These neighbors have very different ideas of what the future of their neighborhood should look like.
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Residents of North Boulevard Terrace and West Kessler, the more affluent neighborhood that overlooks the land the development would be built on, are against the proposal. They were against it in 2015, when Chernock first tried to get the proposal through, and they’re against it now, especially because he sits on the quasi-judicial board that could approve the rezoning request.
To hear Beckham tell it, the neighborhood was open to a compromise but the whole thing fell through when the requested decrease in density would have resulted in a smaller paycheck for the developer. To hear Chernock tell it, the design was adjusted a dozen times before he realized the neighborhood would never stop moving the goalposts. Listening to both sides in 2024, it's no wonder a compromise was never achieved.
“You don’t want to add density to a high-mobility street,” he says, pointing to the map. “It’s totally counterintuitive.” “Then it goes to council, and during that time, up to council I mean, the fight was really on, because the tensions were high, the stakes were high, and you know, the gloves were off,” Beckham told theIn response to the contentious relationship between West Kessler and Chernock, filmmaker and neighbor Kirby Warnock created a series of videos that mocked the development and dug in a bit personally on Chernock, which Beckham says were “hilarious.
The plan’s latest iteration includes an apartment building of up to 100 units, although it will probably end up being fewer because of the steep topography. An additional 45 multifamily units and manor homes are drawn up for the eastern half of the property, and a road leading out to Hampton would be gated and used only by first responders in the event of an emergency. Traffic is planned to travel along an extension of North Boulevard Terrace and across a bridge over the creek.
Chernock submitted the rezoning requests in May, and they have not yet been added to a CPC agenda. When the case is scheduled, it's almost guaranteed the public comment will include fiery opposition, and Chernock isn't allowed to defend himself or his project. “If this is what the commissioner thinks we should be doing with all our land in Dallas and all our single-family homes, this is alarming for a lot of people who are not comfortable with Forward Dallas,” Beckham says. “They use this term, you hear it a lot, gentle density. This is the opposite of gentle density. This is a hostile takeover of a neighborhood.”
In 2015, when the neighbors received a notice about a planned development at the end of their street, they didn’t think much of it.
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