2023 ANNUAL COMMUNITY GUIDE
UPDATE IN THE WORKS City sta hope to bring the nal updates to the nearly decade-old plan by the fall.
Expected City Council approval: ForwardDallas would be used to guide future decisions.
Work on updating ForwardDallas begins: The comprehensive plan will help guide future land-use decisions in Dallas.
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2021
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2023
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ForwardDallas rst adopted: Since ForwardDallas was adopted, ve of its seven elements have been updated.
City sta begin hosting update workshops: At workshops hosted around the city, residents provide input.
Expected release of updated draft: City sta will seek additional resident feedback.
SOURCE: CITY OF DALLAS COMMUNITY IMPACT
which impact many aspects of daily life,” Ridley said. “This includes whether there are enough housing options where you’d like to live, whether there are viable employ- ment opportunities near you, how long it takes you to get to work or shopping, and whether you have access to parks.” The city of Dallas began expand- ing east toward White Rock Lake with the annexation of East Dallas in 1889—40 years before the city would adopt its rst zoning policy. The city’s limits would not reach the Audelia area until the 1980s, accord- ing to the ForwardDallas’ Existing Conditions Report. The largest type of land-use in the northeast sec- tion of the city that encompasses the Lakewood and Lake Highlands areas is transportation, followed by single-family detached housing and public open space, per the report. Gilles said the ForwardDallas plan adopted in 2006 speci cally stated that it was not to be used as a land- use plan, adding that the update will provide more of an implementation component. That will allow it to be a “big-picture” guide for future zoning
guide to provide vision and predict- ability, which leads to “piecemeal” developments that do not consider the neighborhood or city as a whole. Dallas is one of the fastest-grow- ing cities in the country, according to an American Growth Project report, which noted that nearly 100,000 people moved to the area from June 2020-July 2021. By the 2030s, the population of the Dallas-Fort Worth area is expected to reach more than 10 million, making it the third-larg- est metro area in the U.S., according to a Rice University report. “Through this planning e ort, we want to be more thoughtful and stra- tegic about where new development goes in the future, so we can respond appropriately with the necessary infrastructure and public resources,” Gilles said. Through the spring, city sta plan to continue to gather feedback on the ForwardDallas update through community meetings and via an online portal where residents can leave area-speci c comments. Some of those comments in the Lake Highlands area include requests to develop the Northlake Shopping
decisions providing predictability. Agu said that will bene t residents by helping them know which types of developments can be built in their neighborhoods and helping alleviate congestion in the city’s permitting and zoning pipeline by letting devel- opers know what types of proposals t in di erent areas. “[ForwardDallas] is going to deter- mine how our city looks 20 years from now,” Blackmon said. Gilles said the goal of the land-use update is to create “complete places,” or areas where residents have easy access to amenities, such as gro- cery stores, restaurants, schools and parks—something both Blackmon and Ridley said they would like to see more of in their districts. “I think the pandemic actually allowed more people to realize that they have … poor access to trails,” Blackmon said. “I think people real- ize ‘I can walk or bike to X,’ so they
Center into housing. Comments in the Lakewood area include calls for improving the infrastructure around White Rock Lake. “We don’t necessarily have a long history of land-use planning,” Gilles said. ”We want to make sure that people feel engaged in the process, understand what it means to have a comprehensive plan, understand what the place types mean, and give people the space to ask questions and provide us feedback.” City sta expect to begin to pro- duce a draft map of land-use after wrapping up its initial series of work- shops in the spring. After that, there will be more feedback meetings with the hope of taking a nal draft to City Council for approval in the fall. “[District 9] has not seen a big, big push in new development in the last 20 years,” Blackmon said. “I think it’s because, like any city, you start in the downtown core and you work out. I think the next phase is to come into the northeast Dallas area.”
want safer passage.” Driving Dallas’ future
Gilles said the ForwardDallas update comes zoning cases are back- logged due to not having a land-use
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LAKE HIGHLANDS LAKEWOOD EDITION • JANUARY 2023
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