December 2010 Update: DHA Master Plan

To everyone who worked on the project this past summer and has been tracking its progress, the Lakewest Towne Center project portfolios have been turned in to the Housing Authority. DHA has just begun its Master Planning process to create a blueprint for all of the vacant land that it owns between Hampton Road and Westmoreland. There will be at least four segments of community meetings between now and mid-Spring to help determine the “best and highest use” for the land. The Lakewest shopping center designs that the Young Developers came up with will be presented in the next round of community meetings on December 13th and 15th and drawn from as the architecture firm BSW creates the final Master Plan for the area. We look forward to some of the Young Developers joining in the Master Planning process!

Final Design Review Day

It’s finally here! The last day of our first Young Developers Project internship and the day for the final review of the Young Developers’ designs, the culmination of their work this summer. The interns arrived all dressed up at the Mattie Nash-Myrtle Davis Recreation Center on Hampton Road, where we held the review in a room with windows looking out at the green grass, tall trees, and playground a few yards away. The interns and some of their families gathered with other invited guests and mingled until everyone arrived, the interns nervously checking their materials. The winning prize was $500 for each team member.

The review panel was a mix of West Dallas community and nonprofit leaders and professionals in urban design:

• Pat Stephens, President and Founder, Westmoreland Heights Community Center
• Tim Lott, Director of Capital Projects, Dallas Housing Authority
• Brent Brown, Director, and Arturo Del Castillo, Urban Designer, Dallas City Design Studio
• Roxanne Morales, Board Member, Vecinos Unidos
• Regina Nippert, Director, Dallas Faith Communities Coalition

Once we began, each student group stood and presented their design components one by one. After each of their three pieces were presented, the panel had time to ask them questions for clarification or to prod their rationale. Once the designs were all presented, the panel took each design package into the next room to make a decision. While the panel was deciding, Teddy and Stephanie presented the interns with awards for their accomplishments and personality qualities that we admired from working together over the summer.

The panel reviewers returned – and said it was too hard to make a decision! All the interns did such wonderful work that while one group was chosen based primarily on their sustainability report as well as their drawings, all other interns received a $150 bonus. The winning design group, however, was Johnathan Williamson and JT Caraway. You can view their sustainability report below with the pictures.

It was a bittersweet day. We had driven each other crazy at times but had also grown close as a team. The interns were ready to split and have fun after six hard weeks of work; but they promised to keep in touch. It was an incredible summer of learning together and from each other…a job well done. Thank you everyone…thank you Summer 2010 interns.

Preparing Our Final Designs

We spent the last several days of our internship preparing our designs for the final review. We were set up in four groups of two, and each group competed for the best final development design according to three criteria:

1. Holistic & restorative in nature - socially and environmentally healthy
2. Sustainability – economically, environmentally, and socially (Will it be good for the environment and create a good place for people to be? Will it go out of style in 5 years?)
3. Long-term asset-based economic development, with the main goal being to empower current residents, and with the ability to adapt to needs as the neighborhood evolves.

Each group’s design package had to include 1) an elevation view drawing, 2) a site plan, and 3) a sustainability report. We stayed late the night before the review working overtime! Luckily, we decided to order pizza to help us focus.

Final Design Components

Community Charrette

The students arrived early the day of the charrette. A major part of their project was conducting a mini charrette on their own – like the type the City Design Studio has been holding in La Bajada. The couple of weeks leading up to the charrette the students spent time pouring themselves into learning about the charrette process. Rich Laughlin at the Charrette Center describes this process:

“In many ways, a charrette is a creative ‘tornado in reverse.’ The event begins with a multitude of information scattered about and, with a flurry of activity, concludes in a coherent vision for a real place.”

The term “charrette,” we learned from Regina Nippert, comes from the French word for “cart.” Back in French design schools a few centuries ago, architects would be hurriedly finishing their renderings before they were due and would toss them onto a cart that the professor rolled around the room to collect the drawings for grading. The cart became a metaphor for the process of hastily collecting as much information as one could before making a final decision. Today, the charrette is usually a several-day to several-month process of urban planners and architects receiving input from all stakeholders of a proposed project that they may implement into the design of the project for the best interest of all parties involved.

This process is just now starting to be applied in Dallas. If our students are to really create a successful design, it must be both relevant and beneficial to the surrounding community, and they must be open to critique before their plans are solidified.

They worked all afternoon on each of their roles for the charrette: we had invited around 150 people, expecting 30-50 to show up. We held it at the unoccupied Habitat offices diagonally across from the shopping center. Several tables were set up around the room so that community members could discuss the ideas in small groups and draw their feedback directly onto large printouts of the plans. The flow was to be a general overview of the project, followed by presentations and feedback of 1) the site plan, 2) the elevation view, and 3) amenities. Charlie was our MC - the young man has admirable talent for public speaking. Johnathan, Jamie, and Darius presented their drawings in the listed three segments. Gerald was our scribe, who took notes of the whole thing, and JT, Solomon, and Daniel were table discussion leaders. We had lively conversations about what stores we need, where to put water fountains, what themes we should incorporate into the design, and how people got to the center when they traveled there.

Everyone rested well after that night, and our students were filled with a new confidence and energy for the project, which waned a bit as the end drew near. We set to work incorporating the feedback we received into our designs for our last two days of the internship, before we turned the designs in for our final review.

“Sometimes it is not comfortable to hear everything the public has to offer. People who show up at planning meetings are typically better prepared to tell you what they don’t like than what they do. But it is much more practical to hear it all when something can be done, as opposed to hearing about it at a public hearing. A charrette planning process is the best forum for this to occur, because it draws people toward positive results.” www.charrettecenter.net

The Retail Connection: Connecting with Retail Specialists David and Michael

Two other very special guests who worked with us to understand how to develop a shopping center were David Wilson and Michael Thum from a company called The Retail Connection. We were connected with them by a mutual friend Brooke, our Development Director at DFCC. David is in charge of the retail investment area of the company, and Michael works in tenant representation and project leasing. David and Michael came to talk with us about how to decide what types of stores fit best together in a retail center development. We looked at the site plan for the Lakewest Shopping Center and minimization of direct competition within the center so that rather than having two dollar stores and three beauty shops that carry basically the same things, people would have a variety of different stores to choose from. David showed us the example of the high-end Arlington Heights retail development that their company has worked on along with a financial statement depicting how the company spent money developing the land in a pleasing way for people while still making a profit. Brooke helped bring the head-hurting financials to all of our level by asking good questions so that we could learn to budget our project!

Michael walked us through the process of determining what stores to invite in. We determined we need a center that serves as a destination as well as a shop-and-go place. Right now, Charlie said, people go to the center just to buy what they need and get out as quickly as possible because it is not a welcoming environment. If we clean it up in the right way and make it a place where people want to stay (rest areas with benches and trees, shops that allow people to sit down and eat or meander), then more people will want to come and will spend money, have fun, and feel safer too.

We decided we need the following tenants:

• A bank – there currently is no bank in West Dallas at all
• A large, sit-down family diner/restaurant – right now there is only fast food, with the exception of a rarely frequented hole in the wall spot
• A fun place that teens would like, like an arcade
• A coffee/ice cream/dessert place with an internet cafe

To maintain our goal of asset-based development but also maintain economic stability within the center, we support a healthy mixture of chain/franchise stores and locally-owned microenterprise.

Tim Lott, DHA’s Director of Capital Projects Visits Us

We had the privilege of working in partnership with the Dallas Housing Authority in this project. Tim Lott is a good friend and businessman who deeply cares about the West Dallas community, as he has worked in it for years and oversaw the building of the new public housing apartments that replaced the old projects. He oversees the business of the shopping center, its tenants and maintenance, and as we were working on this project was in process of receiving bids for an architectural firm to redesign the center; because of his interest in our Young Developers Project, Tim agreed that our final designs would go directly into the hands of the firm contracted to complete the project, so that as many of our ideas as possible might be incorporated into the new center.

Tim told us stories of his childhood and how he got into his career with DHA. He told us of the process of designing the new housing developments, and that the reason they put fences around the Hamptons, Villa Creek, Kingbridge, and Lakeview was that it was a request from residents to have the feel of being like the more upscale gated communities. He told us there were things he was proud of and that he felt succeeded, and there were things he would do over again if he could. He shared with us his ideas and hopes for the shopping center, and about its history, how he had struggled to get and keep a major grocer in it, and subsequently other businesses that fed off that anchor store.

Tim gave us the perspective of an older, wiser planner who has experienced and seen a lot in the years he’s been working with DHA.  We were grateful for our time with him, and very thankful as well that he was able to be part of our final design review team for our interns’ designs.

Random Pics: A Taste of YDP 2010!