Dallas’ freeway grid might have effectively connected the region, but it has proved a concrete divider for our city’s neighborhoods, with highways like Interstates 30 and 45 choking off areas like southern Dallas from the urban core.
Deck parks have been held up as a way to stitch neighborhoods back together and make them more pedestrian-friendly. Klyde Warren Park that connects Uptown with downtown over 12 lanes of bustling traffic on Woodall Rodgers freeway has been the poster child for the benefits of these projects and the enormous economic development they can generate.
As you can imagine, though, these projects are expensive. The last time we wrote about the Southern Gateway Park, a proposed 5-acre green space over Interstate 35E near the Dallas Zoo, we were impressed by the project’s goal of revitalizing southern Dallas, even as we worried that there was too little civic and philanthropic commitment to its completion.
That’s why it’s encouraging that the North Central Texas Council of Governments, the region’s advisory group on transportation issues, plans to apply for a federal grant to fund infrastructure for four deck parks, including Southern Gateway.
NCTCOG is applying to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Reconnecting Communities and Neighborhoods grant. Now in its second year, the grant offers $2.7 billion in funding for projects across the country that help address harm from past infrastructure projects and that increase access to jobs, housing and grocery stores. Forty percent of this funding is meant for projects in historically marginalized communities. This makes Southern Gateway an ideal candidate as it will knit parts of Oak Cliff back together and improve quality of life in an area that has historically not had this kind of investment.
NCTCOG is angling for $95 million in Reconnecting Communities grants. That includes funds for the second phase of the Southern Gateway and funding for a planned 1.7-acre extension of Klyde Warren Park to the west.
It also includes two new projects — a planned deck park over Interstate 30 near the Dallas Farmers Market that will reconnect the Cedars to downtown as well as a park under State Highway 5 in McKinney.
The total amount applied for would account for 41% of the total funding needed to build infrastructure, including beams and the decks for all four parks. It would not cover the cost of park amenities like trees, sod or playgrounds, things that are commonly funded through either local taxes or philanthropic funds.
This decision to apply for funding as a region is wise. Karla Windsor, senior program manager at NCTCOG, who presented the proposal to pursue this grant funding at the Council’s Surface Transportation Technical Committee meeting last week, told us that the federal government is looking to distribute funds across the states. If these deck park projects had applied independently, they’d effectively be competing against one another.
“We’re trying to present the federal government with a menu of options,” Windsor said. This makes sense, because even if federal reviewers cannot award our region the entire $95 million, they will be aware of our needs and can think about how to prioritize the projects depending on available funds.
NCTCOG expects its Regional Transportation Council to approve the plan to apply at its meeting on Sept. 14. The federal grant applications are due Sept. 28, and the Department of Transportation will announce the awards in the spring of next year.
For Southern Gateway Park securing this grant would help bring its second phase, stretching from Lancaster Avenue to Marsalis Avenue, to life. The deck for the first phase, from Ewing Avenue to Lancaster, is built.
NCTCOG is requesting $35 million of the $95 million total for Southern Gateway, which is just over half of the infrastructure cost for phase two.
The remainder of the infrastructure costs could be covered through city bond funds and state transportation dollars. Construction of amenities for the first phase of the park will begin in November, but park supporters still need to raise millions in private funds for phase two amenities that will make the deck a park. The hope is that phase one of the park will be open by spring 2025.
It’s hard to overstate the importance that parks like Klyde Warren, Southern Gateway and the eventual I-30 deck can have on the fabric of our city. Interstates and highways created great opportunities for growth. But they came at great cost to our neighborhoods and to the way we live.
Binding them back together is a step toward re-creating parts of the city we lost through progress.
We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at letters@dallasnews.com
