Homeowners Pay the Price of ‘Progress’

Richland Park East’s final days as a neighborhood were strange days indeed. Luretta Laue spent them shooing away salvagers. Phyllis Duval dug up her daylilies and tended to her dying husband. Bulldozers trolled deserted streets. At night, looters with metal detectors scavenged by the glow of miracle-mile neon.

Then there were the guys from the water department who were forcing their way into 1253 West Cheryl Ave. to rip out a meter when Doris Lopez appeared from within. “Hey,” she told them, “I still live here.”

A community was dying, and it was not a natural death. Soon, against the will of some residents, Richland Park East would cease to exist. No more tree-lined yards. No more kids scouring Walker Branch Creek for crawfish. No more families. Only a muddy lump of silence awaiting fresh development amid a dense, paved forest of late 20th century consumer bustle.

Times had changed. This pocket of the Dallas-Fort Worth “metroplex” was swollen with highways, K marts, muffler shops, TGI Fridays. The last homesteaders were encircled, and the temple of modern American desires needed to grow.

Progress was afoot. The city wanted, even needed, it and was willing to use its power to get it. The North East Mall was expanding from next door, and the Phyllis Duvals of Richland Park East had no choice but to get out of the way.

*

Razing homes for highways, hospitals or railroads has become part of the American fabric, a time-tested--if not always welcomed--tradition based on the notion of progress for the public good. But a shopping mall? Is that where consumerism is leading us? In Hurst, for good or ill, the answer is yes.

If consumerism is the latter-day American religion, the “edge city”--that still-coalescing mix of urban and suburban, glass and mortar, automobile and pavement--is its holy land. And for Hurst, population 36,000, the main house of worship is the North East Mall.

Ever since the world’s first indoor shopping mall, Southdale Center, opened Oct. 8, 1956, in Edina, Minn., such beasts have burgeoned. Today, up the road from Southdale in Bloomington, Minn., sits the Mall of America, the industry’s jewel--an emporium so large that shoppers sometimes crisscross the parking lot by car to move from store to store.

Hurst’s is smaller. Built in 1971, the North East Mall covers 1.13 million square feet today, part of the metastasizing development that has spilled over Dallas and Fort Worth like burgundy on a tablecloth.

It also has become, like many of its brethren, a substitute community center for an amorphous city. Seniors “mall-walk” each morning; adolescents roam the corridors in late afternoon. And, tucked amid Athens Gyros, Taste of Orient and Luca Pizza, the Epcot-like food court even features the Main Street Deli.

All towns grow and thrive on money changing hands, and the mall is Hurst’s late 20th-century equivalent: its biggest taxpayer and, with more than 2,600 workers, its biggest employer, a quasi-town within a town, built on commerce, consumerism and city taxes that total $7 million a year.

So when the owner, Simon DeBartolo Group Inc. of Indianapolis, the nation’s largest shopping-mall developer, decided that it needed a $220-million expansion for a Nordstrom and other stores, the Hurst City Council was willing to listen.

Hurst stood to gain about $8 million in annual sales taxes and 2,000 more jobs. And Simon DeBartolo, which owns five other malls in the region, said it was worried about being “outflanked” by competition.

“You either enhance or expand what you have or you get slaughtered,” says Art Spellmeyer, Simon’s senior vice president for development.

But 127 houses were in the way, so they crafted a plan. The Hurst Economic Development Corp., a quasi-governmental body, would offer a phased buyout to the owners of Richland Park East’s homes, then use an intricate combination of laws to pass the land to Simon for the new wing. In exchange, the extra tax money would flow back to Hurst for various projects.

The decision to take the homes required only a majority of the council. The vote was unanimous.

Simon says it paid an average 180% of the property values to people who agreed to buyouts. It allowed residents to dismantle and take whatever they wanted from the homes; one family moved the entire house. The developer arranged moves for elderly residents.

“We settled with 117 people,” Spellmeyer says. “You tell me which politician last got 90% of the vote.”

*

But by and by, a problem surfaced. Ten problems, actually. Problems with names. People who refused buyout offers--who didn’t believe that Orange Juliuses should replace living rooms, that bed and bath should yield to Bed, Bath and Beyond.

They sued. A state judge agreed last May to allow the demolitions, and the residents appealed. After eight months of legal maneuverings, their appeal is pending.

Only one problem: The homes were demolished as scheduled last May and June.

In the 1997 movie “Grosse Point Blank,” a distraught Martin Blank (John Cusack) finds his childhood home has been razed to build an “Ultimart” convenience store. “You can never go home again,” he snaps. “But I guess you can shop there.” And so it goes in Hurst.

“If they can get by taking your home because they can make more money on the land, there’s something wrong,” says Jeff Molenburg, a glazier who lived in the neighborhood for 18 years with his wife, Jeri, and their three children.

This is Texas, after all, where people are so ardent about self-determination that some still consider the place a separate nation. Texas, where homes and land are sacred and are defended--sometimes with guns.

But this is also Texas where shopping is an art, where high school football gets corporate sponsorship. And this is Hurst, named for William Letchworth Hurst, a rancher who sold a piece of his land to the railroad in 1903, and whose great-grandson would become mayor nearly a century later.

The difference: “Uncle Billy” Hurst parted with his farmland willingly; Bill Souder, mayor of a town with barely a square mile of undeveloped space left, had to contend with people who didn’t want to move. Hurst the man was making way for the arteries that built America; Hurst the city is doing it for a shopping mall.

Comparing Souder’s dilemma with his ancestor’s illuminates the evolution of the legal principle known as eminent domain.

Since the United States was established, eminent domain has been used by the government--federal, state and to a lesser extent local--to drive progress. It involves using due process to take private land, typically for public works.

Over the years, that has meant homes have been sacrificed to build highways, parks, schools, even factories. But now, as people move to suburbs and “second-ring suburbs” beyond, struggling municipalities use partnerships, grants and tax breaks to keep existing businesses and attract new ones. And that can mean, occasionally, taking private land.

They call it “economic development incentive.” It has allowed eminent domain, historically associated with public works, to effectively become a planning tool for commercial developers.

“It all serves people,” says John Boyle, Hurst’s attorney. “Private enterprise is integrated in virtually everything you wind up doing, from a reservoir to an airport to a fire station. And I think a shopping mall is integral to a community.”

Corporations have been willing partners.

“The city is donating the power of eminent domain to the mall developer,” laments Glenn Sodd, a cattle rancher and attorney for the 10 holdouts. “Big business has learned to use government as a source of income--and governmental power as a source of help.”

Commercially driven seizures have happened before: Detroit condemned thousands of houses so General Motors could build a plant. The very law invoked to uproot Richland Park East was originally enacted so private land in nearby Arlington could be taken for the Texas Rangers’ new stadium.

So why not a mall? Whatever else it may be, it’s generally sound economics.

Across America in 1996, 42,048 shopping centers produced $973.5 billion in retail sales--and 10.1 million jobs and $40 billion in sales tax revenues, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers.

Besides, both the city and Simon say, eminent domain was a last resort.

“If we were trying to do something out in the boondocks, you could say, ‘Gee, isn’t there a different way to do this and leave those houses alone?’ ” Spellmeyer says.

“But clearly this is a highly developed regional area,” he says. “I’m not saying people should or shouldn’t want to live there, but the commercial development and traffic is a fact. [And] part of this is, the good of the many outweigh the good of the few.”

*

Maybe the homeowners should have seen it coming. No matter that some of their houses had stood since 1965, that highways and stores and malls arrived much later. They’d been encircled. Any good general would have surrendered.

Stand in the wedge of quiet that used to be Richland Park East and you’re struck by the surrounding bustle--the dizzying array of humanity’s monuments to itself. The effect evokes that 1950s Warner Bros. cartoon: Bugs Bunny awakens from a two-decade nap to find his rabbit hole encircled by layers of elevated freeway.

But what, really, are we dealing with here? When the city’s well-documented justifications and the displaced residents’ emotional stories melt away, one truth remains: In a small corner of the world, mall has overrun neighborhood. The ability to shop has trumped the ability to keep a home.

Part of it is a change in values. America’s shift from production to consumption economy has meant, naturally, that the means of consumption (the mall) is becoming as important as the means of production (a big factory or a road project).

“The common good is being identified as the expansion of shopping opportunities,” says Margaret Crawford, an urban historian at the Southern California School of Architecture in Los Angeles.

But this consumerism is also replacing uniqueness of place with an orchestrated facsimile. For all the economic and social opportunities the mall offers, it is not a neighborhood. The Main Street Deli is not Main Street. The rules--no canvassing, photography or picketing without permission, no “inappropriate attire”--are enforced by mall-employed guards walking the beat.

And, though the space may be quasi-public and welcome mall-walkers and community activities, a shopping mall is ultimately just that--a place where all comforts and attractions facilitate the cash-register transaction. Instead of stores rising downtown, “downtown” is prefabricated to support stores.

“This strikes me as one of the classic case studies for the question about what the word progress means,” says Joel Garreau, a senior fellow at George Mason University’s Institute of Public Policy in Fairfax, Va., and author of “Edge City: Life on the New Frontier.”

“I started out with this theory that the evil developers were ruining our world,” he says. “But I eventually found out that these guys will happily build anything you want. They don’t care how Americans should operate. They’re interested in how Americans do operate--as measured by that most reliable of measures: what they are willing to trade money for.”

*

“This is my house,” says Phyllis Duval. Then she eyes the mud and divots at her feet and rethinks. “This,” she amends, “is where my house was.”

Yards away, cars buzz along the elevated freeway, zooming from Dallas to Fort Worth, Fort Worth to Dallas.

“The Chritzburgs lived here,” Phyllis Duval continues, pointing. “And Mrs. Cook. Then the Gilettis. And August Harris.” Beyond the mud sits the mall, the Montgomery Ward sign looming high.

The neighbors have scattered around the metroplex. Kids who shared backyards now attend different schools. Support networks forged over three decades are gone. Luretta Laue lives with one of her daughters; because of space, her husband stays with another.

“The neighbors are nice where we are right now, but it’s not the same,” Jeff Molenburg says.

Duval’s husband, a carpenter, helped build the mall in 1970 and upgrade it years later. He was dying when the couple withdrew from the neighborhood weeks before the demolition. She’ll tell you the whole mess hastened his death.

“He remodeled every mall in this area. Then they took his house to build more mall,” says Duval, 58. She concludes: “They’ve got my home. This land is dead.”

It is not, of course. It will live on in a different incarnation, with different people living different sorts of lives. But it is government and developer that have dictated this change and replaced one kind of existence with another.

True, needs of the many often outweigh needs of the few, but do they here? And what role should Simon DeBartolo Group Inc., whose interests are financial, have in the decision?

The vast field of mud and memories that was Richland Park East will sprout shopping mall by century’s end, and the new shoppers it draws will see no evidence a neighborhood ever existed.

The 10 holdouts say they’ll fight on--against Hurst, against Simon DeBartolo, against the idea that this could happen. For them, it is a sad, symbolic resistance--and one that may well happen again elsewhere. The industry is shifting; “super-regional centers” are replacing regional malls, and expansion of existing properties is inevitable. As Hurst goes, so may the nation.

“It’s a precedent. When precedents are set, other people imitate,” says Jordan Clark, president of the United Homeowners Assn., a lobbying group in Washington. “And when they can come in and say, ‘We’re taking a neighborhood to expand our mall to make money,’ that’s a pretty dangerous precedent.”

Certainly edge cities are still in toddlerhood. As Garreau notes, we like the older sections of a Venice or a London or a Paris because we’re seeing a product molded over centuries, not a nascent creature plagued by fits, starts and stumbles.

The Hurst homeowners’ fight underscores some pressing questions. Why do we mourn the disappearance of Woolworth’s, then welcome the mall with open wallets? Where will economic development go next?

“You’re looking at something much more complicated and diverse than just buying your shirts,” Garreau says. “What we build is the best reflection of who we are that we can find. We are the mall, and it is us.

“This is the issue: Is this ever going to be a good place to be young or to be old? Can you ever imagine falling in love here? And if the answer to that question is, young lawyers in love in the food court--well, that tells us a lot about what we are.”