mcmansions1

I wonder, because years ago I watched it happen in East Dallas …

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When I first started covering the White Rock area in 2007, I found myself in the middle of a battle among residents in one Lakewood-area community. Former friendly neighbors were feuding, name calling and shunning one another. What were they so worked up about? McMansions.

Some detested them; others were willing to fight for the right to build whatever-the-hell they wanted on their property (that generally was the tone). Then every week it was a different neighborhood warring over the same thing.

The chaos seemed to ensue shortly after the Dallas City Council created a tool for neighborhoods called the Neighborhood Stabilization Overlay — often shortened to NSO or “overlay”.

Before that there existed conservation and historic districts, by which homeowners associations/the city could inflict strict building restrictions on property owners, but the NSO was geared toward slightly newer neighborhoods. (These are complicated zoning laws and I admittedly am oversimplifying for the sake of getting to the point).

The purpose of these residential zoning tools is to “preserve the character and charm of homes threatened by demolition, neglect, improper zoning and incompatible infill,” notes former councilwoman Angela Hunt in an Advocate East Dallas column (in it, she also explains the process and offers her insight regarding recent proposed changes to conservation and historic districts).

Problem is, much of it is subjective (that is, before zoning is in place).

Based on what I witnessed in East Dallas, the McMansion-zoning issue rivaled religion and politics in its divisiveness.

It resulted in neighbors fighting over fundamental tastes, ideas and values. Here’s an example of one conversation I heard (paraphrased):

Homeowner 1: Your home is an ugly, obnoxious, McMansion that looks ridiculous in this neighborhood.
Homeowner 2: You are only jealous because you cannot afford to live in a big beautiful house like mine.

And those are the sorts of statements you can’t really take back.

So that all happened in East Dallas — Hunt notes that “East Dallas boasts more conservation districts, historic districts and neighborhood stabilization overlays than just about any other part of the city” — and Lake Highlands never really plummeted into the whole NSO fray.

However, after a couple of older homes in my L Streets neighborhood were demolished and replaced with new ones that dwarfed its neighbors, there were rumblings among my then-neighbors about “what could be done”.

Then the economy tanked and, for a while, it became less of an issue.

Around that time, I moved north to another Lake Highlands neighborhood.

mcmansions

Yesterday, while visiting the old neighborhood, I noticed some new builds that were overwhelming in size compared to the rest of the neighborhood’s houses. Of course at least one of the streets I drove down has so many big builds that you could almost argue that the tiny houses are now the out-of-character ones.

The new builds seem to stand out more in L Streets and Lake Highlands Estates, which typically feature quaint residences on smaller lots.

To date, there are no overlay proposals on my radar.