They Were Sold a Boulevard. What They Got Was a Highway.
Cesar Chavez Boulevard in Dallas, Texas, has all the trappings of a highway: oversized traffic signs hover above a road that stretches seven active lanes at its widest, nine if the seldom-used curbside parking is included. Yet, with a speed limit of 30 mph and townhomes hugging its perimeter, it is technically a city-owned street in a neighborhood home to students, families, retail, and a regionally famous farmer’s market. The resulting mismatch is bringing the area’s residents to their breaking point as they find it too dangerous to walk in the “walkable” neighborhood they thought they bought into.
With New Housing Comes New Responsibilities
“I can’t do anything downstairs,” Brad Sibley lamented. “I can’t watch TV down there, and when people come over, they’re too afraid to sleep on the first floor.”
Sibley is one of hundreds of Farmers Market District residents who live right on Cesar Chavez Boulevard, formerly known as the South Central Expressway. In fact, when Sibley first moved to the area in 2013, he recalled receiving mail still addressed to the road’s former name. Since then, the area has only grown denser, with retail, amenities, and homes all within walking distance. At the same time, other than a new name, the nine-lane road steps from his window hasn’t changed at all. “If this continues, I don’t know if I can’t take it,” he added. “I might have to leave.”
His building—like much of the neighborhood—was constructed with Tax Increment Financing, or TIF. Formally situated just outside of downtown Dallas, his TIF district was initially created to facilitate the redevelopment of vacant land adjacent to the Dallas Farmers Market, after which it was ultimately named. Since the project began over 10 years ago, the district has embraced a mixture of housing types and retail, parks, and is still slated to welcome a convention center.
When it comes to housing and retail, the district continuously exceeds its goals. For example, the 2021–2022 Annual Report for the district mentions that of the planned 1,700 housing units and 100,000 square feet of commercial, restaurant and farmers market, “2,059 residential units (121% of goal) (1,857 apartments, 202 townhomes) and 290,983 square feet of commercial space (291% of goal) have been completed.” At the same time, the neighbors feel one of the goals has fallen to the wayside, and it’s costing them their sanity.
“This has been a great area to revitalize,” Sibley said. “But you can’t do that while neglecting the infrastructure. So, now what you have is nice homes on a highway.”
“Someone’s going to get killed,” Sibley’s neighbor, Karen Pierre, a fourth-generation Dallas resident and real estate agent, cautioned. Another neighbor, Sana Syed, a multi-hyphenate professional who lives just across the street, joked that Pierre likely broke the “Guinness World Records of number of photographs of the intersection.” Pierre documents all of the collisions she witnesses right outside of her window and relays them to her local officials in the hopes that the city will actually transform this highway into a boulevard. “It’s a weekly occurrence,” she said.
In fact, just two days after Pierre spoke with Strong Towns, she cataloged another collision across the street from her home. In this instance, a pedestrian was struck and severely injured by a vehicle Pierre described as “speeding out of control.”
All the neighbors point out that speeds routinely exceed and even double the posted limit on Cesar Chavez Boulevard. “I’m often less worried about the occasional person pushing 70 mph,” Sibley mentioned. “And more concerned about how often people go 55 mph without even realizing it.”
With HOV lanes, oversized traffic signs, and wide lanes, they’re not surprised motorists treat the boulevard like a highway.
When Dreams Are Shattered, Support Is Not Enough
Like Sibley, Syed doesn’t know how long she can remain if nothing changes. She used to come to the famed farmer’s market after which the district is named on a regular basis and when an opportunity to live within walking distance opened up in 2020, she took it. “It was our dream to live at the Farmers Market,” she shared.
However, as pandemic-related restrictions began to lift, institutions reopened, and traffic returned to prior patterns, the relative tranquility of her adopted home shifted. She was shocked. Heading to the farmer’s market steps from her home is a death wish, and walking the dog induces a daily panic.
Now, most of Syed’s time is spent advocating for safety interventions alongside her neighbors. Syed, Sibley, Pierre, and Arianna Smith, a lawyer who lives adjacent to Syed, formed a task force. Their persistence is capturing the ears of city officials, for which they’re grateful. At the same time, the pace of progress—and whether they’ll see it at all—is discouraging.
“Our councilperson: supportive. Our transportation agencies: supportive, absolutely supportive. Downtown Dallas: very supportive. The Farmer’s Market Stakeholder Association: supportive,” Sibley listed. “I don’t know of any group that isn’t supportive, but I’m tired of people being supportive. Who is driving this? Where’s the timeline? Whose priority is this? I don’t want support; I want action.”
In response to their complaints, the city installed rumble strips. The neighbors recall a transportation official citing that the noise and vibrations produced by rumble strips can reduce speeds by 5 mph, a figure they didn’t dispute, but found insufficient for their situation. “And now I’m hearing every single car even louder,” Sibley added.
The rumble strips were ultimately removed and replaced by another intervention Pierre described as “even worse.” Dozens of cone-shaped reflectors began lining Cesar Chavez Boulevard and within days they graduated to projectiles, according to Pierre. “Cars would just drive right into and over them, causing them to fly into people’s windows, in one case, smashing one,” she shared. She recalled picking up as many as 55 displaced reflectors on a walk.
The neighbors don’t fault the city for the attempts, but they are frustrated with the pace of progress. Most of all, they want officials in the city to make transforming Cesar Chavez Boulevard a priority. “Why are we the only ones who care?” Sibley asked.
There’s a Way, but Is There a Will?
Ultimately, the task force wants to narrow the boulevard, ideally by widening the sidewalks to build in a buffer between the traffic and the housing. Widening the median is their secondary preference, but in the end, however it happens, they want to see the boulevard narrowed to two lanes with multiple opportunities to cross safely. Anything less would be as fruitful as the city’s previous attempts.
While involved, their vision isn’t some distant pipe dream. In fact, they believe they’re just a step away from making it reality. Because their neighborhood is a TIF district, it has a kind of bank account with a budget to be spent on neighborhood-specific improvements, Syed explained. Just over a million of those dollars is earmarked for public improvement projects like overhauling the boulevard.
We don't even have the biggest problem that we usually have,” Sibley added. “We actually have the money.”
In addition to the money available through TIF financing, the neighbors have established relationships with Downtown Dallas Inc., the steward of downtown, and hope to engage Verdunity, a Dallas-based planning and engineering firm, as a project manager. In other words, they’ve collected the cash and talent necessary to see the project through, leaving the city with one job: stepping aside and letting it happen.
While Cesar Chavez Boulevard is at the heart of their TIF district, the road falls under the jurisdiction of the city, meaning before any ground is broken, the city would need to lend its approval. The support and sympathy the neighbors have amassed from officials is coming in handy, but the city’s processes are standing in the way. Before authorizing the transformation residents of the Farmers Market have been dreaming of, Dallas would need to conduct a corridor study, which would first need to be put to a vote.
“That’ll take a year if not more,” Syed remarked. “I don’t know if I can wait that long.”
Hope on the Horizon
The neighbors are hopeful that with allies in the city, they can bypass the study and begin the long-awaited transformation by the start of 2024. With a collision ripping them out of bed every week, this is too urgent to let wait. “Seriously, someone is going to die here,” Pierre insisted.
Pierre is willing to wait however long it takes to get the boulevard she was promised. She was born just a mile from where she now lives and her first date with her now-husband was at the farmer’s market. Her investment in the neighborhood has too much sentimental value. “I don't want to leave. I want to see this get better and I want to be able to say: ‘Hey, I helped get this done,’” Pierre exclaimed. “But I want to see it done.”
Sibley, Syed, and Smith want to stay, as well. After all, they invested in a dream Dallas was building. They just want the city to recognize that building a walkable neighborhood takes more than apartments, retail, and a park. You actually need to be able to walk in it.
“To me, this is a story of prosperity,” Sibley said. “We’ve successfully revitalized an area—congratulations! But with prosperity comes responsibility. And the city has a responsibility to make the infrastructure correspond to the vision they’re trying to build out here.”
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.