Michael Davis
Rad Field
                             

07/20/06  Control Freaks out of Control

It's ironic that so much is going on just now involving old houses, and neighborhoods and a bunch of outsiders trying to control someone else's property.

Dallas Observer's Jim Schutze had an hilarious blog about his neighborhood war related to an old, non-repairable house that needs to be demolished and replaced. 

UnFair Park:  Hell House Filed under: Schutze 7/18/06

Oh boy. The Hatfields is loaded up, and them McCoys got blood in their eyes too. This is when I really love my neighborhood.    I live down the block from a house?6015 Bryan Parkway?included on Preservation Dallas? list of the city?s 11 most endangered historic sites. It?s an early 20th-century wood-sided two-story house of an architectural style I call Prairie P.U.eee!, which is what all of our houses were in the 1970s before we became historic and genteel. Let me not bore you with the stories of how we did it: Our sagas are all the same money-pit tales of woe. If Julius Caesar were telling it, he would say, ?I came; I was a sucker; for some reason I stayed.?    But 6015 never got fixed. It looks like hell. The floors are rotted out, and there is cat doo-doo galore. That?s what every house on our block was like 25 years ago, but the newcomers don?t know that. Maybe their realtors forgot to tell them.    About three years ago a Plano couple who are developers bought 6015 to tear down and replace it with a new house. Some neighbors were overjoyed, because they?re sick of it looking bad. Others, especially the ones who fought for 30 years to save the original architecture of the neighborhood, were horrified. Anyway, the whole thing wound up in court, where it has been for three years. Now it looks as if the dispute is about to come either to a resolution or a new level of crisis. Last week the tear-it-downers won in a lower court, but the don?t-tear-it-downers took it to the appeals court and won an extension of the injunction against demolition.    The night of the lower court ruling, somebody bashed in the downstairs windows. A big utility fence went up around the house a couple days later. Dwayne Jones of Preservation Dallas could tell me only that the fence is ?part of a settlement,? but that the settlement is not a final solution.    There were two July 4th picnics on the block, one for the tear-it-downers and the other for the don?ts. Of course we went to the wrong one. I tried to smooth everybody out by saying I personally supported the owners? legal right to deal with their property as they saw fit, but that I probably would stand in front of the bulldozers just because I get off on civil disobedience. I got no laughs?not even a tiny little creaky crack of a smile. I mean, people stared at me like I was something bad on the lawn. And maybe I am.    A tear-it-downer recently addressed a don?t tear-it-downer on the block as ?Lard-ass,? the one epithet that probably applies equally to most of the people on both sides. So maybe that?s a good thing, a sign we can agree on something? Nah, I didn?t think so either.    Anyway, the whole thing is coming to a head soon, any day now, and I mean to keep you posted. And remember this: He who forgets his history is condemned to live in it. ?Jim Schutze

It's really funny how people who have to live with a giant piece of garbage on their street are willing to lose a little history for the sake of the quality of their lives and their own property value.  Not every old structure is salvageable or worth saving.  As my friend, Nancy Weinberger, has often said "If you want to save an old house, buy it." 

Rather than living in a new home that could have been built in 3 to 6 months, the owners of the Historic Dump have been in court for three years because Preservation Dallas and the other Preservation Nazis are flexing their muscles to prove that "they" are the real owners of the Historic Dump and the titled owners just get to pay for it.

More on the Historic Dump Filed under: Schutze  7/19/06

Look for a story tonight on WFAA-Channel 8 about 6015 Bryan Parkway, one of Dallas?s 11 most endangered dumps?oh, I?m sorry, I meant to say historic sites that I blogged about yesterday.  My snitches tell me Byron Harris was down there this morning interviewing folks. I blogged about how somebody smashed in the windows. No one knows who did it, but my personal theory is that it was a drunk middle-class white person. We have a big problem with them in Old East Dallas. So it?s obvious: WFAA?s chasing Unfair Park on this. ?Jim Schutze

I love old stuff.  I'm just devastated that we may lose our historic viaducts that were built in 1912.  Have you heard a peep out of the Preservation Nazis about the loss to the city that will come from having those beautiful structures demolished to make way for those ugly string thing bridges?

Preservation Dallas knows who butters their bread.  The Preservation Nazi's are not about to challenge the projects that most of their high-dollar donors so desperately want.  So, they stand by silently while City Hall makes plans to demolish bridges that are almost 100 years old, but they are raising a control freak's ruckus over a dilapidated old house that came from a Sears-Roebuck catalog?

	Battle rages over 'historic' home Wednesday, July 19, 2006 By BYRON HARRIS / WFAA-TV
DALLAS - What is the difference between an historic landmark and a decrepit old house? A lawyer.    That's a neighborhood joke making the rounds in one of Dallas' historic districts near Swiss Avenue. The humor rises from a long standing legal battle over an old home, between its owners, who want to tear it down, and preservationists who want to save it.    When Sharon Wyly and her husband first saw the vintage home she wanted to rehabilitate it. Early on, she says she found out just how impossible that would be. ... She approached foundation contractors to fix the home, only to find some who refused to do it, saying repair was impossible. After years of neglect, the roof leaked by the bucketful. The second floor was concave and it was infested; the neighbors already knew that.    ?I can't feed my dogs outside without the rats coming. And you think I'm kidding? I'm not,? said one resident.    Some nearby families? kids play in the neighborhood. They say their children are endangered by the house, which was falling down before the Wylys bought it. And they say preservationists have hijacked the legal process. ... ?We don't want the house kept up. We want the house torn down. We've seen the Wyly's plans, and we feel the property owners have the right to make that decision,? said Jenifer McSpadden. ... Their opponents say it should be preserved. A search through archives shows the home is really a 1920 Sears Roebuck home kit, called the Chesterton. ... This house has been slated for destruction three times, and each time that's been postponed because of a legal action. A legal action now has the case before the Court of Appeals. The Court of Appeals will decide if it will hear the case within the next month.

Property owners do have a right to make decisions about their property.  If it is cost-prohibitive or even impossible (as in the case of the Historic Dump) to make an old house habitable, then the Preservation Nazis should back off.  Many neighbors who have invested in Bryan Parkway want the Historic Dump demolished and replaced, but the Preservation Nazis know best and could care less about mundane matters like what the neighborhood wants or whether the house could ever be repaired to even minimal City Code standards. 

For almost 30 years, I lived in a neighborhood between Oak Lawn and Turtle Creek.  Part of that time, I was a tenant in an apartment building, but I then purchased two condos in a next door building where I lived for almost 20 years.  There were some great prairie style houses on Hood Street and Gillespie and some interesting small apartment buildings.  The late architect Bud Oglesby purchased almost all of them to hold for redevelopment as high-rise multi-family.  He let the houses and the apartment buildings get run down through lack of maintenance, and code enforcement was non-existent.  As the houses deteriorated under his lack of stewardship, the type of tenants he imposed on the neighborhood got steadily worse.  We went from interesting eccentrics living in his properties, to real scum bags.

Those houses could have been saved, but Preservation Dallas never voiced one concern, because it was "Bud Oglesby" victimizing our neighborhood.

That's the thing with Preservation Nazis, they never challenge bad decisions made by their friends and benefactors.

David Webb of the Dallas Voice called me a few days ago to tell me that Dr. Barris had sold his mother's home, and it was likely to be demolished due to the land value in the neighborhood and issues with the house itself.  It stunned me.  It seemed impossible that anyone would consider tearing down that big old beautiful house.  Dr. Barris and his mother lived in the entire downstairs area, and the upstairs had been divided into 4 very large apartments.  It had always been an anchor in the neighborhood.

The thing is -- my old neighborhood does not exist anymore.  It was a mixed income community with some medical and other office buildings interspaced with the residential properties.  Now, it's almost totally upscale ($300,000-900,000) condos, including luxury high rises that replaced the prairie style homes Oglesby ran into the ground.  There are many more people living in the neighborhood than we ever imagined.  It's their neighborhood now.  They bought into a community that is much different than it was when I lived there. 

Memorable Oak Lawn house faces demolition By David Webb Staff Writer Jul 13, 2006, 20:31 $1.5 million asking price makes renovation unlikely; area?s residential zoning prohibits commercial use

One of the oldest, largest houses remaining in Oak Lawn ?one that many gay men will remember from an infamous 1970s-era cruise route ? may soon be razed to make way for new development.    The two-story house near the intersection of Hood and Brown streets was recently sold to an investment company that has listed it for sale at $1.5 million. Many gay men and lesbians have called the former mansion, which was carved up into apartments in the late 1940s, home during the past three decades.    Once surrounded by smaller prairie-style bungalows and apartment buildings, it was a focal point on the cruise route, where cars and pedestrians wandered the streets at all hours at night. Now, the house sits across the street from an upscale high-rise, a location sure to assign it to oblivion.     Harvey McLean, president of Harvey McLean and Associates, said the land?s market value makes it unlikely anyone will buy the home with the intention of renovating it as a residence. A few people, who have expressed interest in paying the price, balk at the work that would be involved in restoring it, he said.    ?They go over and look at it and say, ?this is far more of job than I want to tackle,?? said McLean, whose agency specializes in architecturally significant real estate. ?I would like nothing better than to sell it to someone who would restore it.?    The house cannot be restored as a business, such as a bed-and-breakfast or as a professional office building, because the neighborhood is zoned residential.    McLean said he is uncertain of the structure?s age, but he is sure that it pre-dates most older buildings in Oak Lawn.    ?It?s been redone so many times that it is hard to tell how old it is,? McLean said. ?There are some things about the renovations that are wonderful, but there are some things that are really kind of hokey.?    Sharon Boyd, publisher of dallasarena.com, said she once lived on Hood Street in an apartment near the old house and became friends with the woman who owned it and lived in the downstairs unit. The woman?s husband converted the second-floor to apartments because he wanted her to have an income after his approaching death from leukemia, she said.    ?The house not only paid for itself, but it was her revenue,? Boyd said. ?There was enough money from the house all of those years to let her live there and pay all of her bills.?    Boyd said the woman, who was in her 90s in the 1970s, was much more savvy than her tenants suspected.    ?She knew everyone was gay,? Boyd said. ?She referred to them as the boys.?    The woman?s son who inherited the house recently sold it and moved to an apartment after living there for many years. After returning from living out-of-state, he lived with his mother before she died.    Boyd said she was surprised to learn the house was on the market and sad to hear that it might be torn down. It reminds her of a time when the area was bohemian and intriguing with many interesting people living in the apartments and bungalows, she said.    ?There were a bunch of hippy-type people living there,? Boyd said. ?At one time two of the houses were occupied by caterers who cooked out of the kitchens.?    Boyd said when she first moved into the area in 1976, she was perplexed by all of the traffic during the nighttime hours, not understanding that she had moved to an apartment on the cruise route. About two years later, she and other straight and gay residents petitioned the city to install the no-turn signs that still stand on the corners in the area that put an end to the cruising.    ?After a couple of years, it just got to be unbearable for everybody in the neighborhood,? Boyd said. ?It wasn?t anti-gay. It was a traffic disaster.?    Boyd said that even though she remembers the old house and its occupants so fondly, she understands neighborhoods change. She now lives in Northwest Dallas, and she calls her feelings about the area?s development ?bittersweet.?    ?People have a right to make their communities look the way they want,? Boyd said. ?Those of us who left Oak Lawn, whether we like it or not, people who are buying in now ? it?s theirs, not ours.

I love living in Northwest Dallas (95% love it).  When I go to Oak Lawn and drive around, I am amazed at the density and obvious new wealth in the area.  I don't get homesick for the old 'hood because it doesn't exist anymore.  It's very exciting and vibrant and urbane, but it's not as interesting  as it was when I called Oak Lawn home.  The realtors even changed the name of my old neighborhood from "Oak Lawn Place" to "Mansion Park", and that is an appropriate name for what is there now.

A few years ago, the Oak Lawn Planned Development District was amended by a handful of Control Freaks (including Lordi Palmer, who didn't even live in the County at the time).  They had one community meeting right in the middle of the July 4th holiday, and the majority of the people at the meeting were against the changes.  That didn't bother Princess Velveeta Lill.  She rammed that amendment down our throats.  The changes were supposed to be for preserving the character of the various Oak Lawn neighborhoods, but there was no homogenous "Oak Lawn" neighborhood.  The amendments imposed restrictions on my old neighborhood that had never been there in the first place.  Rather than let developers build town homes with sidewalks and amenities that coordinated with what was already built on the block (building set backs and sidewalk widths). the Control Freaks tried to force regulations that were appropriate in one neighborhood (like Perry Heights) onto another neighborhood with a completely different look.

This wacky fight in the Bryan Parkway neighborhood where Jim Schutze lives and has his money tied up is the natural result of a handful of Control Freaks trying to impose their will over people who weren't even in the neighborhood when the Control Freaks were building their power base.

Control Freaks never reach out to new people. 

Control Freaks don't solicit community input.  They tell the community what the deal is, and then spend whatever time and political leverage they have to keep their subjects in line and under control.

It's funny that a liberal like Schutze (who believes in government control and intervention) is so put off by the expected results of imposing control by one connected faction over the property rights of a homeowner. 

I guess the closer you are to being dominated by the Control Freaks, the less you like the results.

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