Catch A Wave

“Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world.”

– Brian Wilson, The Beach Boys

A recent professional change has brought me to a place overlooking one of the jewels of our city, Klyde Warren Park. Daily, I witness how it sparks public interest in our downtown, engaging tourists and locals alike. As a park, it has received broad acclaim for the way it embodies Dallas’ can-do spirit and demonstrates the potential for public-private partnerships to shape the public realm. As an urban intervention, it unites districts and spawns an explosion of economic value.

An ongoing wave of infrastructure projects currently shaping American cities emerged in the wake of Boston’s Big Dig in the early 2000’s, fostering the High Line and Klyde Warren in the 2010’s. Now, a further decade on, we still consider these exemplars as models for addressing broadly divergent sets of needs and contexts. It feels as if we have reached what I might deem “Peak Deck Park” as infrastructure projects, green or otherwise, are widely hoped to change the urban landscape of our city. We now seem to reflexively call on these interventions as primary levers to elevate the quality of life. The future promise is ever present as we debate high profile urban anchors such as the Convention Center and I-345. We challenge these projects with levels of heavy lifting that Atlas would appreciate.

For a city managing growth and a broadly acknowledged deficit of affordable housing, it is worth considering how these initiatives tend to impose their own urban alchemy. One widely discussed outcome of transformative development is the intractable gentrification surrounding high quality urban space. Klyde Warren initiated shiny new commercial projects altering our skyline where parking lots once stood. In Atlanta, growth around the Belt Line, the 22-mile loop encircling the city, has been widely critiqued. The TIF structure underpinning its development did not address fundamental land acquisition strategies when values were low. They thus managed to hit the gentrification trifecta of increasing property values, displacing lower income residents and impeding creation of promised affordable housing. A compelling counter has emerged around the 11th St Bridge Park in Washington DC. They have spent the past decade creating economic stakeholders within the community via advocacy and structures such as a Community Land Trust, prior to construction even beginning. The result is those who are often forced to replace physical blight with economic dislocation will be better positioned to ride the economic and social ripples that are the legacy of these projects.

My wish is that our city will delve deeper into the stickier problems beyond the table stakes of physical remediation. We have many examples of what to do and not to do. Housing advocates continue to encourage our leaders to increase funding with the upcoming 2024 bond initiatives in the short term. Our local Community Land Trust and Homebuyer Assistance Programs that already exist offer achievable means to broaden homeownership-based wealth creation. It would be wonderful to continue to broaden the availability of support via initiatives like the recently discontinued DHAP10 program aiding long term residents attempting to buy. More attention and funding for these sorts of programs within our Department of Housing and Neighborhood Revitalization could offer better alternatives for our citizens. I fully applaud the civic ambition these transformational projects reflect. They are necessary and important. Completing projects at this scale requires a uniquely daunting confluence of circumstances, resources and sheer will, both political and social. It will be important for us all to prepare for impact as this wave comes ashore.