,” says Pam Conley of the Kidd Springs Neighborhood Association.

The first time Bishop Arts was booming, in the 1930s, parking was hardly needed since a streetcar ran right through it.

Our neighborhood just wasn’t built to accommodate parked cars.

Around the mid-1950s, cities began putting suburban-style rules on old commercial districts, requiring businesses to have a certain number of parking spaces based on square footage.

When developers and upstarts tried to use old buildings in the 1970s and ’80s, strict parking requirements often prevented them from opening.

“It’s often parking that freezes things,” says real estate developer David Spence of Good Space.

That’s why the Bishop/Davis ordinance made exceptions for parking requirements for use of old buildings. The Bishop/Davis ordinance specifies by address the 50 or so buildings that are considered “legacy” in the Bishop and West Davis corridors. Restaurants, shops and offices housed in legacy buildings are not required to have any off-street parking under the Bishop/ Davis ordinance.

Take the Cannon’s Village shopping center at West Davis at Edgefield. New owners are renovating the 1922 shopping center, one of the oldest commercial buildings west of Zang. They’re planning a coffee shop or restaurant on the ground floor with residences on the second floor.

Since Cannon’s Village has no parking lot — who had a car in 1922? — it would have been impossible to use as a restaurant or shop under the city’s parking rules.

The parking situation is uncomfortable at best for some residential neighbors of Bishop Arts. Some question whether there should be a limit on how many restaurants, which cause the most parking demand, are allowed to be adjacent to homes.

But parking abatements are necessary, especially in old neighborhoods, if we want “small, locally clustered, walkable commercial development at the neighborhood scale,” as urban planner Jason Roberts puts it.

HOW DO WE FIX THE PARKING PROBLEM?

THE PARKING SITUATION IN BISHOP ARTS is unlikely to improve on its own.

Aside from Oak Cliffers and northern Dallasites who want to park their cars, some 3,000 upscale apartments are planned in West Dallas. Will all those young professionals ride their bikes uphill to Bishop Arts? Maybe sometimes. More likely, Sunday brunches and Saturday date nights will only bring more and more cars to our neighborhood.

When the Oak Cliff streetcar opens next year, it will run right through the Oak Cliff Gateway into Bishop Arts, connecting the two neighborhoods and offering a new public transportation option. While the free D-Link shuttle will continue running at least for one more year, the streetcar is scheduled to run only from 7 a.m.-7 p.m. Monday-Friday, so it won’t alleviate night and weekend parking in Bishop Arts.

An informal survey of politicians, real estate developers and neighbors on how to solve the parking problem in Bishop Arts revealed two solutions.

1. Build a parking garage If the land could be found and purchased, and a proposal made it past the nimbys and naysayers, who would pay for it? Parking garages are very expensive to build. City Plan Commissioner Mike Anglin suggests