| UNFAIR PARK | Bike Paths Dallas is drawing up new plans to make the city more bike friendly. BY KATE PEZZULLI L ate last year, Dallas City Council allocated $2 million to rebuild the city’s bicycling infrastructure, and recently they released an up- date to this plan and a timeline to complete it. The new bikeway master plan is meant to be an update to the 2011 version and in- cludes identifying and updating the core bi- cycle network, updating design standards for facilities and ensuring route feasibility based on traffic engineering and safety. The planning process for the Dallas bike- way began in January this year and is set to be completed in April 2023. The April dead- line is just for completing the planning stage and not the completion of the bikeway itself. Dallas first introduced plans to build a more bike-friendly city in 2011. That pro- gram, known as the City’s 2011 Bike Plan, laid out far-reaching goals, but there are only a little more than five miles of protected bike lanes on Dallas streets, D Magazine re- ported in December. This new design will span the city with the goal of creating a safe, accessible and comfortable bicycle network. Dallas, as of now, doesn’t have that great of a record when it comes to public transportation, in- cluding ease of cycling routes. Still, Dallas has high hopes that this new project will provide something that avid cy- clists would look forward to, even if they re- main a bit skeptical. “It’s getting better every year,” said Rich- ard Hellberg, the operations manager at Dal- las Bike Works, a popular bike shop near White Rock Lake. “Will it ever be great? It’s pretty questionable for Dallas.” The city has provided a detailed docu- ment outlining its plan for public involve- ment in this project, citing that “at the heart of updating the Dallas Bike Plan is including the voices of the community it will serve.” This new project is not the only plan in Dallas to increase bicycling accessibility around the city. The Circuit Trail Conser- vancy (CTC) plans to create The Loop, a 50- mile path for pedestrians and cyclists. While these are two separate projects, both the CTC and the city have worked to- gether to create a new Dallas bike system. “The bikeway update is for what’s con- 44 sidered on-street facilities, and the Loop is off-street facilities,” said Philip Hiatt Haigh, The Loop’s executive director. “So, really it makes sense for those two to be connected because, you know, trails aren’t going to be able to lead you everywhere, and so you need a really comprehensive on-street sys- tem in order to make it really effective.” or when they look for housing, the stark fail- ure of Congress’ spend-your-way-to-pros- perity policy starts to sink in.” Emmer added, “While many Americans can’t afford a full tank of gas or to buy meat at the grocery store, our subcommittee is fo- cusing on institutional homeownership in the home rental market.” He said that single-family rentals serve a large portion of the population who “prefer or need to rent.” “We cannot demonize institutions for fa- cilitating this supply of quality housing that otherwise would be out of the realm of pos- sibility for many Americans due to the eco- nomic consequences of inflation,” he said. Alternatively, Chairwoman Maxine Wa- Unsplash Hiatt Haigh has seen an increase in pub- lic interest in The Loop, which he said has had a lot of momentum and fundraising success. “I think the big thing was COVID,” Hiatt Haigh said. “The number of people who needed a space to be out and to do things just skyrocketed. … This is our opportunity to take advantage of that shift and make sure that it’s sustained into the future.” He supports Dallas’ new bikeway plans and has been working directly with the city to integrate street paths with The Loop’s trail system. Meanwhile, the city has started the first phase of public engagement with a survey, which will be available until Sunday, July 17. Survey takers can also add comments to an interactive web map where they can draw lines and drop waypoints. “I’m super excited for the city, and I think this is the right time for them to be doing the bikeway,” Hiatt Haigh said. “I think that the biggest … piece that they’re going to need, though, is the support from the public to actually deliver these projects … because if not, then, you know, that’s just another missed opportunity.” ▼ HOUSING SHORT SUPPLY investors are snatching up properties across the country, including here in Dallas, isn’t making things any easier for the people Roll- ins works with as the executive director of Texas Tenants’ Union. “We’d much rather see people being able A to acquire housing if they’re ready for home- ownership and not having to compete with [these investors],” Rollins said. THE NUMBER OF HOMES PURCHASED BY INSTITUTIONAL INVESTORS IS INCREASING. CONGRESS WANTS TO KNOW WHAT THAT’S DOING TO THE HOUSING MARKET. BY JACOB VAUGHN s far as Sandy Rollins is concerned, tenants are facing a brutal housing market. The fact that institutional Dallas City Council set aside $2 million to rebuild Dallas’s bicycle path system. Instead, Rollins said they’re seeing peo- ple priced out of their homes, in both the rental and homeowner markets. “We talk to people every day who are facing these outra- geous rent increases,” she said. Even proper- ties reserved for people making less than the average income are dishing out triple-digit rent increases. The impact these investors have on the housing market is still uncertain, but it’s a question that’s sparked a congressional in- vestigation. The Congressional Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations has been looking into the influx of investor home- buying. A June 23 memo from the commit- tee explained that the 2008 recession created a huge supply of for-sale homes, made available by all the foreclosures at the time. That’s when corporate ownership of single-family homes began to rise. In 2011, no single investor owned more than 1,000 homes, according to the memo. But there’s been a shift in the last 10 years, with investors making 52% of 2021 home purchases in Tarrant County, and 43% in Dallas County. Counties in many parts of the country are seeing similar numbers, espe- cially in communities of color. On June 28, the subcommittee held a hearing over the findings of its investiga- tion. Party lines divided the committee when it came to what consequences they thought investors have on the housing market. U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer, a Minnesota Re- publican and a ranking member of the sub- committee, said their investigation was misguided and that institutional investors were being used as a scapegoat for the real problems at hand: poor housing policy de- cisions by Democrats and rising inflation. “Today, Americans are being punched in the face with 8.6% inflation,” he said at the hearing late last month. “When our constit- uents go to the grocery store, the gas pump ters, a Democrat from California, said these investors are going into communities and buying up homes that would be available to individuals if financial institutions gave them the loans they needed to become homeowners. The witnesses at the hearing were a bit more unified in their thoughts. “Institutional landlords have seized the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to expand their reach even further into our homes,” Sofia Lopez, a deputy campaign di- rector at the Action Center on Race and the Economy, told the committee. “Private equi- ty’s business model hinges on boosting reve- nue, cutting costs, and maximizing efficiencies. … This is a recipe for disaster: In housing, it translates into exorbitant rent in- creases.” But there was an outlier on the witness list, Jenny Schuetz, a senior fellow at Brook- ings Metro. “The growth of institutional in- vestors is a symptom, rather than the cause, of extremely tight housing markets,” Schuetz told the committee. “Institutional investors benefit from tight housing supply, but they did not create the problem.” In the last decade, the demand for hous- ing has grown, but the production hasn’t kept up. Schuetz said local governments are partially to blame. “Since the Great Recession, the U.S. has not built enough housing, leading to histori- cally low vacancy rates and rapidly rising costs,” she said. “Local governments across the U.S. have adopted policies that make it difficult to build more homes where people want to live.” Dallas City Council member Chad West told the Observer something similar last week. “We are not building enough homes both for sale and for rent in Dallas to accom- modate everyone that wants to move to Dal- las,” West said. “That’s why prices are going up so much.” Whatever the cause, the high prices are making it even harder for the people Roll- ins works with to one day become home- owners. “It’s a concern that the housing that’s com- ing on the market and the existing housing on the market is very expensive. And the condi- tions aren’t very good,” Rollins said. “Not ev- erybody wants to be a homeowner but obviously many people do and have not been able to get into homeownership.” >> p6 MONTH XX–MONTH XX, 2014 JULY 14–20, 2022 DALLAS OBSERVER DALLAS OBSERVER | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | MOVIES | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | FEATURE | SCHUTZE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS | CLASSIFIED | MUSIC | DISH | CULTURE | UNFAIR PARK | CONTENTS dallasobserver.comdallasobserver.com
