No-show: Luxury apartment developer cancels on Southeast Denton neighborhood meeting

The Railyard project will bring five three-story-high buildings with about 320 units and 448 parking spaces on about 9 acres of land near Oakwood Cemetery.

“How’s that going to help us?” SEDNA President Colette Johnson asked at a meeting in late September. “High-priced apartments that nobody can afford. How is that going to help us? We’re going to talk to that developer and see if there’s something else that can be done. We feel the need that they should have to come talk to us.”

That developer, Lang Sycamore, didn’t seem to feel that same need: No one representing the developer showed up to the Monday night meeting despite previously agreeing to do so.

Denton Mayor Gerard Hudspeth seemed disappointed that the developer called to cancel due to a scheduling conflict. He also didn’t understand why Aimee Bissett — the former director of the city’s Development Services Department who is now coordinating the project for the developer — didn’t attend to speak with the neighborhood group since she has an office nearby.

“She knows enough that she could have been here,” Hudspeth told the packed room.

Last month, the Rev. Reginald Logan told the Denton Record-Chronicle that SEDNA members have been known to get loud in the past and descend on City Hall. He said that was probably why representatives from Lang Sycamore had agreed to meet with SEDNA. That could have also been why several Denton police officers were lingering at the back of the meeting Monday.

None of the SEDNA members had been aware of the Railyard Phase 1 project, which received preliminary plat approval in June. Vicki Byrd, also a Denton City Council member, didn’t seem to know; she had to contact staff to learn more about the project. SEDNA members were looking forward to discussing the possibility of a community benefits agreement with the investment firms.

In an Oct. 14 op-ed essay for the Record-Chronicle, former City Council member Paul Meltzer pointed out that community benefits agreements for a development could include benefits such as guaranteed minimum local hiring and percentages of affordable housing units, offering the neighborhood some direct benefit from the development to receive their support for the project.

“When development threatens a neighborhood, a community benefits agreement, or CBA, can be the jiujitsu move that flips the energy and makes the project work for the neighborhood instead,” Meltzer wrote in the op-ed.

Meltzer suggested that the city could play a role in establishing a community benefits ordinance, which would require “developers to negotiate CBAs wherever new projects will impact existing neighborhoods.”

SEDNA members learned more about such agreements from recent screenings of Alice Street, a documentary about a California neighborhood facing gentrification — similar to what SEDNA is facing now and had faced 100 years ago with Quakertown. Members were hopeful that some kind of concessions could be arranged between the real estate investors and the neighborhood.

As one member said: “And be a good neighbor.”

The Dallas and Fort Worth investment firms decided to be the no-show kind of neighbor Monday.

City employees from Development Services were at the meeting, however, to give a presentation about how planning and zoning works. They used the Railyard Phase 1 apartment project as an example. Because it meets the zoning requirement for the area, no public hearing was needed. If it hadn’t met the requirements or needed a special-use permit, then one would have been required.

The property was previously zoned as a heavy industrial district, but the City Council changed it in 2002 to downtown commercial general. In 2019 it was updated to the MN zoning designation, which allows multifamily uses like apartments.

“Generally speaking, if a use is permitted by right within a zoning that council has approved, the permitted uses are not expected to have significant fiscal impact as they have been determined to be appropriate in that area,” said Stuart Birdseye, a city spokesperson.

But the city doesn’t do a study on neighborhoods to determine how the zoning change would impact it. Officials do send notices to those within 200 and 500 feet of the development, but most of the residents within that 500 feet circle around Railyard Phase 1 are buried in the graveyard next to it.

None of the residents at the SEDNA meeting seemed aware that the city had made the zoning change in 2002 or understood what that change meant until they discovered that a high-end apartment complex would be appearing in their community.

“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell people,” said Donald McDade, the Planning & Zoning Commission member from Southeast Denton.

The idea of community benefits agreements between developers and neighborhoods has become a hot topic among Denton neighborhoods, one resident from the Denia neighborhood told residents at the meeting.

McDade agreed that it is a hot topic and said, “It’s not going away.”

Tina Firgens, deputy director of Development Services, told SEDNA members they were looking into it and had to make sure that such agreements are allowed under state law.

Randy Hunt from Historic Denton explained to Firgens how a community benefits agreement works with developers and offered an example of what Byrd had done with an apartment project on Woodrow Lane, where she worked with the developers to offer concessions to the neighborhood such as some affordable units.

“This doesn’t have to be controlled by the city,” Hunt said. “This is something that is done by the community and the developer. Don’t you discount that.”

At the late September SEDNA meeting, Hudspeth told those gathered that he would make sure SEDNA would have a presentation at the late October meeting. Instead, those attending discovered that the project will be appearing in front of Planning & Zoning at the Wednesday night meeting. Yet, since it’s “by right,” as Development Services pointed out, due to the 2002 zoning change, there isn’t much SEDNA can do about it.