How 2025 Set the Course for South Dallas’ Future

A few years back, Tabitha Wheeler-Reagan began asking her neighbors why they leave South Dallas on Saturday mornings. The answers—breakfast, coffee, even groceries—were deceptively simple, because getting those things often required driving someplace else.

In a community not even three miles from downtown—why? From the office of her title company on Second Avenue, across from an entire block of grass-topped vacant lots, the plan commissioner for the City Council’s District 7 let loose in planning parlance, recalling a glossary of numbers and letters that denote zoning codes and restrictions. Whether you know what a “special use permit” is or can picture the physical space of 3,500 square feet, Wheeler-Reagan’s argument is easy enough to understand. She contends that the way the neighborhood is zoned has long made it very difficult to do business in the two ZIP codes that make up the nearly 20 neighborhoods inside South Dallas. The way that manifests? A lot of folks have to leave on a Saturday morning.

Wheeler-Reagan began discussions at community meetings with that question, the answers to which helped inform a new area plan the City Council adopted last June. At its core is loosening some of the rules inside what is known as Planned Development District 595, or PD 595, a special zoning district that, when it first passed in 2001, was partly designed as a cudgel against the liquor stores and shoddy gas stations that proliferated here.

“That’s not because those are the only things the community wants,” says Wheeler-Reagan. “It’s going to be because … there’s zoning issues, and nobody has come in and showed them other businesses.”

She sees the area plan as a way to introduce these other businesses. It recommends broadening zoning on certain streets to allow for the type of commercial development that once thrived in the many pre-war storefronts that currently sit vacant on Second Avenue.

It includes simple design standards for new homes—porch in the front, garage in the back, no more than two stories with a pitched roof and a small driveway—to avoid the taller, modernist housing that former council member and area plan task force member Diane Ragsdale describes as “grossly incompatible” with the homes already there. In other historically Black neighborhoods, most recently Elm Thicket near Love Field, similar giant, boxy homes and duplexes now tower over the older bungalows and Craftsmen, in part because the market moves faster than City Hall. 

Importantly, the plan also acknowledges the woeful infrastructure problems that have made it difficult for residents and business owners alike. One of its guiding principles is to overlay infrastructure investments around its target areas. “We’ve had folks who were interested in doing things, and once we started doing due diligence, they’re just like, ‘This stuff’s ridiculous,’” says Jason Brown, a South Dallas resident, area plan task force member, and president of the nonprofit developer Dallas City Homes. “I’ve got to go through a whole zoning change, and then I’ve got the infrastructure issue—the storm water drain is 300 yards away? It’s just not worth the squeeze.”  

City planners are trying to balance preservation with what appears to be inevitable growth—the median estimated home value jumped from $165,000 in 2022 to $221,000 in 2025—while creating more commercial opportunities for the people who live here. And a group of younger developers and volunteers is trying to ensure that the neighborhood benefits from what is coming, that South Dallas, and not just Fair Park, actually sees investment from its own increasing tax base.

Three things happened last year that will affect how South Dallas, a community of a little over 31,000 residents, grows. The area plan was one of them, a process that precedes and informs future zoning changes.

Council also finally amended the city’s ancient parking code, which was last touched nearly 60 years ago. The new rules draw a half-mile radius around transit stations; anything inside it will no longer be required to provide a certain number of parking spots based on things like bedrooms (previously one space per) or square footage. Estimates from various national studies price a single parking spot at between $5,000 and $10,000, if accounting for the land value.

DART’s three light rail stations that touch South Dallas mean that key commercial corridors are now free from such arbitrary parking calculations. (The area plan also recommends eliminating any parking requirements that aren’t covered by the half-mile radius near transit.) Wheeler-Reagan believes this will lower development costs that have hindered retail, restaurants, and other small businesses from opening here.

The third significant 2025 development is the new state law, Senate Bill 840, which makes it legal to build apartment buildings and mixed-use developments on areas zoned commercially. This is currently more of an existential concern, considering developers haven’t yet taken advantage of the new law. But a proposed 25-story tower that would eat up an entire block of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard—swatted down by the City Plan Commission in October—understandably put many residents on edge.

“There’s going to be a lot of development that happens specifically down in and around Fair Park,” says Scottie Smith II, a developer and community volunteer who chaired the area plan’s task force. “I’m really nervous that the development that happens won’t necessarily benefit the community like folks expect or anticipate.”

Last fall, Council member Adam Bazaldua decided the way forward included a Public Improvement District, or a PID, which levies a special tax to create a fund that can only be spent within its boundaries. At 15 cents per $100 valuation, or about $450 a year for a home valued at $300,000, this new tax is not pennies. The PID is limited by state law to pay for things like public safety, landscaping, marketing, and infrastructure. Bazaldua tapped Smith to stand it up. 

“It’s important for the community to see that the whole intent of this is to give them results of something tangible,” Bazaldua says. “They need to feel like something that they wanted to see happen is happening because of these dollars designated to it.” 

The Sunny South Dallas PID would include about 1,300 properties—most commercial, but some residential—in an area bounded by Interstate 30 to the north, Washington Street to the east, Botham Jean Boulevard, the road that connects South Dallas and the Cedars, to the west, and terminating south at Pennsylvania and Fitzhugh avenues. It captures historic residential areas like South Boulevard/Park Row and Jeffries-Meyers; Smith is negotiating with the city to include a carve-out so residents with a 65 and older exemption won’t have to pay the assessment but would still receive the public benefits.

There are currently 13 PIDs operating in the city of Dallas, in busier neighborhoods like downtown, Uptown, and Deep Ellum as well as more residential communities like Lake Highlands and Far East Dallas.

If the PID is approved, Smith anticipates generating $410,000 in the first year and between $8.5 million and $10 million over a decade. Most of the property tax here comes from properties owned by about 100 people and entities, Smith says. “And most of those, I’d say 90 percent, don’t live in South Dallas.” That’s why he believes it’s so important for the neighborhood to have a mechanism to capture some of the future growth in property tax revenue.

That growth isn’t hard to find. Near Fair Park, at Ash Lane and Second Avenue, Larkspur Capital has planned a 292-unit mixed-income apartment complex called The Dahl, named for Fair Park architect George Dahl. Two miles south, on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, the old Forest Theater is wrapped in scaffolding as the nonprofit Forest Forward nears completion of the redevelopment later this year. (That will include a Starbucks, run by a local operator, which the nonprofit says was the most popular cafe request from residents.)

S.M. Wright freeway, also known as U.S. 175, is no longer an elevated barrier that slices MLK; the Texas Department of Transportation is turning it into a boulevard, one that city leaders hope will lead to more pedestrian access to the street-friendly retail envisioned for the adjacent boulevard. MLK received $22 million in federal funds to help with its infrastructure. And the City Council last week assumed oversight from the Park and Recreation Board of a planned $39 million community park at Fair Park, which will replace an expanse of parking near Fitzhugh Avenue and Lagow Street on the 277-acre campus’ east side. 

Those are a lot of headlines for a part of Dallas that is still dealing with poor police response times, an ongoing challenge with homelessness, and a lack of sidewalks, water and sewer lines, drainage, and Internet access. “In some cases, this is because that infrastructure was not maintained,” the area plan reads, “in other cases it was because that infrastructure was never developed.” 

But that reality isn’t stopping modern homes from going up on Pennsylvania Avenue or attention from development firms like Larkspur—which says it “seeks to activate urban renewal in transitional neighborhoods by building innovative projects that disrupt existing development standards”—from betting on the future.

All this investment will certainly juice the tax base, but that money flows back to City Hall and the school district then goes out everywhere. The PID would help supplement investments in South Dallas, be that by paying for additional police patrols or addressing some of the infrastructure issues.

Smith sees the PID helping address “the nonsense that happens up and down our streets, especially our business corridors. When folks see that there’s care in an area, they don’t do things,” he says.

The earliest the PID would be active is 2028. Smith says he missed the Feb. 1 deadline going back and forth with the city over whether elderly homeowners could be exempted from the assessment. (They will be, he says.) He’ll need petitions approved by either 50 percent of the owners or support equal to 50 percent of the value in the area or the total land area. Bazaldua is also attempting to get the city to change its policy to agree to self-assess Fair Park and other land in the area then also pay into the PID. Currently, the city uses this calculation on property it owns downtown for the Downtown Dallas Inc. PID.

There is still much to determine, like PID board governance; Smith envisions 21 to 25 members who represent all property types within its boundaries. He has promised monthly meetings that would be open to the public and views the board as another way to hold the city accountable for responding to 311 and other service requests. The PID will be run by an executive director, who draws a salary. Smith says he is confident he will gather enough support in order to have the PID up and running by 2028. “The residents want a mechanism like this,” he says. 

Still, in a community like South Dallas—with a median income of less than $32,000, where the school district is the largest employer, and which has watched for years as other neighborhoods received far more attention from City Hall—a PID can seem like a second tax just to get basic services. Some longtime residents haven’t shied away from voicing these concerns. “I would have to agree with them,” Smith says. “The city should be providing South Dallas, as a whole, the basic services that we deserve and that we already pay for. The PID isn’t designed to take over the function of city government and city services, but it is designed to enhance what the city is doing.” 

The new PID effort will have to overcome resistance because of how poorly this idea worked in the past. A prior PID raised a fraction of what Smith’s proposes—and wound up dissolving after its money vanished, tax dollars in the wind. If you want your neighbors to agree to pay more taxes, you need something to show for it. And the prior PID didn’t, a failure blamed on mismanagement and poorly-drawn geographic boundaries that failed to capture enough tax revenue. 

“If you’re gonna put us in the PID, show us what you’re doing for us so we feel like we’re being served too,” says Hank Lawson, the founder of the Pointe South Revitalization Committee, and a longtime South Dallas resident who helped lead a campaign to kill a prior PID. “That PID, being so underfunded and poorly structured, was gonna be a problem to begin with.”

Lawson contends that the neighborhood’s issues are deeper than what extra police patrols can provide. And his concern is one shared by legacy residents in neighborhoods like this one all over Dallas—they stuck it out when things weren’t so bright, and they want to be able to afford to stay.  

“Our property values at Park Row/South Boulevard have damn near doubled in the last two years,” says Lawson. “Housing is about to get out of reach for the people who live here now. Everything you build is going to be for people with the capacity to live here.”

Indeed, the neighborhood is changing.

Brown, 38, the Dallas City Homes president, grew up in the Queen City neighborhood and moved back to South Dallas after college. After finishing renovations on his South Boulevard home in 2018, he would host friends from other neighborhoods for dinner. “You gotta give people an opportunity to experience a city,” he says. “Over the last 20 years, a lot of the new housing that was put in was heavily subsidized. So you only got one side of people who got a chance to experience South Dallas.”

Brown remembers his first Halloween in the neighborhood in 2018, when there were maybe five or six kids trick-or-treating. “It’s like 50 kids now, under the age of 10,” he says. “People want to love South Dallas—no, people love South Dallas.”

South Dallas’ many nonprofit institutions and churches have spent decades addressing the economic and housing challenges by acquiring land, making investments, and pursuing housing and commercial opportunities. The city, in many ways, is new to this game, but has entered at a critical time. A neighborhood with significant needs—better city services and infrastructure, at least—is poised for significant growth. 

“The neighborhood’s been saying, ‘We’re not against development, we just want it to be done responsibly,’” Brown says. “Do things that fit the mold, the fabric of the neighborhood.”

The area plan has mapped out that path. But as the discussion around the PID has proven, its success will also be determined by what level of public investment follows.

Matt Goodman is the co-founder and editor of The Lab Report. [email protected].

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