Dallas Neighborhoods Fight Toxic Zoning

Patrick Sisson profiles the residents fighting to clean up the communities of southern and western Dallas. "Ringed by highways and dense with cement plants, warehouses, factories and landfills, these once-rural tracts of land are now the most contaminated in the city."

To fight polluters, residents, environmental activists and public health advocates have had to take on another powerful, mostly invisible foe: the zoning regulations that forced Black and brown communities on the wrong side of I-30 and the Trinity River to bear the brunt of industrial pollution.

Now, local activists are looking for ways to use zoning to their advantage. "'Zoning has been a tool to weaponize land against communities of color, and now communities of color are saying, wait, this is a tool we can use to restore our neighborhoods,' says Collin Yarbrough, a local activist and author of Paved A Way: Infrastructure, Policy and Racism in an American City, which explores Dallas’s legacy of economic segregation."

These efforts have gotten attention at City Hall, too. "In August 2021 the city launched Forward Dallas, an effort to reform future land use in the city. Citing the need to 'reevaluate existing land use policies and adopt new, more equitable and sustainable strategies,' the city’s rezoning initiative promises to acknowledge the systemic failures and injustices that drew its zoning map, and fix them."

The article points out that "The history of zoning and environmental injustice intersects with property values and the long history of redlining. The least expensive neighborhoods, those with fewer resources and support, tend to be where lower-income residents and communities of color can set down roots, as well as where highways and polluting industries are directed." Advocates are using science-based evidence to push for zoning reform that would regulate industrial uses to protect vulnerable neighborhoods.  

According to Dallas director of planning and urban design Julia Ryan, "the planning department is reaching out to neighborhood groups and hopes to have a draft plan by the middle of next year." Ryan "intends to study the plans developed by different neighborhoods, establish land use policies that include buffers for certain uses, and 'look at areas from an environmental justice standpoint and follow up with recommendations for zoning changes.'"