All over the town center

The City of Dallas and developers seem at a stalemate regarding the Lake Highlands Town Center’s design. Might our new mediation-savvy councilman help things along?

Story by Keri Mitchell

Mixed-use. Transit-oriented. Dense. Vertical. Urban. Since the idea of a Lake Highlands town center was proposed a decade ago, this jargon has been used to describe the future development.

The City of Dallas wants town center developer Cypress Equities to make good on this vision, considering that the city and other government entities already have invested $24 million in the project. Cypress argues, however, that the commercial real estate market isn’t compatible with the city’s demands.

The two sides are at a stalemate.

And neighbors, who have watched the 70-acre Skillman-Walnut Hill project languish for 10 years, find themselves somewhere between exasperated and resigned to whatever may (or may not) come.

The fact that urban planners use an elitist vocabulary is unfortu- nate, says Kevin Sloan, an architect who co-chairs the city’s Urban Design Peer Review Panel, because it keeps residents from feeling like they can engage in the conversation.

“Urbanism is somewhat hard to understand at a verbal level,” Sloan says, but whether or not neighbors know the terminology, “when they see it, they know whether it’s right or wrong.”

“A real urban building is like a puzzle piece,” he continues. “You put it in, and all of a sudden, you understand the rest of the puzzle.

“Our cities are an incomplete puzzle, and we are all city builders. Every building makes or unmakes the city.”

That last sentence is a mantra that adorns Sloan’s office. He takes this into consideration when developers’ projects come to the panel of architects and urban planners for review, usually because they are seeking millions of city tax dollars as part of their financing. And in return, Sloan believes, we the taxpayers should expect projects that don’t just benefit the city economically but also benefit our quality of life.

In the case of the Lake Highlands Town Center, the city’s Urban Design Peer Review Panel took issue with the “suburban character” of Cypress Equities’ proposal.

“There’s nothing close to urban about this project,” Sloan says. “It wasn’t designed with the end first, which is you, the person. If you don’t begin with the end, you’re gonna get what you’re gonna get.”

Urbanity doesn’t necessarily mean density, a reference to how many people live in a certain area. Density in cities often takes the form of apartment complexes, condominium developments, even duplexes or zero-lot homes.

Most Americans yearn for a more lowdensity urbanism, Sloan says, like the kind evident in a French town or English garden village — “all of the essential pieces and parts of urbanism are there,” he says, “not in multiples but in singles and doubles, where you can get to know all the people in your environment.

“Lake Highlands wants to be low-density, but it still wants a physical center, that if there was a reason to congregate, there’s a place we would all go to congregate.”

The town center project’s Wildcat Way, an interior street running parallel to Skillman, is a natural parade route or strolling avenue, for example. Already, when events such as Oktoberfest or the Art and Play Festival use the town center property, Wildcat Way is the main drag, so to speak.

But if buildings are arranged around a pond of parking with their backs to that street, as they are in Cypress’ plan, it loses that feel, Sloan says. The panel suggested