“In Dallas, building walkable, urban neighborhoods like West Village and Mockingbird Station has long meant countless trips to City Hall, reams of paperwork and tens of thousands of dollars in fees for developers. And that's all before the first spade of dirt is turned,” Rudolph Bush reports for The Dallas Morning News.
"But with the population of Dallas set to spike upward in coming years, city officials are working to make it easier to construct densely populated neighborhoods with a mix of businesses and homes and with features like wide sidewalks, landscaped streets and less parking.
"Today, the City Plan Commission is set to take up a major reform of the city's development code that would ease the path for developers to build such neighborhoods in Dallas.
"'We have got to make it easy to do the right thing and difficult to do the low-quality thing, which is exactly the opposite of how we have it now,' said Theresa O'Donnell, director of Dallas' Development Services Department.
"As it stands, developers have a much easier time at City Hall if they want to build big-box retail stores fronted with large parking lots, or if they want to build traditional single-family-home neighborhoods well removed from retail stores..."
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