The Battle for Preston Hollow's Soul
Steve Collins, a real estate agent from the neighborhood who led the fight against the Tom Thumb 19 years ago, sums up his concerns by conjuring an image of children being mowed down by speeding apartment residents. Renters, he says, "might come down the street a little bit faster [than homeowners] when our kids are out playing. They don't have the same stake in the neighborhood. That's just a fact of life."
In the following days, Parks, the keeper of the neighborhood email database and the homeowner with the most to lose, channeled her neighbors' simmering outrage into a coordinated opposition campaign. She circulated an online survey that revealed overwhelming opposition to any development higher than the three stories allowed by the zoning rules and followed up with an anti-Transwestern petition that quickly surpassed 1,000 signatures. "No 8-Story High Rise" signs were next, hundreds of them quickly printed and planted in front yards. The neighborhood hired Michael Jung, a former member of the City Plan Commission and one of the most influential neighborhood preservation lawyers in the city.
On February 19, three days before neighbors were scheduled to rally against the development in Preston Hollow Park, Transwestern announced that it would scale back plans from eight stories to six and knock the number of units down from 296 to 220. They would also set aside land for a right-turn lane from Northwest Highway onto Preston Road, widen sidewalks and put a small, publicly accessible park between Parks' house and the apartments.
Parks and her neighbors were unmoved. Hundreds of homeowners showed up for the rally, still angry that Transwestern wanted to build apartments next door. Kleinman came armed with his labradoodle, Buddy. "No one's going to throw anything at me with my dog here," he joked as he took the microphone. He explained, as he had at the meeting in January, that he would not be opposing Transwestern. He never explicitly endorsed the plan either, but he has distanced himself from the neighborhood's fears. Dallas needs to become denser to grow its tax base, he says, and there's no reason an eight-story apartment complex and a suburban-style subdivision can't coexist side-by-side. He also thinks there are "some misconceptions about what happens in those apartments."
Preston Hollow is accustomed to having its interests protected at City Hall. For more than two decades its representatives on the City Council -- Jerry Bartos, Donna Blumer, Mitchell Rasansky, Ann Margolin -- have been staunch defenders of the status quo. To have Kleinman downplay their concerns was a new feeling. "Our neighborhood felt like now we're your constituents and you're not listening to us," Parks says. "So really, if he wasn't going to vote for us and Jennifer was out, all of a sudden what was going to happen in our backyard? People didn't feel like they had a voice, like they had a vote, and they were really upset about that."
The neighborhood, though, hadn't yet unleashed its secret weapon, a neighbor who, perhaps better than anyone in the city, knew how to make things happen -- and, more important, not happen -- at City Hall.
Former Dallas Mayor Laura Miller left office in 2007 and made a quick retreat from public life. She took a job with Seattle-based Summit Power, leading the charge to build a "clean coal" power plant in West Texas, and otherwise made good on her pledge to devote herself to raising her three kids. Her youngest, Max, she sent off to Stanford this fall. Aside from wading briefly into the debate over Museum Tower's glare (she's against it) and endorsing the occasional candidate -- former Police Chief David Kunkle over Mike Rawlings for mayor in 2011, developer Leland Burk over Jennifer Gates for City Council District 13 in 2013 -- she's stayed mum on local issues.
The now-dead project proposed for Northwest Highway, east of Preston.
Miller lives with her husband, former state Representative Steve Wolens, in a sprawling, $4 million estate on Dentwood Drive in the heart of Old Preston Hollow, complete with three fireplaces and detached servant's quarters. Around February, she began hearing rumblings about an eight-story apartment complex being planned a half mile to the east. The email blasts Parks was sending out filled her in on the details.
Two deeply held beliefs propelled Miller into the Transwestern fight. One is that Dallas needs to protect the suburban character of the neighborhoods stretching from Northwest Highway north to Forest Lane by keeping out dense, multi-family developments. In office, this came across in Miller's tendency to side with neighbors over developers (especially Wal-mart) in zoning spats, as well as the adoption in 2006 of Forward Dallas, a comprehensive zoning plan that championed increased density so long as it steered clear of "stable residential areas." The other deeply held belief: that the traffic at Preston and Northwest Highway sucks.
"Northwest Highway is the street I spend most of my time on," she says. "If I want to get to NorthPark, if I want to get to the Tollway, if I want to go to Central, if I want to go to Preston Center, I take Northwest Highway." The traffic that congeals there at lunch and during morning and evening rush hours is bad enough that, for excursions to NorthPark, she cuts through the streets of Preston Hollow East to to save time and aggravation. One of her mistakes as mayor, she says, was allowing a bank on the southern end of Preston Center to be rezoned for a mid-rise residential building in 2007. That project went belly-up, and a large office building is now going up on the site. "I regret that building," she says. "Back in 2005 whenever it was we did that, I didn't particularly see a traffic problem."
Miller, a former Dallas Observer columnist whose famous shake-it-till-its-neck-snaps tenacity is as likely to be triggered by a traffic gripe as a threat to her deeply held values, set to work. She gathered an intimidating roster of current and former politicians, including state Senator John Carona and County Commissioner Mike Cantrell, and demanded that Kleinman host a public meeting. When Kleinman blew her off, she fired off a letter to Gates demanding his replacement. When that didn't happen, she strode into Transwestern's public meetings to argue the case on its merits. She had the same complaints as the neighbors -- too dense, too much traffic -- but she delivered them with a gravitas unique to former mayors/alt-weekly columnists. No one dared interrupt her when the time limit placed on other speakers expired.
Her involvement transformed the case from an obscure, rich-people zoning fight into a topic of interest citywide and amped up pressure on Transwestern, which in August scaled back plans for a second time, knocking the development from six stories to four and from 220 units to 196. That was the death knell. To get its plans off the ground, the firm had lined up the dozen homeowners on Townhouse Row and the owners of the corner apartment complex and convinced them to sell, offering the townhome owners upward of $1 million each, more than three times their market price. As Transwestern's plans were scaled back, though, so too were its offers on Townhouse Row. When the project reached four stories, the townhome owners pulled. Pamela Smith, who leads the group of townhouse owners, declined to comment beyond saying the homes are still on the market.
Jung, the attorney hired by Preston Hollow East, thinks neighbors would have toppled Transwestern even without Miller. Under state law, if at least 20 percent of property owners within 200 feet of a proposed development file a formal protest -- and Jung would have had that many, easy -- a zoning change requires approval from a three-fourths vote of a City Council. Which means that neighbors would have had to peel only four votes away from Transwestern instead of eight. After meeting with several sympathetic council members, he says he had at least that many in his pocket.
Gates' recusal made it a slam dunk. Because each member of the City Council theoretically knows his or her district best, and because each will one day have a pet project they'd like approved, zoning cases are decided according to the wishes of the council member whose district it falls in. With Gates out, this dynamic disappeared. Council members who might have thought twice about voting against Gates would have no trouble bucking Kleinman, Jung says. He was the substitute teacher of lawmakers, easily trampled.
In fact, by the time Jung got around to counting votes, Miller's attention, like that of a cat tired of batting around a dead mouse, had wandered to new prey. "As soon as I started working on Transwestern, Lee Kleinman called me. 'You're still concerned about this little case?'" she remembers him asking. "[What about] the really big case across the street?'"
The case across the street, in Preston Center, was Crosland's. Miller decided at a glance that she wanted it dead, too.
Crosland has been yearning to build something transformational in Preston Center since he first surveyed it three decades ago. In the early 1990s, he had a vision of replacing the outmoded parking garage with a Niketown, movie theater or high-end stores. In the 2000s, it had evolved into an apartment tower and a Marriott hotel. Then he wanted to build an even taller apartment tower on the spot where Hopdoddy now flips burgers.
Crosland's proposed Highland House, killed dead in part by Laura Miller.
None of those projects came close to being built. The standalone apartment tower was shot down by Rasansky, and any development that touches the parking garage has to be approved by the 70 or so owners of the surrounding retail buildings, a doubtful prospect given Crosland's contentious relationship with his neighbors.
Crosland "has consistently made the other owners in the center unhappy," says Bill Willingham, a longtime Preston Center property owner. Their long-simmering dispute is rooted partly in a disagreement over the best use of the garage (Crosland-built development or parking lot), partly in Crosland's refusal to cover his share of its upkeep (his current bill is upward of $200,000, though he points out the dues are voluntary and contends he's being overcharged) and partly in the sharp-elbowed way Crosland sometimes does business.
His reputation dates to his early days as a developer. In the 1980s, when he was rezoning property on Maple and Oak Lawn avenues for what would later become the Observer building, he reportedly promised neighbors he wouldn't build a drive-thru bank. Then he built a drive-thru bank. And his disputes, both business and personal, have a tendency to end in protracted legal battles. He and restaurateur Phil Romano traded blows in court a decade ago after the Preston Center lobster joint they partnered on went south. Over the summer, he thrust his ongoing divorce battle into the headlines when he sued his estranged wife's alleged lover, UT Southwestern Medical Center's chief plastic surgeon, Dr. Rod Rohrich. According to Crosland, his wife and Rohrich had conspired to sell a $1.1 million diamond Crosland had bought for his wife so they could finance the publication of Navigate Your Beauty, a cosmetic surgery guidebook they'd collaborated on.
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