My question — asked in hope three years ago — now looks only naïve.
When the first starkly modern houses shot up in Mount Auburn — towering over the 100-year-old cottages of working-income families and retired folks on modest incomes — I wrote:
“Gentrification creeps deeper into East Dallas. Will this time be different?”
Nope.
Just north of Interstate 30 and west of Samuell-Grand Park, Mount Auburn has long been the last affordable community for working folks near the city’s center.
While badly dilapidated and barely patched houses exist here or there, most of the neighborhood’s small homes are charming and well-cared for, with magnificent flower beds and century-old trees.
Long home to young families and senior citizens, artists and activists, renters and longtime owners, Mount Auburn is increasingly also the choice of people with a lot more wealth.
The hundreds of original residences still vastly outnumber the mega-modern houses and duplexes. But the construction damage is already visible: The average property-tax bill for old homes in Mount Auburn has skyrocketed the past decade — particularly the past four years — from $1,500 to $4,250, a 183% increase.
Neighborhood advocate Lisa Lopez is accustomed to residents knocking on her door when they need help, and these days the visitors come to say they cannot afford the taxes. “Those were not happy endings for those families,” she told me. “They were forced to sell.”
None of the dozen or so residents I talked with blame the newcomers who have bought the big new homes. Their anger is at investors and developers who have long circled like vultures over Mount Auburn.
Forty years ago, residents thought they had saved their neighborhood from market forces by getting the area’s unprotected zoning designation changed to a planned development. But as community organizer John Fullinwider pointed out after this modern construction boom began, “even non-speculative zoning cannot withstand the raw economic power that builds a $750,000 house next to a little frame building that’s on the tax rolls for $58,000.”
What I heard in all my interviews was a cry for every resident’s voice to be heard. If City Hall chose to listen, this is what it would hear:
Sarah Mendoza grew up in Mount Auburn with her five siblings, mother and stepfather in a house on Garland Avenue where her grandmother still lives.
Sarah, now 33, loves this neighborhood with all her heart. Yet despite a degree from Texas State and a solid job in social work, she can’t afford to live here.
After almost a year’s search for something in her price range, she finally settled on nearby Owenwood, south of I-30, for herself and her 4-year-old son.
“It’s not so far away, but I wanted to be in Mount Auburn, to be close to my family because that’s my support system,” Sarah told me.
Her brother and his family care for their grandmother in the Garland Avenue home. Her mother, uncle and aunt also still live in the neighborhood.
As a child, Sarah accompanied her grandmother as she sold her homemade tamales throughout Mount Auburn. “We’d park in front of a house, she would chit-chat with a neighbor, sell her tamales, then move on to the next house.
“I know so many people because of that,” Sarah told me. “Looking back, it’s a beautiful thing.”
Sarah has become friends with many of the newcomers to Mount Auburn, but she’s discouraged about what’s happening.
She and her longtime Mount Auburn friends — proud Woodrow Wilson High School alums and many of them teachers and municipal employees — say the changes leave them with little opportunity to make a good life for themselves.
“People need workforce housing,” she said, “and without it, we are put in a tough situation.”
City Hall devotes energy to creating a robust economy for development, Sarah said, but not so much to addressing Mount Auburn’s crime, unemployment and “resources for people barely getting by.”
Oscar Aparicio returned a decade ago after college to the Mount Auburn home that has been in his family for more than half a century. But he’s not sure how much longer he will be able to hang on.
It’s important to Oscar, who is 33 and works for Dallas County, to keep the Garland Avenue home in the family, especially because he and wife Gisselle have a 7-year-old son and a daughter on the way.
“Looking at those taxes, can we continue being here, especially with me having a new baby and property taxes coming due just a few months after she is born?” Oscar told me.
“They put up these homes, but who is it really helping?” he asked. “We’re … just paying more money to live there even though we’ve lived there forever.
“It’s like it’s not our community anymore. It’s like we’re getting pushed aside and kicked out.”
Lisa Lopez hears stories like these every day.
The lifelong Mount Auburn resident, who met her husband, Salvador, at Woodrow, cut her advocacy teeth on classroom-equity issues when their four children began public school.
In the 1990s, drive-by shootings and deadly speeders led her also to speak out on neighborhood issues.
Lisa said much work remains to stop the reckless speeders on her streets, the random gunfire and the occasional robberies.
But what would she most like to change? “Stop the houses from going up,” she said without hesitation.
“Three or four years ago, people were happy,” she said. “Then a house goes up and your taxes go up and then another house goes up. We are at four times what we were paying four years ago.”
Lisa noted that many of her neighbors are housekeepers or mechanics whose incomes rarely increase. “So they are losing their homes and having to move in with other family members.
“I could fall into that same category,” she said.
On Cameron Street, home to the largest concentration of new construction, Karen Roberts and Jeanne Chvosta have lived next door to each other for more than 40 years.
They’ve seen some of Mount Auburn’s worst days, for instance during the 1990s, when a drug house openly did business for several years on their block. Having lived alongside rentals where owners often didn’t care whom they rented to, Karen said, “I wouldn’t trade these new neighbors for anything.”
Roberts credits the newcomers with helping out in all sorts of ways — banding together to fight the proposal for a large football stadium in nearby Willis Winters Park, helping rebuild the neighborhood association and keeping City Hall on speed dial to report problems.
The two women share their neighbors’ concerns about the loss of affordable housing, “but that’s happening all over the city,” Karen said. Yet even with the exemptions that come with her senior citizen status, she’s nervous about the upward climb of her own tax bill.
Sky-high taxes sparked Denise and Stephen Knitch’s move to one of the new houses near Karen in April 2019 from their Lakewood home of 30 years.
Denise acknowledged that the change hasn’t been “100% wonderful,” but she said she’s slowly making inroads with her neighbors, even when she can’t speak their language.
She’s rallied her block to get city lights repaired and drains cleaned out, but she remains baffled by the condition of the neighborhood’s streets, curbs and most flagrant code violations.
“I have to keep reminding her — this isn’t Lakewood,” Karen said, laughing.
Rudy and Katherine Karimi were among the first to move into a new home on the edge of Mount Auburn along the Santa Fe Trail.
Even after four years, they are mindful of still being newcomers, so Rudy’s response has been to volunteer at every opportunity and try to make Mount Auburn better for everyone.
He led the “Our Park, No Stadium” fight at Willis Winters Park and got speed cushions and stop signs installed near the Woodrow campus.
Rudy wants to do his part to help Mount Auburn rise up. “We aren’t speaking up. We are marginalized. We don’t feel like we can ask for — or even demand — something from the city.”
City Hall needs to hear voices like these and do what it can to preserve this neighborhood’s diversity before it’s too late.
