Residence Analysis of Deep Ellum

There is a subtle underlying context to the way that Deep Ellum has developed over the years.  Long story short, the neighborhood is divided in half by Hall St.  Essentially, the west side is mainly businesses with a few residences, but the east side is mainly residences with a couple few businesses.

Blue = West, Green = East, Bubble = < 3 tenants, Pin = > 3 tenants

In an urban context*, it's important to look for density and concentrations of people.  While there are a good number of living spaces in the west side of Deep Ellum, there are much fewer multi-residence buildings than in the east side.  In other words, the west is dense with commercial space but sparse in residential.

The east, on the other hand, is replete with multi-tenant buildings and consequently have larger concentrations of people.  By the way, there are no parking meters on the east side.  In a comfortable, walkable community, people have all the amenities they need within a 5 minute walking distance.  A 5 minute walk to the west from the Futura lofts on Commerce barely gets you to Walton St.

One of the biggest difficulties of local businesses is getting the area residences to patronize their establishments.  If the businesses are outside the universal preferred walking distance of where people live, those people will most likely jump into the car.  If they get into the car, they might as well go to Mockingbird lane, Greenville Ave, McKinney Ave, or Lakewood to shop, eat, or drink.

The bane of the modern city is zoning laws, which assist in the development of suburbs.  Everywhere in Dallas, with the exception of Downtown and Uptown, takes pains to separate homes from businesses.  It turns out, this goes against millennia of city development patterns all over the world.

*The Marquis on Gaston (pin in the top left corner) is not considered part of the urban context because it is based on the suburban fortress model of residential development and impermeable to city life. 

Time for a Change

The great thing about talking to people from different places is getting their perspective on how things work in their cities.  Dallas is certainly unique in many aspects, but it can also learn from other places.

V. is a recently returning Dallas native adjusting to life back home having come from the more urban, more dynamic Washington D.C.  Apparently over the better part of the last decade, in D.C. there has been the ubiquitous emergence of "hyper local" blogs, from which people get their information about the city.

A Google search of "Dallas neighborhood blog" only yielded search results from the Observer, D Mag, Dallas News, and a real estate blog.  Since Google doesn't recognize any Dallas neighborhood blogs, let's assume that the hyper local blog doesn't exist here.  Since it doesn't exist here, let's take this opportunity to start one, or at least re-tool this one to be more useful to people.

The goal of this project is threefold: 1) excavate information and conversations that may help to make Deep Ellum a better place, 2) get more people supporting local businesses, 3) give me an outlet for my opinions.  After all, it's my blog and I can do whatever I want with it.

So expect more posts.  They'll be shorter with more mistakes and hopefully more pictures.  If you're close to the Deep Ellum Postal Center at Main and Hall, stop by and say hi.

Leisure is not a luxury: Public places and cost free distraction

One of the major tenets of the New Urbanism movement is that public places need to be made for people.  Taking a look at major public spaces around the world, the most common activity among them is sitting.  Washington Square Park in New York City creates a respite from hectic urban life by providing many places where you can relax.  Successful urban spaces allow people to change gears by offering a distraction to business, work, and domestic chores.

Washington Square Park

My good friend Stacy Cherones of Get Healthy Dallas says "Leisure is not a luxury."  In other words, people deserve distractions from the daily grind to regardless of race, creed, or income.  At Google, for example,  innovative work is balanced with recreation, which in turn makes employees more productive.  If people enjoy their work environment, employers will see a more industrious workforce.

Every Friday this October, DEOM has teamed up with Downtown Dallas Inc. to create the Pegasus Plaza Outdoor Market.  The mission of this project is to provide Downtown workers, residents, and tourists the distraction that urban spaces are able to provide.

More people on construction laden sidewalk than Market

Weeks before the Market, polling Downtown workers showed that they didn't know the name of the plaza and that pedestrians shuffled by with blinders on, unaware of their surroundings.  In fact, the first Pegasus Market showed that people were reluctant to interact with the marketplace and took pains to avoid it.

At the first two Pegasus Markets, it was baffling that people chose to walk on the difficult terrain of the sidewalks than to walk through the closed street where we set up vendors.  Perhaps these people were too used to their lunch routine, or maybe they didn't want to shop for anything.  I also considered that the passersby thought that the event wasn't open to them.  Despite our efforts to obstruct normal pathways, people still trudged on through.

People continue to walk on sidewalk despite obstruction.

After the second Pegasus Market, we received news from Downtown Dallas Inc. that we were over budget and could no longer afford to close Akard as part of the Special Event Permit.  The urbanism activist in me was disappointed because I believe in shutting down streets and limiting automobile access in favor of pedestrian walkways, but in this case, it was a blessing in disguise.  Dallasites aren't ready to walk on the streets.  They respect the car and its territory too much to question its authority in urban mobility.  Still, word of mouth in combination with familiarity and with human comfort attracted more people to the third Pegasus Plaza Outdoor Market than the previous two.

The sidewalk is more comfortable than the street.

Jane Jacobs wrote in her book The Economy of Cities that diversity in cities promotes innovation and development of new work and production.  The benefit of the Market in the middle of Downtown Dallas is that locally made, distinct, and unfamiliar products are given fresh exposure to a new group of people.  As these entrepreneurs make sales, new products are added to the market and their manufacture can be sustained.  In order for the vendors to make sales, the customers need a comfortable and inviting marketplace to come to.  Long story short, people need enjoyable public spaces to contribute to local economy.

People in Dallas need re-education in the use of public space.  Public places should be designed for human leisure, like eating, relaxing, and other distractions.  A real city provides leisurely amenities for its people in order to benefit their well being and their economy.

Spandex justifies bicycling in a sprawled city

Whereas dogs make sense of their world by smell, humans make sense of their world by vision.  Therefore image is everything in human environments, as our clothes, hair, and skin help define what tribes we belong to.  Dallas tribes, like any culture, have interesting customs that define us as well as the city itself.

Being a city of consolidated, sprawled suburban areas, Dallas is a metropolis that features few actual city-like areas, which means that typical city-like forms of transportation are certainly underutilized.  In the homeland of the $30k Millionaire, people can't afford to be seen walking or biking from one place to the next.  The way you get around Big D indicates, for the most part, your status in our society.

And yet, people still walk and bike on occasion.  Given the social stigmas attached to such activities, pedestrians and velocipedists justify their choice of transportation by certain accessories.  In Dallas, it's only acceptable to traverse the sidewalks when with a dog.  For example, a person walking from Upper Henderson (near Central) to Lower Henderson (near New Flower Market) is ostensibly a non-Caucasian with no money.  But with a dog, that person is a local resident taking care of his or her pet responsibilities. Similarly, someone walking from Downtown to Uptown is obviously on crack.  But give them a canine, and they're coming back from the dog park.

Likewise, riding a bike in Dallas is justified only as long as you're wearing fluorescent spandex (hipsters notwithstanding).  Conversely, the more plain and baggy your clothes while riding, the lower your salary.  Wearing spandex not only helps reduce chafing, but it also means that the bicyclist rides for fitness and not for transportation.  After all, the well-off bike rider keeps a rack on the trunk of his car to schlepp the bike to and from White Rock Lake.  It's dangerous to a person's well being to ride on the streets of Dallas; being seen and recognized is almost as perilous as being hit by a distracted driver.

These accessories give the average Dallas walker and biker the image of well-to-do recreation.  Real destinations in the Jewel of the Flatlands require automobile transportation, otherwise there is no feasible way to access those places.  Since dogs are never found at the grocery store, a quick jaunt for snacks requires hopping into a car.  Spandex clad people are mainly seen mounting a bike, as opposed to checking out a book at the library or sipping espresso at the café.

Ultimately, this image problem hinders the viability of alternate forms of transportation.  While foot traffic can only be increased with infrastructure and destination rehabilitation, bicycle use can be remedied by having different expectations.  The mission of Dallas Cycle Chic is to do this exactly.  Meeting friends at the restaurant is unadvisable in pastel lycra, and wearing a helmet is such a drag.  The solution?  Make Dallas cycle-friendly.  Leave the helmet.  Wear jeans on your bike.  And watch this Ted Talk (courtesy of Dallas Cycle Chic):

Dallas ain't Madrid, but...

Inside El Tigre

When I got back to Dallas from Madrid in 2006, the first business I wanted to attempt was a Spanish style tapas bar.  I had in my mind El Tigre, a traditional type of tapas bar in Madrid where you order a caña (small beer) and you get a tapa (free food).  At any time during the day, you find theater people, musicians, gays, businessmen, punks, and pijos at the standing-room-only bar.  What I wanted to bring to Dallas was a small slice of Spanish culture at its best.

After almost a year back in town, however, I realized Dallas doesn't have a single location that would sustain a business like this.  After all, sprawled cities cannot support diverse communities.  El Tigre attracts such a peculiar crowd because its location is within short walking distance from various popular destinations in Madrid.

Madrid, Spain. El Tigre in the middle.

El Tigre is located within 800ft of four different Metro stations (red diamonds on map).  It's mere minutes from the Gayborhood, the Hipster District, the Theater District, a ton of shopping, and the center of the city.  People go to this tapas bar because it's easy to get to, it's laid back, and the food is cheap and delicious.

In Dallas, there are plenty of places  that are cheap, delicious, and laid back.  But this city's biggest disadvantage is that everything and everyone is so far away from each other.  Many people doubt that Big D could ever be a condensed, diverse, walkable city.  Here's the thing: Dallas used to be that way.

Dallas had become a significant, bustling city after the Civil War.  The brand new national railroad system made Dallas an important crossroads connecting north, south, east, and west.  The Jewel of the Flatlands soon became the most important hub in the Southwest for economic activity in cotton, oil, and investment banking.  That money created an urban landscape that today's blighted downtowns envy.

Downtown Dallas. Main and Akard. November 3, 1951.

Unfortunately, automobile focused development killed downtowns all over the country, as highways spliced through urban areas and incentivized citizens to move further and further away.  We now see the results in weakened cities, unsustainable sprawl, and a plethora of places not worth caring about.  On the other hand, in spite of irresponsible urban planning, Dallas still has sections and neighborhoods that retain the spirit of good urbanism.

Four years after coming back to my hometown, I started a business that would help activate one of the few Dallas neighborhoods that retained this urban spirit.  I wanted to create a place that took space away from inactive automobiles and allowed human activity to prevail.  Instead of a car soaking sunlight, an artist would use the space for self expression.

Deep Ellum is a place worth caring about.  Not only is its history important to the character of the neighborhood, but also its future is directly tied to the kind of city Dallas becomes.  As developments within the city grasp at straws to figure out how to create a place where people want to be, Deep Ellum already has the shape and infrastructure to show a sprawled town what a real city looks like.

Dallas police reaction to recent special events

The past few weeks, I attended the Homegrown Music Fest in Downtown, the Deep Ellum Outdoor Market (of course), and the Brew Riot in Bishop Arts.  Security is key to all outdoor events, such that the City of Dallas requires Dallas Police presence to ensure the safety of all in attendance.  From an event coordinators perspective, this is an expensive but necessary cost, as it's important to have a smooth running event.

It's even better when the police have a positive comments of the event.  Packing up our booth at Homegrown, I overheard a few cops saying how it was a well run event with a good crowd that didn't cause trouble.  As I handed our officer his check and thanked him for coming out, he told me that he looks forward to the Market every month.  At Brew Riot, surrounded by hundreds of people drinking, I witnessed a few cops joking around with each other knowing that vigilance was not a priority on the day.

It's crucial that people have a good time at these events, but it's even more important that everyone feel safe, and if we make the cops' jobs easier, then we make it easier to pull off these special events in the future.  Most importantly, the people who come out to these events, I've observed, appreciate the quality of experience and respect the work it takes it pull these things off.

Impact city neighborhoods by creating public space.

Before attending the City of Dallas' Deep Ellum Area Revitalization project presentation last week, I would have signed off on improved streetscaping and bike lane installation without even thinking.  Indeed, I am always in favor of walkability and bikeability in neighborhood design, but the point of these meetings is to get everyone's perspective on the project and to be open to contrary opinions.  Many why's, who's, and how's were asked, but there were a few objections to the plan that stood out to me.

To paraphrase: Where are the people going to come from when the plan eliminates street parking crucial to the businesses on Elm St.?  Who says there will be bicyclists and pedestrians?  Furthermore, why would street improvements attract more business to Deep Ellum?  The plan, as it stands, will eliminate 24 street parking spots from Good Latimer to Hall.  These spaces create easy access to the establishments up and down this corridor of Elm St.  Additionally, there is skepticism that widening sidewalks would actually promote pedestrian activity.

This got me thinking about the DART Rail and the strategy for its implementation.  DART won an award for building the longest light rail public transportation in the United States but experienced a drop in ridership from 2009 to 2010 despite extending the Green Line just before wintertime.  And this when gas has become more expensive!  The DART Rail is an example of infrastructure development before destination development. 

The lesson to be learned from DART is connecting sites is not as important as connecting destinations.  Following a trend and implementing a greener technology does not necessarily make people buy your product.  Granted, this rail system exists, but does it take you to places that you want to go to?  To apply this to the streetscaping plans, is it reasonable to believe people will want to walk the Deep Ellum sidewalks just because the pavement is wide and a bike can share the road with a car?  It is much more reasonable to believe that people will walk to and from a desirable destination for the simple pleasure of doing so.

The question now is how do you develop a destination?  To quote the authors of Suburban Nation:

"Just as it is difficult to imagine the concept of family independent of the home, it is near-impossible to imagine community independent of the town square...In the absence of walkable public places - streets, squares, and parks, the public realm - people of diverse ages, races, and beliefs are unlikely to meet and talk."

Any visitor to New York City will see how crucial Washington Square Park and Union Square are to their respective communities.  Both are comfortable and inviting public spaces that give people access to other people, things to do, and other places around the city

There is currently a lack of these kinds of places throughout Dallas, but Deep Ellum is a perfect candidate to feature such a public space.  Deep Ellum feels divided by Hall St. where the west side of the neighborhood features most of the eateries, drinking holes, and metered parking, as opposed to the east side, where most people live and don't pay to park.  A public space would connect these places and provide a communal area to enjoy at any hour of the day, much like how the Main Street Garden Park serves Downtown Dallas today.  Imagine the sight in Deep Ellum of residents, Downtown visitors, and Baylor folk communing in a comfortable and shady environment. 

As it stands, most of the activities in the neighborhood are on the west side of Deep Ellum where parking is at a premium because of the expectation of convenient, direct to the door, parking.  A walkable streetplan would open up the rest of the neighborhood to foot traffic and incentivize people to park farther and walk longer.  In truth, there's scant reason nowadays for a person to park near Undermain Theater to watch a show at Trees, even though the walk takes less than 10 minutes.  To promote this kind of pedestrian activity, make it worth that person's time to stroll through an area worth caring about.

How about holding off on the monstrous task of reformatting Elm St. and develop a public space that will not handicap the businesses that are currently thriving in the renewed interest in Deep Ellum?  It is such a crucial time for the businesses trying to gain a foothold in the local economy that hindering access to them is dangerous.  Since the City of Dallas has money to spend on Deep Ellum, develop a project that helps the local businesses, encourages residents out of their lofts, and attracts people from neighboring communities.