4 July 3 - 9, 2025 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents susceptible to or experiencing some form of gentrification as of 2021. The toolkit lists Brentwood, which cen- sus data shows is primarily Hispanic and Black, as one of the most at-risk neighbor- hoods in Dallas for displacement. The neighborhood is recording accelerating home values, the report found, and the gen- trification stage is listed as “dynamic,” a step above early levels, but not impossible to re- cover from. For Carden, displacement is personal. He grew up an Oak Cliff kid; his grandparents lived on the eastern border of the Wyn- newood neighborhood, so close to Interstate 35 that the highway acted as a boundary when he and his cousins played football in the summers. His parents grew up in Oak Cliff too, but around the time Carden turned 8, they started looking to move because the neighborhood didn’t provide the type of en- vironment they wanted to raise kids in. “Everyone wants to live in safe streets, in a safe community, have nice housing and ac- cess to retail. [When that doesn’t exist] it’s almost like effectively being displaced,” Carden said. “Because you’ve got an educa- tion and then you end up doing well, and there’s a sense of ‘I can’t really do as much here with it.’” His parents ended up moving out to Mansfield, and, bouncing between the sub- urbs and his grandparents’ home, he grew up wondering why you had to leave south- ern Dallas to get to all the good stuff, espe- cially when southern Dallas is where you’d rather be. Then, for a while in his 20s he lived in Vancouver. He’d decided to follow the Chi- nese exchange student he’d met in high school, who is now his wife, and lived the “typical immigrant experience,” where he worked a normal job with a half-finished de- gree for a few years. Vancouver was a utopia from a zoning and city planning perspective, he says, albeit an expensive one. “It’s still single-family, but it has a ridicu- lous walk score. And yeah, it has its chal- lenges. If you want to have your cake and eat it too, it’s a very, very expensive cake,” he said. “But one thing I noticed was that no one who grew up there wanted to leave Van- couver. … And I kind of wanted to have that.” He came back to Dallas in 2015, living first in Old East Dallas and then Oak Cliff. Wanting to “do big things,” he began work- ing on the Southern Gateway Citizens Task- force, which provided early design feedback on the I-35 deck park. Inspired by his grand- parents’ adjoining home, he advocated for community-oriented design standards like noise mitigation walls. It was around that time that he started scooping up land in Brentwood, too. Tucked between two DART rail stations and the adjacent Dallas Zoo, Brentwood is a bit of an enigma. Off the bat, any city planner would tell you that dropping single-family zoning between two mass-transit ports is less than desirable, Carden says, because transit stations are typically seen as a place to build density. But even if you ignore that and take Brentwood for the single-family neighbor- hood it is, things are disjointed. In most Dallas neighborhoods, homes were built around the same time period, and an overarching aesthetic thread runs through the streets, giving the area a cohe- sive look. With proximity to transit, Brent- wood should have exploded the way every other part of Dallas has. Instead, it’s been a slow growth, with homes going up a few at a time through the 1910s, the ’30s, the ’50s, the ’70s, the ’90s. The randomness, Carden said, has become part of the culture of Brent- wood. But it also had made the area difficult to preserve. A duplex can sit next to a ranch-style home, next to a craftsman-esque house, next to a three-story modern box. Because there is no overarching form that defines Brent- wood, it would be difficult for the neighbor- hood to pursue a conservation district or historic district status, which protects nearby neighborhoods, like the 10th Street Historic District, from teardowns. City data shows that demolitions have been happening in Brentwood since the 1980s, and in many cases, those lots sat empty until the last decade. While gentrification in other parts of Dallas may look like an old home getting bought up by a developer who “makes it cute and adds flowers,” Carden said, there is very little restoration happening in Brent- wood. Instead, empty lots and crumbling homes are being replaced by oversized, modern homes that sell in the high $400,000s and low $500,000s. Think about that: In historically under- served southern Dallas, where you have to cross a highway to get to the nearest grocery store, in a district where the median house- hold income is $43,573, according to city data, homes are selling for half a million dol- lars. The custom builds sell for even more, Carden adds, and the snail’s pace growth that defined Brentwood through the 20th century has quickened exponentially over the last five years. “There is a very disproportionate amount of well-to-do [minority] professionals mov- ing here. Very disproportionate,” Carden says, pointing at a sparkling-new home that is owned by a Black doctor. “Which tells you that it wasn’t like people didn’t want to be here. There was a complete mismatch be- tween what people thought [and what Brentwood is.]” It’s the inverse of the decision his parents made so many years ago. Instead of moving out to the suburbs, educated Dallasites of minority communities are choosing to re- turn to a neighborhood that Dallas has his- torically relegated them to. Theoretically, that’s Carden’s driving goal. The city plan- ner in him, though, knows that sooner or later, if something in Brentwood doesn’t give, it’ll be at the expense of long-time, more vulnerable residents. An Opportunity Waiting to Happen W hen Carden first came to Brent- wood, he saw a neighborhood that the city of Dallas had writ- ten off as a “C” student, investing in the area as such. But he believed that the neighbor- hood had the potential to be an “A” student if given the right resources. Winding back down Compton Street and taking in the new buildings and “for sale” signs scattered ev- erywhere, he’s changed his assessment. All the student needed was some Cliffs- Notes, and it got there on its own. “Dallas hasn’t really talked about if a neighborhood is being gentrified, not by white communities, like we’ve come to ex- pect. What if it’s being gentrified by wealth- ier people who may have had some kind of connection to the community, and now they’re coming back, but they’re coming back for something drastically larger?” Carden, who is white and Black, said. “How does that conversation go? That hasn’t been something that has played out, and that tells you we still have some biases to work out.” For Lavine, the founder of the neighbor- hood’s action group, the word gentrification has become associated with the baggage of displacement, but he’d like to reframe that thinking. Born in Opelousas, Louisiana, Lavine, who is Black, attended school in New Or- leans and received degrees in physics and electrical engineering. He lived there for a few years while working at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi but decided to move to North Texas in 2015 for better ca- reer opportunities. He bought land in Brent- wood that year, even though he was living in Grand Prairie at the time. He started a brand consulting business, dabbled in real estate and life coaching, and, in 2022, built his dream home on the empty lot in southern Dallas he’d purchased years earlier. All that to say, Lavine encapsulates the type of career professional moving into the neighborhood, and he’s had to reckon with his role in the changing landscape. “I look at it as I am part of the evolution. … I put the onus on me to represent that and to also remain rooted in the community,” Lavine said. “The way gentrification has typically happened, it’s not been evolution- ary. It’s just been a disruptive change right out. Societal evolution, that’s different be- cause we’re all meant to evolve, right? We just have to embrace the evolution and un- derstand how we fit into the change.” When Lavine first came to the area, he saw the neighborhood as an “opportunity waiting to happen.” He was at the beginning of the multi-story modern home owner wave (his second floor has a view of down- town), and he started the community action group as a way to address the concerns he shared with neighbors. Issues like prostitu- tion, loitering and dumping were things he knew would be taken more seriously by the city if they were backed by an organized neighborhood group. Unfair Park from p3 Nathan Hunsinger The Brentwood boom forged new construction next to legacy properties. >> p6
