Has Oak Cliff’s Deck Park Won the Trust of Its Neighbors?

You can’t help feeling on top of the world, a world of great promise, while standing on the skywalk of the almost-completed Halperin Park, which spans Interstate 35E. The nearly 3-acre deck park symbolically reconnects Oak Cliff neighborhoods ripped apart decades ago by the highway below. Surrounding you is a collection of first-class amenities—a promenade with markers planned to honor local history-makers, a children’s “rain curtain” and playground, as well as a band shell, large lawn, and multipurpose building.

Just beyond the park’s borders, the limestone-marked topography of rolling trees that distinguishes this part of Dallas unfurls for miles toward the concrete, glass, and steel of Fair Park, the downtown skyline, and the Margaret Hunt Hill and Margaret McDermott bridges. This high perch offers a breathtaking panorama, a patchwork of rooftops peeking through a verdant gateway of green that sweeps in all directions to the imposing iconic landmarks.

The view is also an uncomfortable reminder of Halperin Park’s greatest challenge. It bears the weight of the mistrust southern Dallas has long felt—with good reason, given the economic and quality-of-life injustices it has suffered—toward establishment Dallas. As the park’s spring opening nears, its relationship with many neighbors remains complicated and, at times, difficult in a part of the city challenged by poverty but bolstered by strong communities of committed residents.

When April Allen, president and CEO of the Southern Gateway Public Green Foundation, took charge of the park project five years ago, she pledged to stay focused on its neighbors. Allen understands and acknowledges their hesitancy to embrace Halperin Park. Having lived in Oak Cliff for more than two decades, she knows the myriad disparities—commercial development, street and sidewalk repair, code violations—that still plague many of the neighborhoods that are visible from the skywalk. 

“Have we cracked the code to win over everyone?” she says. “No, and I get that. There have been a lot of broken promises to these communities.” 

Allen knows proof is in action, which means finishing the park and ensuring its programming benefits the people who live around it. Until then, amid fundraising and construction details, she and her tiny staff, which only this month expanded to five, do their best to set neighbors’ minds at ease. But she realizes social media updates and announcements about community meetings don’t reach everyone. 

“I would give us maybe a ‘B’ on the community-focused communications these last few years,” Allen says. “When the park opens, that's where people will really see the intentionality in a real way.”

On this toasty last day of September, Allen walks through the park, dodging the army of construction workers. She is joined by Dr. Slavoski Wright, senior pastor of Greater El Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, and the church’s business manager, Keldrick McKinney. The men, whose church is less than a mile northeast, contacted Allen a few weeks earlier with concerns from their 250 or so congregants. 

During the presentation and tour, Wright and McKinney applaud the park’s amenities but don’t hold back with their questions: How will you keep the park safe? Halperin will have its own security team, led by a full-time director. It will patrol 24 hours a day to ensure a safe environment for everyone. The team also will work closely with law enforcement regarding security concerns. What about property taxes going up? The park will continue to provide workshops to help homeowners take advantage of all possible exemptions. Allen also hasn’t given up on persuading state legislators to support policy changes that could ease tax burdens.

Will visitors overrun our streets in search of parking? The Dallas Zoo’s new parking garage will free up surface spaces that Halperin hopes to use. The park also is working on other nearby options. Will the homeless individuals who gather near the highway get pushed into our neighborhoods? Allen’s team will coordinate with Dallas City Hall and the police department to ensure the homeless don’t simply move farther east. 

Allen has done hundreds of tours like this one since 2023, when the Texas Department of Transportation finished the concrete deck on which the park sits. “Usually when we talk, there’s a change of heart among those who have hesitancy,” she says.

Oak Cliff residents raised the idea of an I-35 deck park during community meetings a decade ago, not long after Klyde Warren Park opened over Woodall Rodgers Freeway. In 2016, the City Council gave the OK for the state transportation department to build the deck infrastructure as part of its reconstruction of I-35 south of downtown. 

As far back as those first meetings, while the majority of neighborhoods on the proposed park’s west side embraced the idea, opinions were split on the east. The same sentiments emerged repeatedly during my week of interviews in the neighborhoods around Halperin Park, with east-side viewpoints mostly fluctuating between residents hesitant to embrace the project and those cautiously optimistic. 

A drive through the Oak Cliff neighborhoods within a two-mile radius of Halperin provides a sense of why attitudes likely differ. To the west, while there are still many pockets of blue-collar streets made up of small white-frame cottages with the occasional brick structure, developments like the Bishop Arts District and new homeowners in neighborhoods such as Winnetka Heights and Kidd Springs have already changed the community’s face. Still intact is the bustling Latino community exemplified by the quinceañera shops, taquerias, and art galleries on Jefferson Boulevard. The east side has its share of thriving single-family brick-home neighborhoods such as in Cedar Crest, but most of its streets are a scramble of modest homes and the occasional narrow modernist new builds.

Most everyone agrees that amenities like the park improve a neighborhood’s quality of life. Younger residents, new businesses, and people with financial means appear to be most excited about Halperin. They rave about having a safe place to walk their dogs and a public spot to sit, read, and relax. Oak Cliff longtimers, especially those whose income is low or who have a friend or loved one in that boat, are queasy about higher property values leading to oppressive tax bills. No one doubts that change is here—new homes were sprouting long before park construction began—so the challenge for established residents is to preserve what makes their neighborhoods special.

Shania Wilhite, 26, is an Oak Cliff native who lives with a roommate in the Tenth Street Historic District, one of the neighborhoods closest to the park, a hodgepodge of wood-frame bungalows, shotgun-style houses, vacant lots, and new homes like Wilhite’s. She bought here because she loves Tenth Street’s history as a Freedmen’s Town; her home’s design resembles the architecture of the area’s original long and narrow shotgun houses, many of which have fallen into disrepair. The proximity to I-35 also makes it an easy drive to Wilhite's job as an events manager. 

She can’t wait for Halperin Park to open. “We don't have a lot of sidewalks or street lamps, so for me, the walkability with the park’s location is a big deal,” she says. “Being able to walk to a park that’s so close, even if I’m just walking in a circle there with my dog, feeling protected sounds very nice.”

Wilhite, a member of the Tenth Street Neighborhood Association, shares the concern that owners of older homes are facing heavy property tax burdens. “But it’s so much more than the park that’s changing,” she says. “I just hope the park is good for the current residents in the neighborhood and in the future.”

Developer AJ Ramler, 37, who restores old homes and commercial buildings in Oak Cliff, has two projects close to Halperin Park. He began buying property when the idea of a park over I-35 was more dream than reality. Ramler lived in the Tenth Street area before moving to West Dallas, and he expects the park won’t alter the neighborhood but rather “will show the rest of the world what the neighborhood already is.”

Ramler says his Proxy Properties “listens and tries to make sure we're representing the current fabric of the neighborhood and not changing it.” For instance, before his team began the restoration of East Dock, a former ice factory and book manufacturing site on Clarendon Drive, they listened to residents about what was missing from their neighborhood. “Food and coffee” was the top response. When this new small business hub—within walking distance of the Dallas Zoo and Halperin Park—opens, its tenants will include Oak Cliff’s Kuluntu Bakery and two restaurants.

Like Allen, Ramler notes increased property valuations help homeowners build generational wealth, but he’s sensitive to the reality that taxes can create an impossible burden. “There are a lot of layers to gentrification,” he says. “One thing most neighbors can agree about is we would like to have parks. We would like to have better streets. We would like to have lower crime.” 

Daymond Lavine, 48, founded and leads the Brentwood Trinity Heights Community Action Group, established in 2023 to represent a swath of east-side neighborhoods between Clarendon and East Illinois Avenue. Lavine also is one of the newest members to Halperin Park’s community advisory council.

An engineer from Louisiana, Lavine moved to Arlington for his job in 2004 and in 2021 relocated to the home he built near DART’s Morrell Station, half a mile from the Dallas Zoo. Lavine knew the park was in the works when he bought his land in 2015 and saw it as an exciting opportunity. Once he moved in, he realized many of his neighbors see things differently. Lavine describes them as feeling disconnected, or worse, overlooked.

Predictably, Lavine says, opinions are tied to financial means. Some residents tell him they are jazzed about Halperin and the possibility of an increase in their home values. Others suspect new development and higher taxes will push them out—which they say is “about what they think they can expect from Dallas.”

Lavine wants to see Allen’s park team improve communication, which he describes as “a large gaping hole” in its efforts. The park has done a good job being intentional with selecting its amenities, he says. “But sometimes you forget to communicate to people on the outside all of the details about that intentional work.”

Regardless of how many community meetings were held prior to construction, Lavine says he hears from people who feel the park “almost certainly isn’t for them. You have to have a concerted effort to see them, meet them where they are and bring them along the way on the journey.”

Among those neighbors who feel disconnected from the new park is Tisha Crear, whose Recipe Oak Cliff vegan restaurant is south of the zoo. Several customers picking up their orders one recent Friday afternoon share her concerns. Crear, 54, was born and raised in Oak Cliff. She earned a theater degree from New York University then chose to return home to try to improve her community.

She opened her restaurant in 2017 partly because she wanted to demonstrate the economic opportunities in revitalizing abandoned spaces. “My goal was to show people within the community there was a way to develop, instead of stuff developing over them and pushing them out.” She pauses only a second before adding, “That eventually will happen, you know, because that's just how it goes in Dallas.”

Crear isn’t opposed to Halperin Park—she is passionate about anything that will help the area—but she says she’s heard almost nothing about the project. While that strikes her as hardly the actions of a new amenity seeking to be inclusive, Crear notes she has been mostly focused on her business, especially since the pandemic. “I just wish that I was a little bit more involved in what it’s [the park’s] doing.”

She expects the new park could bring more business to her restaurant, which is about a mile south of Halperin. But that’s not as important to her as what she sees as the potential loss “of the beautiful people and families inside of this neighborhood.”

“Health and wealth,” Candi Clifton chimes in to the conversation as she picks up her juice order. Clifton supports the park and loves that it will beautify the neighborhood, “but in this community, we need health and wealth. I hope the park can help with that.” 

Crear’s resume of work reflects an indomitable woman: The opening of Reciprocity, a beloved poetry spot and health food co-op on Tyler Street; arts-related work with Dallas ISD; and years with the city of Dallas in what was then called the cultural affairs office. Yet today she often feels defeated. Her dream of more home-grown small businesses sprouting has dissolved into fears about development pushing people out.  

“I just pray this park and the changes it brings is done with some integrity,” she says. “Not just kind of waiting for people to hurry up and die off or be pushed out because of poverty.”

Located east of Brentwood Trinity Heights and Crear’s restaurant, Cedar Crest is among the neighborhoods that seems most positive about the park. Everardo Amaya, a 34-year-old management analyst with the city of Dallas and member of the Cedar Crest Neighborhood Association, says both his job and volunteer work have dropped him into the hot middle of disagreements and communication breakdowns between big projects and their neighbors. Those experiences led him to take a seat on the Halperin Park community advisory council a few months ago.

He’s watched stakeholders on other projects meet repeatedly but fail to take the information to the neighbors they are supposed to represent. Conversely, he’s heard people say “I never heard about this,” after informational flyers are placed in their mailboxes and announcements are pushed out on social media.

Amaya says Cedar Crest residents are eager to be a part of Halperin Park because, even though they will have to drive to get there—no trail yet connects them with the amenity—they think of it as “our own Klyde Warren Park.” 

When Amaya talks to people who live closer to the park, they are more likely to focus on their fears about property taxes going up or development overrunning their neighborhoods. “There’s no getting around the history of the lack of investment from developers and government here,” he says. Amaya tries to explain to worried neighbors that the affordability of housing is a problem that exists whether Halperin Park is built or not. “I hope that one day people can look back, beyond their general mistrust, and see the good that can come from development like the deck park.”

On the west side of I-35, Claudia Vega, 47, a small business owner in Oak Cliff who participated in a Halperin tour earlier this year, says everyone she talks with is excited and curious about the park. She says she’s heard no concerns—whether from friends and family or customers at her Whose Books shop in Bishop Arts. “We can’t wait to see it and to have something like Klyde Warren here” is the common sentiment.

Vega, who lives near Kidd Springs Park, says the park leadership’s emphasis on community programming is reassuring. “That promise, that this is for us, matters,” she says. 

Back at Halperin Park, as Allen slips off the protective gear required to walk inside the construction site and prepares for a fundraising meeting, she reminds me that she relishes being in the underdog role. Once the park opens, “the rubber will meet the road,” she says, “in terms of, ‘Are we really doing what we committed to as it relates to ensuring people feel we created a space that is for us, not for visitors passing through?’”

She ticks off ideas: Mobile health screenings and mammograms, vaccinations and physicals for school-age kids, an education director on staff to coordinate with area schools on curriculum and homework, and the continuation of financial literacy workshops for adults.

“Maybe I’m a bridge,” she says, “between the history of bad outcomes that shouldn’t be forgotten and charting a new course. Can we write a new chapter?”

The next Halperin Park community meeting will be at 6 p.m. Oct. 29 at the Oak Cliff Cultural Center. Sign up here to RSVP.

Sharon Grigsby is the co-founder and senior writer of The Lab Report. [email protected].

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