Overview, Stakeholder Feedback, and Considerations

DEEP ELLUM DALLAS SERVICE CENTER

Overview, Stakeholder Feedback, and Considerations

Deep Ellum¹ and its nearby neighborhood are currently home to almost 5800 residents in about 2800 households. Of those households, approximately 2400 people rent their homes, while 400 own. In 2017, the average household income was $70,800, and the median age was 34.² The residents include a mix of tattoo artists, service industry staff, attorneys, painters and more.

Deep Ellum sees itself as a place where “nobody fits, but everybody belongs³.” The community wants to extend the heart and “feel” of Deep Ellum by repurposing the 20+ acre City Service Center to the east. This heart of Deep Ellum is a history of Dallas housed in a bricolage of intimately scaled, load-bearing masonry merchant shops and former factories.

The City Services center houses city departments such as sanitation services, Dallas Fire Marshal, and Dallas Fire Department headquarters. The Urban Land Institute (ULI) is assisting the neighborhood by advising the local tax increment financing district, the Deep Ellum Foundation (DEF), to canvas neighborhood input, business owner input, and other affected jurisdictions.

The neighbors and the City of Dallas want mixed income housing nearby. Many are artists that can’t pay the higher rents of Uptown.4 The Foundation needs this ULI Technical Assistance Panel to recommend innovative strategies to provide mixed income housing, such as:

• Vouchers using an endowment from the sale or lease of the property, upzoning, or other mechanism, 5,6 • Inclusionary zoning, • Upzoning, • or other methods.

While the aggregate of structures of Deep Ellum are historical and help create a vibrant street life, the structures in the City Service Center are a milieu of 70’s utilitarian architecture with limited architectural value from a viewpoint of pedestrian activity, scale, and capacity. In replacing these structures, the neighborhood wants to retain and enhance the walkability of the neighborhood. The neighborhood also wants to further leverage alternate modes of transportation, including bike lanes7. Improved walkability can be achieved through development of shorter blocks8, and following the Downtown360 urban design guidelines9 including, but not limited to:

• Height to width ratio10,11 to foster a sense of enclosure, • Sidewalk widths10 • Buildings that respond to changing grids.

Stakeholders want a variety of uses, but favor publicly accessible spaces and locally owned shops. 12,13,14 More bars is not the answer, as it lends the cyclical nature that Deep Ellum has historically experienced.14 ULI enthusiastically supports a mix of creative uses. In the short term, provide structures that attempt to lower the “barrier to entry” for local businesses via modest construction costs. Considering the long term, provide durable construction materials arranged with adaptable floor-to-floor heights so that when buildings “take on a life of their own”, the structures will be candidates for adaptive re-use just like much of Deep Ellum has been in the past. This is an important consideration if, say, above grade parking structures are necessary, and the long term future of parking is uncertain.

The community is lacking green space and public activity space, and this is a priority of the neighborhood in any new development.15 The area is served by the new Santa Fe hike and bike trailhead which can be extended to the west along the existing DART Green line and Canton Street.16 The Santa Fe hike and bike trial passes nearby the city services center site.

Keep in mind that the City of Dallas is trying to find other ways to tie together nearby neighborhoods, such as Fair Park, with the planned renovation of nearby I-30. The Texas Department of Transportation has plans to lower I-30 from Good Latimer to Grand Avenue and possibly beyond. The community will then be tasked to raise funds to cap I-30 with a park thereby providing further connection to Fair Park.18,19 Also, the connection to Baylor from I-30 is critical. Options to connect to Baylor are from Trunk Avenue, Baylor, and 2nd Ave. While TXDOT has suggested 2nd Avenue as an off ramp from I-30, there are no options set in stone as of December 2019. 19

As mentioned above, materials should reflect the honesty, scale, and durability of Deep Ellum’s buildings. Many residents in the neighborhood would simply like to extend a brick veneer into the new developments.17 Consider, however, that Deep Ellum cannot simply be duplicated by copying new brick over a 21st century structure. What is important about the architecture of Deep Ellum is the scale and durability of the materials and buildings. Brick is certainly an option and probably a safe bet, but other scalable materials can complement the neighborhood.