3 July 3 - 9, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents A developer in a southern Dallas neighborhood finds you can go home again, and build some nice houses, too. BY EMMA RUBY T he Brentwood neighborhood in southern Dallas is made up of a series of dead ends, as if a city planner long ago forgot about the area halfway through paving it. Those dead ends overlook a rocky and steep descent to a trickling stream called Ce- dar Creek, which has contributed to the landscape’s erosion. Overgrown foliage cre- ates a dark canopy along the neighborhood’s edge. Through the trees, a clear view of downtown Dallas peeks out. The view, if you can find the right van- tage point, stretches from the western bridges over the Trinity River to Fair Park. It’s startling, the way it comes out of no- where, visible only as you approach and then descend the ridge that Brentwood is built on. Once you take in that full look of Dallas from east to west, you wonder how it took this long for construction crews to sweep in en masse. “They’re all trying to get this view,” says Paul Carden, a deep-voiced developer from Oak Cliff, as he navigates his car along Compton Street on a warm June day. On both sides of the road, men wearing hard hats dart in and out of half-built, tower- ing homes. Each structure rises taller than the last, with oversized balconies decorating the second and third floors of the homes’ northern facades. Some of the men seem to recognize Carden, who has long, curly, salt- and-pepper hair and wears black-rimmed glasses. The neighbors certainly recognize him. As he approaches the point where Comp- ton Street gives way to forest, he parks. A gap in the foliage that cuts up the ridge is the only indication that a trail system weaves along the creek. The trail is quiet today, but typically, Carden finds kids from the neigh- borhood playing in the area. That’s how he likes it, as perhaps the only developer in Dal- las who hopes people walk onto his prop- erty. “When we started building this out, I had to remove hundreds of tires. And the trick was I couldn’t just clear cut [the path], be- cause I’m trying to keep as much of this can- opy intact, so we had to just go straight up jungle bushwacker,” Carden says, hiking up the incline. “When I got this site in 2016, I was paying more for my note on this than I was paying for my full rent in Old East Dal- las.” Carden had a plan, one that considered development in Brentwood as part of a big- ger system contributing to the neighbor- hood instead of a cash grab. Over the last decade, he has amassed par- cels of land all through Brentwood and planned a system of townhomes and multi- use developments that will be connected by the trail system he built. Rezoning the plats from single-family homes to multi-family has taken some time, but in that time, he’s held neighborhood meetings to get com- ments on design, started a neighborhood watch program and helped clean out lots that were used for dumping. At this moment, he owns eight acres, but that fluctuates somewhat frequently. Each time he sells a piece of property, it comes with strings attached, or at the very least, an interview to ensure the buyer’s vision is con- sistent with the broader system he’s work- ing towards. While developers across Dallas are typi- cally met with distrust, Carden snuck into Brentwood under the radar. “At the time that I started investing in Brentwood, nobody was really paying atten- tion. Certainly, the west side [of Oak Cliff] wasn’t paying attention,” Carden said. “The idea that some kid, essentially, would at one point become the largest property owner and then start rezoning things and setting up a whole vision in a neighborhood that has struggled for decades, no one really believed that was gonna happen.” Then came the Brentwood boom. Over the last three or four years, high-end, cus- tom-built houses have started popping up across the neighborhood. They’re being bought by doctors, engineers and “people with SMU degrees,” Carden said. And be- cause single-family zoning doesn’t inher- ently limit home designs, there is no built-in incentive for the developers of those homes to consult with neighbors before designing a project. Carden, in need of a rezoning for his land, did have to consult with neighbors. His will- ingness to work with the neighborhood, jux- taposed with the other changes cannibalizing Brentwood, helped some skeptics come around on his projects. “I’m more than warmed up to [Paul]. … A lot of these homes that are going up, to me, I’m looking at them and they look cheaply built,” said Daymond Lavine, president of the Brentwood Trinity Heights Community Action Group.. “They’ll put anything up there to sell that view.” The Problem of Displacement D isplacement and development seem to go hand in hand, and across Dallas, communities of color have been sounding the alarm on the former for years, warning that development often comes at the expense of existing residents. The recently released Anti-Displacement Toolkit, published by the advocacy group Builders of Hope, found that more than 40% of Dallas neighborhoods were either Nathan Hunsinger | UNFAIR PARK | Gentler GENTRIFICATION Oak Cliff developer Paul Carden is working to develop Brentwood in southern Dallas with the residents’ well being in mind. >> p4
