University Terrace – Neighborhood Overlay: Myths & Realities
1. What’s happening in our neighborhood? Neighborhood Stabilization Overlay
There has been a call to action by a few residents in our neighborhood to move the Dallas City Council to hear and vote on a “re-zoning issue,” which is a voluntary limitation to your rights as a property owner in the University Terrace neighborhood.
• This is over and above the existing deed restrictions.
• This is over and above the existing zoning restrictions
If this passes, these restrictions CANNOT be undone. You WILL BE STUCK with whatever effect they have on the value of your home and future generations of homeowners in University Terrace.
This is a tremendously important issue as it affects the value and marketability of your home; your largest asset. Many people don’t completely understand what an overlay will do, or have only heard one side. It is in your interest to educate yourself and fully understand what is being discussed.
2. What is an overlay? Legal Zoning Restriction On you Deed
An overlay is a zoning restriction applied over the existing zoning restrictions. It limits what you can do with your property and has the force of law behind it.
Simply put, an overlay is a SURRENDER of some of your property rights.
The City of Dallas describes this ordinance on their website at
http://www.dallascityhall.com/development_services/neighborhood_overlay.html
The ordinance can be found at http://www.dallascityhall.com/pdf/DevSvcs/Ordinance_26161.pdf
An overlay can regulate how close to the boundary of your lot your house or any structure can be placed. It can also regulate whether your garage is attached or detached, where your garage is placed relative to your house and how you can enter your garage. However, in this instance the NSO revolves around regulating the height of any structure built on your lot through a complicated mechanism called the "Height Plane".
Once applied, an overlay cannot be removed.
It may be possible to create a replacement overlay with fewer restrictions, but only after a two year waiting period. This would require repeating the entire application process including forming a committee, the petition, the public meetings, the balloting, the zoning hearing and the council hearing. Even then it would still need the city council to approve the replacement.
3. How will this affect the value of my home? Unknown!!!
The truth is that nobody knows, but many real estate professionals have weighed-in on the subject:
Ms. Tama Cole of Briggs-Freeman states: “,,,When you buy property, much like a car, the house immediately begins to depreciate because of age. The only appreciation is in the land. If the land is restricted, making it hard for builders to construct new houses and make a profit, then your land will not appreciate. ,,,”
All experts agree, this type of ordinance is too new to provide any meaningful statistics. However, the overlay ordinance has no procedure for withdrawal or reversal. This means that if it succeeds, whatever effect it does have on the value of your home, you will have no way of stopping it other than starting an entirely new overlay petition. Therefore; logically, what is likely to happen?
If a buyer has a choice between two similar houses and one has a restriction placed on it, that buyer knows that if he buys the house with the restriction, he will have bought the house that is more difficult to sell. It is logical to assume that he will either offer a lower price to offset the restriction or simply buy the unrestricted house.
Simply put, the market value of the house is a function of the ability to sell that house. If it becomes more difficult to sell a house, its value will go down.
Read what the Dallas Central Appraisal District says about calculating Fair Market Value:
The buyer will also be looking at different neighborhoods and comparing them. He will seek out vibrant ones and avoid stagnant ones because stagnation is the start of decline.
• Would YOU buy a house with extra restrictions placed on it?
• Would YOU move into an area where your neighbors knew it didn't make sense to invest money in home improvements?
• Would YOU move into an area of old houses that were unlikely to be updated?
If you wouldn't do these things, then why would a potential buyer do them? It's logical therefore to assume that if this overlay gets passed, your house will lose value, it will become difficult to sell and you will see the neighborhood start to deteriorate around you.
It's getting more and more difficult to sell houses, mortgage lenders are tightening their requirements, housing starts are down, foreclosures are up, prices are flattening or falling, so why would you want to make your position in the market any more difficult than it already is!
4. Won’t this help keep my taxes down? Maybe, but not the way you would hope!
In fact, if you are an owner/occupant your house and are claiming a homestead exemption your taxes are already limited in the amount they can go up.
If you are 65 or over and are claiming the Over 65 exemption, the DISD portion of your property taxes (by far the largest part of your tax bill) cannot be increased.
The Texas Property Tax Code provides that the maximum increase in a home owner's assessed value is 10% per year times the number of years since the property has been appraised. If you protest your assessment, the property is considered to have been reappraised. In short, protesting your Property Tax Assessment every year will ensure that your taxable value will only rise by a maximum of 10% every year. No overlay necessary.
Remember: Taxes are not an issue in whether or not an overlay is beneficial for our neighborhood. The only way an overlay can lower your taxes is by drastically reducing the value of your property.
5. What should I do? Act as you believe by voicing your position.
PLEASE take the position that YOU believe will be the best for your situation! But On/around April 20th, homeowners (on Dallas County Tax records) will be asked to return a Green Ballot to the City Planning Commission signifying your support/rejection of this proposal. If you don’t respond, you are allowing a minority to determine your future rights.
Please understand that this vote is not about “McMansions,” as our current set-back and existing deed restrictions prohibit the dreaded “Zero-lot”/”Garden-style” homes that tower over their neighbor. It is also not about saving our trees. Again, the existing set-backs protect the trees that were planted in accordance with the zoning.
Rather, this is an attempt to keep the University Terrace neighborhood “status-quo.” Supporters of the NSO state they are not attempting to limit growth and that additions can be made to your home. But the reality is that many of our foundations can’t support cost-effective vertical growth and first-floor extensions would consume the little backyards that our families and children presently enjoy.
The reality is that no successful builder will be interested in demolishing the existing structure and rebuild it to the standards of the 1950’s budget-Fox & Jacobs specifications. Therefore, our neighborhood will be locked in the 1950’s with no hope of revitalization, growth or improving the tax base.
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Contact:
Jack Ormberget
7309 Bennington
Dallas, Texas 75214
214-343-9915
Email: noutnso@yahoo.com
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2009
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April
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- Ballots are Out.
- I love University Terrace!
- Van Gogh?
- NEWS FLASH
- An Overlay places additional restrictions or encum...
- Property Values ARE Increasing.
- Another Response to Mr. Riley
- Waiting for an answer.
- Flyers
- M Streets....are you serious?
- Giving Away Valuable Rights
- It is About Property Rights - NOT McMansions
- Response to Steve Riley on Haverford
- From a Builder's Prospective
- From a Dallas Realtor
- University Terrace – Neighborhood Overlay: Myths ...
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April
(16)
First, I’m only speaking for myself here. I represent my opinion and my opinion only. In response to what your friend has to say on page one of your blog about neighborhood NSO’s: He’s right. The value of the large oversized homes built on teardown lots are clearly worth lots more than the homes they replace. So much more that I’d bet that most everyone who currently lives in University Terrace wouldn’t be able to buy one of those homes.
ReplyDeleteBut seeing everyone who lives here now moving out over a 5 to 10 year period to make way for more affluent owners can only be seen as progress by someone who only sees a neighborhood as just another page in a ledger, as a matter of dollars and cents.
I’m glad to see you’ve come out of the shadows. Putting your name on this blog, if not on your mailers, is a big step forward in identifying yourself. You should also mention that you’re a realtor, that buying and selling houses for a profit is how you make your living. Finally, you should point out that 71% of your neighbors – slightly more than 7 out of 10 – have signed FOR the NSO.
I’ll be happy to have a dialogue with you on these issues in this comment section. I have lots more I want to say. But I’ll wait and see if you allow this comment to be posted before I write more.
Steve Riley - Haverford Rd.
In your blog post you post:
ReplyDelete“Ms. Tama Cole of Briggs-Freeman states: ‘When you buy property, much like a car, the house immediately begins to depreciate because of age. The only appreciation is in the land. If the land is restricted, making it hard for builders to construct new houses and make a profit, then your land will not appreciate. ,,,’
All experts agree, this type of ordinance is too new to provide any meaningful statistics.”
You are cherry picking information to make it appear that you have “facts” and “experts” on your side of the argument. Your Briggs-Freeman representative states a simple fact; all structures begin to depreciate the moment after they’re built, but it’s not too soon, as your “experts” claim, to draw some conclusions about structure depreciation in a pre-teardown and post-teardown neighborhood. (By the way: What experts? Where are they? What are their names?)
We have a perfect example in Santa Barbara, less than 0.5 miles from the border of our neighborhood. Look at the Market Value graph for 4020 Santa Barbara:
http://www.dallascad.org/AcctHistory.aspx?ID=00000248420060000
Notice how as recently as 2006, their structure was worth $124,000 and their lot was worth $30,000. Today, that structure is worth $21,470. This structure is listed as in Fair condition, as it was in 2006 when it was worth $124,000. The only thing that’s changed is that the builders moved in, started buying up houses, scraping them and building 4,500 sq. ft. houses (on average).
Now look at your house at 7309 Bennington:
http://www.dallascad.org/AcctHistory.aspx?ID=00000396619000000
In 2006 your structure was worth $127,840 and your lot was worth $50,000. Today, as Ms. Tama Cole predicted, your structure is worth less; $120,760. But that is far more than any of the older structures on Santa Barbara. Yet your house is nearly the same as 4020 Santa Barbara, slightly larger, but listed in the same Fair condition.
What has protected the value of your structure? Our neighborhood is not yet the target of teardown speculators. You can look at any street or neighborhood that’s gone through what Santa Barbara has – or a little farther away, Vanderbilt, or Sondra, or Lake Circle – and see the same phenomenon. As soon as the builders move in and the land becomes worth more, the structures are rapidly depreciated, discouraging any investment in that structure, and turning the entire neighborhood into nothing more than deteriorating Scrapers. I learned that term when I called Dallas Central Appraisal District and asked an appraiser why I was seeing such rapid depreciations in the Market Value histories. Scrapers was his term for what those homes have become.
When you’re over on Lake Circle, go down to the 6500 block and look at the Violation citations posted on the now overgrown scraped lots directly across the street from 3,500 & 4,500 sq. ft. homes. Some of these lots are still owned by builders who apparently can’t afford to keep them mowed. Some are now owned by banks. You can look that up at dallascad.org, too.
When the builders move in, the spirit of neighborhood goes out the window. The streets becomes nothing more than a money trench to be mined for profit. Regardless of the best intentions of the people speculating on teardowns, the bottom line is always money, and if the economy goes south, it is the residents, not the builders, who are left looking at the overgrown, vacant lots, all scraped with the best intentions.
What happens in a teardown neighborhood is that the neighbors who have spent time and effort to make their homes attractive and modern and well maintained are the first to be penalized, because their homes cost too much to attract the builders who specialize in teardowns. Those builders are business people, and they pay as little as possible for their lots. So, the neighbors who have improved their homes are the ones left to deal with the dirt and dust and trucks and racket and lunch trucks blaring their horns and everything that comes along with living in a teardown neighborhood. And as an added bonus, they get to watch the value of their structures plummet over a two or three year period, until no matter the condition of their structure – which I like to call My Home – all it’s worth is the dirt that it sits on.
That is not what I want for this neighborhood and that’s why I support the University Terrace NSO.
Steven Riley - Haverford Rd.
If Mc Mansions are already unable to be built on our lots, then what is all the fuss. I hear things about where my garage can be, what my second story has to look like, how I enter my garage. My wife and I have lived here since '99 and now we live here with our two sons who are now 8 and 6. We have every intention of adding on and complying with whatever restrictions are in place now. We don't need or want people who are afraid of change determining what I can do to my property. There is a reason why builders have not come in here yet. Because of the current setbacks and the non ability to have zero-lots. They are not interested. If I want a second story added on, with the NSO it would have to be setback even further from where the front of my main structure is now. Gee, that will really enable me to expand. I am seeing way too many houses in our area starting to look like trash. So who wants to move in there if they can't expand to fit their needs (within the current restrictions). Simply put, we're gonna have human trash move in the area and with it more crime, maybe not in 5 years, maybe ten years down the line as more of these house start to deteriorate and can't be sold because of restrictions. There will come a time when this neighborhood will NEED to be scraped 20 years from now, but you people are wanting to stop progress, now and in the future and that is not right to impose that on people who have already bought into this neighborhood, and any future occupants of this neighborhood. If this is what you really want, then have a good time living in trashville in 10 years. I'll take my clean family elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteYour opinions are just that; opinions. Show me some data that indicates that NSO neighborhoods decline and fill up with "trash". If you would bother to look, you'd find that the reverse is true.
ReplyDeleteBut then that wouldn't feed into your Property Rights argument, would it?
You're right....it's an opinion. But sadly you people heading up and supporting this NSO crap have a problem with others having a say or voicing their opinions in this. As soon as my neighbor who is for it saw a no nso sign in my yard has stopped talking to me and my family, before any words were exchanged. That is just sad. And you want proof? You don't need it. It's called common sense. Trashy homes attract trashy people. It's really amazing that a few people with a bug up their ass and being worried about their sun being blocked by a two story house(even though their trees already do this) can start this shit. And then go out and get a petition signed by lying and misleading people into signing. Do you want proof on that too? I too have heard from many people that they were told to sign it because everyone else has, and that it's all about Mc mansions. I'm assuming you are not one of them but if those people are denying it, they are a bunch of fucking liars and I have no respect for them. And I feel sorry for the people tricked into signing. What's next on their agenda? Are they gonna tell me when I can take a shit? I usually like to and have the urge at around 5:30pm most days. I'm not trying to impose on any of their rights, what the fuck makes them think it's a nice thing to do it to other people. Like I said before, let your little NSO (need shitty occupants) pass and when the neighborhood declines from no growth, have a good time. Now I missed my 5:30 appointment so I gotta go make up for it. Is that ok?
ReplyDeleteEverywhere I look I see Steve Riley cranking up the pro NSO line on this website. Steve, do you have a life? Are you employeed by the pro NSO lobby to be disruptive? Tomorrow's Sunday. Go to church. Go to the Arboratum. See a movie. Relax. Give it a break.
ReplyDeleteI personally am not for an exchange with you. It's just tossing statistics back and forth which may or may not have any real value. Put up some signs. Pass out flyers. You are a nuisance.
You know, Concerned, I love to read, and there was this period in the history in our country when we had this political party called the Know Nothings. I always imagined a bunch of guys in Washington voting on bills without even reading them, with their defense being, "well, I'm a Know Nothing".
ReplyDeleteTwice in this blog you've tossed off the comment that facts and information and statistics are useless. Such an enlightened position. I see you've been asked to join the team of bloggers here.
Why am I not surprised?
I have handed out flyers. I have put up yard signs. And I host the utnsoyes.blogspot.com blog to try to post some facts to counter the opinions that you all post here. And I post comments here at your blog.
Just so you won't worry, I went to the movies yesterday, enjoyed dinner with friends, plan to get out for brunch and more today. So, while your concern for me is touching, don't worry. Life goes on for me and my family.
If you notice, though, this blog of yours is just all of you patting each other on the back for holding the same opinion and then there's me, and one other lone comment from someone in support of the NSO. I don't think anyone is listening. Especially since half of you resort to profanity and personal attack and declare that facts are useless, while the other half pronounce that they know better than the Great Unwashed Masses and so we should all just follow their advise without any data to back up what they're saying.
You are all representing yourselves so well.
Steve, don't worry, there's more of use out there who have your back.
ReplyDeleteI am all for making the most of your investment and doing whatever you want to with "your" property. I must, however, draw the line when your "use and enjoyment" infringes upon my "use and enjoyment" of mine. I do not want McMansions built in the neighborhood. I do not want to look out of my kitchen window into my neighbor's bedroom. I do not want some inconsiderate builder blocking out my sunshine with some behemoth building that was not designed to fit within the limited space most of these lots possess.
I will not begrudge anyone their rights, just don't begrudge me mine.