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Plano City Council elections are up for four seats - Places 1, 3, 5 and 7. I peeked at what the candidates are talking about (https://www.vote411.org/plan-your-vote) and I see a few hopeful signs. It feels like the iron-grip that builders had on the Plano city council may be loosening. Well, maybe not the council, but at least certain candidates might actually be considering what people need in terms of housing, not just what builders want.
A couple of quotes below...(the emphasis is mine)
From one candidate on the ballot :
Quote:
We suffer from a dichotomy of housing types. The vast majority is large (or largish) single-family homes, or apartments (which will be nearly 37% of our housing when current developments are completed). We don't have housing for life stages, with different needs. As such, we don't have great options for families just starting out, nor options for empty-nesters who still want to own a home to downsize. This results in many people staying put in housing that no longer meet their needs, and creates artificial scarcity, driving housing costs up. We need more small-footprint ownership options.
From another candidate on the ballot:
Quote:
I will diligently advocate to protect the remainder of our undeveloped land from high density multifamily rezoning, and preserve it for business development or home ownership.
I would support rezoning for more duplexes, condos, zero-lot-houses, and retirement complexes, but with an emphasis on long term ownership, rather than more transient rental properties.
These are not the only such quotes and I am not advocating on behalf of anyone since multiple candidates on the same ballot have made similar statements. I am just feeling for the first time that we have rounded a significant corner in our collective understanding of what constitutes 'affordable housing' and 'high-density' and that just maybe the next generation actually has a shot at owning instead of renting.
If other cities in North Texas also shift away from the dichotomy of McMansions and Apartments, it has the potential to change the housing scenario in North Texas.
This would have been nice when the city actually had undeveloped land for residential development. They are primarily limited to tear-down and infill projects now, which are costly for small footprint owner-occupied, unless you are doing like a townhome.
I’m in shock how many apartments there are now in Allen. It used to be primarily single-family homes on the west side and your apartment option was basically Settlers Gate , then Benton Pointe.
Now, the entire west side between the freeway and Watters is basically apartments - I would not want to live in a 600-800k house in twin creeks (such as those off Exchange) basically in the shadow of a large apartment complex…not sure what the city council there was thinking other than a quick buck.
Hopefully Plano will be able to come up with some more sustainable solutions
What undeveloped land? Plano doesn't even have enough land for a hot dog stand. The only way you would even see a small townhome development is if they tore something massive down.
I see the same issues as Allen in Frisco. You have massive McMansions at Custer and Main, among countless other places, right down the street from a huge complex of tenements. I've seen others back right up to Walmart Supercenters. Yet, people seem to speak of anything in Frisco like it's particularly upscale with a plethora of employers. What are people thinking?
Everywhere you go, even as far out as Celina and Anna, you see this "mixed use" concept that's throwing together all these different residential types (which is not genuinely mixed use), and it's getting old. Developers get giddy over these. I predict they will fall out of favor and eventually become declining areas.
McKinney is actually actively welcoming and promoting not only more apartments and bigger ones but more low-income ones. They need to focus on creating jobs, an area where the city has been an abysmal failure, seemingly by intent.
Probably too little too late for Plano. Most of the land is already developed.
The bigger issue for not just Plano but Collin County in general is the fact that the price of the land and the cost of building homes here has skyrocketed just like everything else these days. So for builders, affordable housing in Collin County is going to be a money loser for them. Their profit margins would be far higher with the typical mcmansions starting at $600K and so on. Even here in Wylie where I live, it used to be starter home central. But now you will be in a bidding war for anything under $300K, and that's for pre existing housing, not new construction.
Last year, when I found out that Plano West’s economically disadvantaged student population was 25%, a +500% increase over what it was less than twenty years prior when I graduated, I freaked out.
I assumed, erroneously, that Plano West was an outlier in what used to be a largely homogeneously affluent Collin County. Upon further examination, it became apparent that every single high school school in Collin County — which has somehow remained the richest county in Texas by per capita income for more than two decades — has seen a significant increase in economically disadvantaged students in that timeframe.
In DFW, an observable pattern between apartment developments, low income students, “white flight”, and eventual decline in cities has been clearly established, as detailed in this article by Leftist-leaning The Dallas Observer:
Per the article, written in 2016 and already out of date as far as DFW’s fast-evolving demographic changes are concerned:
“In 1997, DeSoto and Cedar Hill were majority white…
DeSoto is now 3 percent white, having lost 91 percent of its white population. The number of low-income students, meanwhile, has quadrupled”
Think it’s just the southern suburbs where this trend has occurred? Think again.
The article states,
“Carrollton-Farmers Branch, Garland, Mesquite, and Richardson were majority white in 1997 with fewer than a third of their students classified as low income.
Mesquite had the highest share of white students at 70.6 percent and also saw the largest decline of the four. By 2015, the number of white students had dropped by 68 percent while its low-income population had surged by 266 percent.”
As poor, “disenfranchised” people move into and a community (mostly apartment dwellers or renters), slowly but surely, white people (middle class and upper middle class) move out. Schools decline as do property values.
Any measures to remediate the mistake Collin County city governments made by allowing multitudes of high density housing projects to be developed are too little, too late at this point. For Collin County communities like McKinney, Plano, Frisco, and Allen, the momentous and continued growth of high density multi family housing developments within their city limits have already sealed their fates.
I predict that these communities will unfortunately continue to decline over time. There is no going back to the way things were.
That being said, these communities should not fall into complete disarray as the aforementioned DeSoto, Mesquite, and Garland, because Collin County is and will
continue to be a major economic powerhouse and center of corporate jobs.
While that reality should prop up certain desirable neighborhoods (Willow Bend, Starwood, etc), Collin County schools will continue to enroll more and more low income students until a breaking point, when those schools will invariably show signs of declining performance.
For daring to discuss these very valid concerns in a thread last year discussing Plano schools, I was attacked, vilified, and excoriated, while implicitly deemed racist and classist, of which I am neither. I am in fact a realist.
Data doesn’t lie and neither do trends. Taken at a macro level, the trends in Collin County aren’t good, and portend that like the formerly-thriving communities before it, Collin County cities are going to experience sustained deleterious demographic changes over the next decade, whose effects are yet unknown.
I resent articles like the one I referenced for sensationalizing this phenomena through the lens of “racism” and “white flight”. Certainly racism could be and probably is a factor in many instances of “white flight” and decaying communities, but it belies the fact that if people are moving away from low income families (who are disproportionately black and Hispanic), perhaps it’s because of the undeniably negative impact that these people have on a community in terms of crime, schools, property values, and quality of life in general.
Those of us who wish not to live around these people should not be vilified by acknowledging these realities and wanting our communities to remain uniformly affluent.
So what? Plano schools are performing better now than they did back then, and the median income and home prices are rising. Apartment rental prices are higher than ever, but somehow that bogeyman of 'decline' is just around the corner. Your moron cohort in cohort in high school also used to do more drugs and die way more often too. So modern Plano can look at all that and see that the direction it's going in is alright, no matter what you think.
It'd be different if Plano had been built to be some exclusive city, like Southlake or Highland Park, but it never was. It always had aspirational plans to be a large-business centered suburb - I mean that's why they built Preston so large and why they helped build six lane roads to EDS and JC Penny Campuses back when there was nothing out there.
This would have been nice when the city actually had undeveloped land for residential development. They are primarily limited to tear-down and infill projects now
Quote:
Originally Posted by Leonard123
What undeveloped land? Plano doesn't even have enough land for a hot dog stand.
Quote:
Originally Posted by biafra4life
Probably too little too late for Plano. Most of the land is already developed.
Yes, no question its too late for Plano. Plano planted the seeds to its eventual decline when every single multi-family zone was built out as apartments.
But Frisco, Allen, McKinney and others have a chance to learn and correct course. It took a long time for Plano citizens and city council members to wake up but they have started to make the right noises now.
For everyone else in North Texas - do you know where your city councilor stands on this matter ? You have a chance to ask and make your vote count during the upcoming May 6 election.
So what? Plano schools are performing better now than they did back then, and the median income and home prices are rising. Apartment rental prices are higher than ever, but somehow that bogeyman of 'decline' is just around the corner. Your moron cohort in cohort in high school also used to do more drugs and die way more often too. So modern Plano can look at all that and see that the direction it's going in is alright, no matter what you think.
Are you time lapse challenged?
I clearly stated that I graduated from Plano West nearly twenty years ago (2004). The heroin epidemic in central Plano was in the early/mid-1980s, which was almost 40 years ago. I am far from a moron, having graduated from high school at age 16.
Time will tell what transpires of Plano schools. If they can hold onto their ever-declining white student populations and relatively constant Asian populations, Plano schools will continue to perform at a high level. If low-income student enrollment at Plano schools continues its upward trajectory, there is no way Plano schools will retain the competitive edge they have now.
You revert to personal attacks because on a subliminal level, you know what I state is true. But in today’s hyper woke society, any facts which call into question the status quo must be silenced and challenged. I won’t be silenced and will speak my mind freely, regardless of what you or anyone else thinks.
the price of the land and the cost of building homes here has skyrocketed just like everything else these days. So for builders, affordable housing in Collin County is going to be a money loser for them. Their profit margins would be far higher with the typical mcmansions starting at $600K and so on.
The argument above is exactly what the builders have been pushing for a long time and thats how they wore down (or bought) city council members. Plano and parts of Frisco are built out, but there is still plenty of land left in Colin county. We are still pretty far off the scenario where building affordable homes is not economical.
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