I've been at JHP Architecture / Urban Design for 23 years, and I'm a partner and a principal here. I lead our urban design effort, but I am also an architect first, and a certified planner. I blur those boundaries and I have projects that are more architecture-oriented and projects that are more planning-oriented. My little tagline, which I believe is what I live by, is that I'm an architect of community in place. A lot of my work is housing oriented, across a huge spectrum from affordable and mixed-income to luxury and senior housing. I've worked in Spartanburg, SC, Athens, GA, Tallahassee, FL, North Las Vegas, New Orleans, and here in the Vickery Meadows community.

What is a project or something more personal in urban planning that you're presently focused on?

A local one that I've been involved in and did the master planning for is Trinity Mills Station. It's in Carrollton at the 35 and Bush, where the Denton rail line comes down and intersects with DART. We won the development RFP and now we've master-planned the plaza and the framework. The first phase of a little over 400 units and 20,000 square feet of retail is already starting to lease. It's right on a DART station. That's one that I'm really proud of locally. It will continue with hotels and more housing.

I'm also traveling to Tallahassee to present to the City Commissioners, the City Council, and the Leon County Commissioners for a housing study that I've been working on for the last year. Tallahassee is a great community, but this is an underprivileged neighborhood centered on some Housing Authority property. We've been working with the neighborhood with a long series of community engagements and have developed a redevelopment vision for this community and how to connect it. That's a theme of a lot of my work, just connecting back to their neighborhood. I think of myself sometimes like a seamstress or a weaver, where you're really trying to just weave back into the fabric that's already there and how to strengthen it and how to create something new.

I finished a couple of years ago a similar one in Athens, GA: A historically African American neighborhood that was forgotten, but just across the street from the downtown Main Street. The physical separation led to all kinds of social, economic, cultural, and racist separations. Our work of doing a master plan led to this reconnection, and we've been fortunate enough to literally build the framework, and the first phase is completed with the second phase starting construction soon.

When I work in these neighborhoods, I tell people that I sometimes think of myself and my team as the riverboat captains on a journey with them, and our job is to keep us from running aground or getting wrecked. But it's their journey and it's their vision and their community. A consistent part of this is establishing trust and building connections and relationships, and I've found that it just takes time. I think it's sometimes best to go in as an outsider because I don't come with all the biases of someone local. You have to go in there and listen, and then you have to go in and keep listening and keep responding and build trust.

You're chair of our GDPC housing committee. Regarding the future, how do you see housing moving forward? And what would be a successful outcome in our city or region?

The GDPC is partnering with the Community Foundation of Texas and other organizations. What's come about is that a lot of groups had initiatives on housing, and it's about coming together, and if we work together, we can get more accomplished than working separately. We're going to take a more planning-oriented approach to this, focusing on the planning, zoning, and physical outcomes of housing. Other organizations are going to be a little more focused on policy and advocacy, and others on the funding and economic side of things.

The ultimate goal is for us to move forward housing in the broadest sense for Dallas and the region. We think of ourselves as a growth area, and if we really want to move to the vanguard, we have to step up, especially when it comes to affordable housing. The more housing we get in general, the more it will help overall.

How do we make Dallas a richer place for people to live? I mean richer in the cultural, environmental, not just physical richness. That wraps in parks, communities, streets, and infrastructure. It’s a lot of stuff that I think that we bring special emphasis as an organization.

I'm hopeful that we can start to push through meaningful change. The ultimate meaningful change will be just more places for people to live. That means preserving and fixing up existing neighborhoods. It means adding to things incrementally. Becoming denser doesn't mean there are 20-story towers in every neighborhood. It means from that one-story house to a three-story, or letting someone put an accessory dwelling unit, you've doubled the density. So, those kinds of incremental changes along with targeting larger redevelopments and areas that haven't been developed can help us have a lot of fundamental change.

We're very lucky, not only GDPC, but our city and region to have leaders like yourself. Thank you.

You're welcome and thank you. I like to say the analogy is change is always coming. Change is the tsunami that's coming and that you can't really do anything about it except try to control it or get out of the way of it, right? So you either harness it or get out of the way, but it's going to come.