At the September 23, 2024 meeting, the Richardson City Council voted 4-3 in favor of a national car dealership’s plan, prioritizing it over the interests of local businesses and residents. Clay Cooley proposed adding a body shop, vehicle storage, and repair shop among a few other things to their property in the heart of the Interurban district. Despite feedback and evidence regarding development goals, zoning laws, and urban design, they moved forward. Concerns raised by stakeholders—both recently and in the past—were overlooked, along with financial data, years of planning, and the community's investment in its future. Instead of encouraging new growth, the decision will preserve aging, substandard buildings from the 1960s and 70s. Ultimately, this vote supports parking lots and a closed repair shop, with the promise of a mural that, by law, could be painted over at any time.
oh come on! You are just exaggerating! No. I’m not. I’m going to show you how bad it is.
It threatens to reverse, kill, or severely stunt transformation of central Richardson for a generation. That transformation that is well underway has already produced creative and local businesses building a productive and profitable business network that is on its way to creating wide cultural district -- assuming it isn't killed.
In a presentation that I handed to Council Members, I started with the slide above. Both are actual pictures from Richardson. The top photo is the vision and aspiration of stakeholders, business owners and residents that have participated in our past planning processes and it is also a realized version of those aspirations. The bottom is the vision of a future Richardson that was voted on that evening. The bottom picture won.
This proposal isn't just a single proposal. It is a decision about how Richardson wants to move forward with folks who have skin in the game like small businesses. This is not a case of whether or not one can make excuses like a NYT Crossword puzzle to see if a proposal fits into the squares of 4 across. This is about what elected officials, local businesses and residents want their city to aspire toward. I first walked into City Hall about 25 years ago. This may be the worst zoning decision I have seen.
Who is the Audience for this Post?
First, the general public. I believe you have a right to understand this because if the City will do this then it can do this to something you hold dear. The city is ignoring its own planning and going back on their word to you, and Interurban District businesses & property owners. If they will do that to Richardson residents who have built-in sweat and monetary equity for a body shop (that as we will see is a fiscal loser) then the implications are clear.
Second, I am addressing the city council. You still have a chance to change this when the ordinance comes before you on the consent agenda. You can remove it from the consent agenda and do what needs to be done. The City Council has done that before. This is your legacy and if this continues then that legacy, for decades, will be surface lot car dealerships and body shops pushing out and repelling local people centered businesses. And when you do what should be done, you won’t be killing the Richardson business centered transformation of this area and you will be doing it for a fiscal gain to the city.
Everyone: I want to concentrate on the sole reason that you need to understand to see how galactically stupid this idea is. That is its negative fiscal impact. You could not pick a worse project for fiscal impact. Richardson’s own history unambiguously shows this. Now I will show you. (It's not the only one but the fiscal reasons alone disqualify it.)
Richardson's Own Standards
The Richardson City Council's own 2023-2025 Goals contain this strategy:
During budget sessions, the amount of revenue produced by "Residential vs Commercial" is always discussed with the aim that the commercial side keep the residential side from being overburdened. That is expressed in this slide from this year's budget sessions."Value, protect, and create a positive return on city, resident, and other stakeholder investments in the City."
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| Source: City of Richardson |
This land use proposal, in no way provides, "a positive return on city, resident, and other stakeholder investments." It also works directly against the Commercial vs Residential measure.
At the September 23, 2024 meeting, several people spoke against this including business owners and there were a number of written comments against it. Below I will link to other sources that detail those. From here I am going to discuss my comments at that meeting and further research along those lines.
I gave the council a relatively hastily prepared packet that mostly explained the negative fiscal impact the proposal will have. If I had two weeks to spend beforehand, I could have done a better job but still the point was made. In days, following the meeting I peeled back my data even further and what I learned makes this project even worse.
Bring the Data
In my packet I included three quotes:
The First Principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool. -- Richard FeynmanMy arguments are based on data, but why these quotes? Because it is easy to think “I am right” and then defend that point instead of letting facts alter your view. Facts should be the mover. Not your prejudices. Not how smart you think you are. Not how much you think you need to save face. Let facts and data decide. I told the council not to trust me. I told them to trust the data. It doesn’t lie. I trusted the data and true to form it changed my opinions the more I looked within it. And lastly, you can disagree with all this but to do so you have to bring data. You can’t just wave your hands around and say, “Well grumble but but blah blah…economic development… blah blah business friendly.” What are your reasons supported by data?
In God We Trust… All others must bring data. -- W. Edwards Deming (misattributed)
Without data, you're just another person with an opinion. -- W. Edwards Deming
I am not using the data to “prove” my opinions. I used data to decide what my conclusions ought to be. How? Automobile uses like car dealers and body shops are worse than I had anticipated. When I peel back the layers of the onion on Richardson’s property tax data, they look worse. In no cases did they look better.
So the data I presented was a form of land use productivity analysis. (Don’t let your eyes glaze over from the jargon.) Simply put what kind of land uses generate the most property taxes per acre compared to others? Land is what cities have and how they pay for police, fire, roads, parks and everything else. They aren’t making more land I am told. Yes. Sales tax is there but it is volatile, produces less revenue, and (TA-DA!) is often strongly correlated to land use. This method is becoming a widely used practice. Garland is doing it now. Addison is finishing their comprehensive plan with this. Many cities in Texas and across the U.S. are using this now. (I’ll put a link to a video presentation at the bottom of this article.)
In my packet, I presented this image with a verbal explanation. This is Campbell and US-75 from values about 3 or 4 years ago. What this shows is property tax value per per acre. The higher the "tower" the higher that value. In other words, how efficient is land being used to produce municipal revenue? This is not merely a measure of straight properly value but a measure of how effectively land produces property tax revenues for cities. What you notice is that there are significant differences based on land use. Other slides concentrated on uses on or adjacent to the US-75 corridor to make the point.
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| Geospatial example expressing productivity data |
I am not going to go over those other slides but instead I will present this data in a different way and explain some implications not in my council presentation.
In case you don’t want to read this entire thing, or you go into TLDR mode because this is too long, then let me start with the conclusion that the data gives:
Automobile uses like dealers, body shops and garages are terrible for economic development. There are no exceptions. It is consistent. Upgrading them only helps them temporarily and even then not that much. And because these uses require all the things a city provides - public safety, roads, and the rest – they are de facto subsidized by other land uses. They do not pay their fair share.
The Analysis
I analyzed properties in Richardson on the US-75 corridor from Spring Valley to just north of Campbell. That’s about 125 properties. I also peeled back data over time and I did comparisons with all properties in Richardson in Dallas County. The latter part of these were not presented to the Council because I had not performed it yet.
The questions are these:
How do automotive uses (especially body shops) compare to others in property tax generation?Automotive Body Shops in General
Does the data show categorical patterns on or very close to the US-75 corridor in Richardson?
Is there temporal evidence that these uses do worse, better, or neither over time?
There are three body shop properties in or directly adjacent to the US-75 corridor.
Parcels with zero tax value like government buildings, schools, and parks and land are removed from the analysis. The parcels in Dallas County in Richardson are then ranked by tax value productivity.
Here is where all three automotive body shops rank:
99.7th LOWEST percentile
of property tax generation per acre.
Mayor Bob Dubey said, “We could do a lot worse, like Mr. Hutchenrider said.”
No. We cannot do worse. This is it. This is the bottom. We certainly cannot do “a lot worse” which could only mean a zero value. I suppose it could be bizarre a negative property value but last I checked taxing entities were not paying land owners refunds for bad properties.
Don’t believe me yet? There is more.
Land Use Productivity by Category on US-75
Every parcel on US-75 from Spring Valley to just north of Campbell Road is included. Because of irregularities in parcels, flag lots, automotive uses adjacent to US-75 corrected, and some adjacent parcels are added. Government and Churches are removed because they produce no revenue. What Dallas County Appraisal District classifies as Land Alone remains in the data set. This data is refined compared to what I presented the council. Some errors were removed, classifications corrected, and data refined.
Rather than show the 3D geospatial representation I showed the City Council (which was similar to what is shown above), this is a more illustrative way to present the data.
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| US-75 Productivity by Category (Click to enlarge) |
This is called a box plot. It is a standard visual statistical tool that shows how a particular measure is distributed and how it compares to other data. After the data is divided into quartiles, the thick bar is the middle 50% of the values in that category. The thin vertical lines are called “whiskers” they contain the top and bottom 25% respectively and the top and bottom of the whisker is the highest and lowest values. The dots are outliers. There is some math to determine outliers and you can see the dots are certainly well outside those category ranges.
This one displays every property on US-75 from Spring Valley to Campbell and measures the property tax productivity per acre and those values are divided by land use categories.
I have added some handy horizontal lines. Blue is the top and bottom of Automotive Dealers. Red is the top and bottom of other automotive uses (and that of course includes body shops like what Clay Cooley is proposing.) Notice that the top and bottom of the bars for Auto Dealer and Auto Other (including their whiskers) are in a tight range and it is very low compared to others. That middle bar height and short whiskers show that the tax value per acre for automotive uses is in a remarkably narrow range. That is positive proof of how consistent their values are and that there is no real escape. These auto uses across the entire US-75 corridor in Richardson are on the lower end of earners consistently.
The vast majority of automotive uses are under $1,000,000 an acre. The bulk of other uses far exceed this and better said they eclipse it.
Remember when I mentioned the statistics of body shops and how poorly they ranked? Those body shops are contained in the bottom whisker for the “Auto Other” category. Look at where that is and scan your eyes to the right. What do you notice? All other categories handily beat them with the exception of one category:
Land.
But look at the rest. The bulk of every use category outperforms all automotive uses. If you know nothing about this zoning case, and I asked you to recommend uses for boosting of our tax base using this chart would you, in any universe, pick any automotive uses? You would not. But the City Council did so.
Digging down into the data, where to the automotive businesses rank?
44% of Automotive Dealers are in the bottom 25% of property tax productivity.
35% of other Automotive Uses are in the bottom 25% of property tax productivity.
75% of Automotive Dealers are in the bottom 50% of property tax productivity.
88% of other Automotive Uses are in the bottom 50% of property tax productivity.
Do you still think we can do worse than this? Let’s remember the First Principle above. Let’s not fool ourselves. Maybe there is something we missed. Let’s keep going.
Time Based Comparisons
What about those outlier dots? That high dot over auto dealerships is a dealer with a new building built in the past few years. “OK. So it’s possible,” you say with a ray of hope. Let me squash that too.
In our analysis here, some land use cases are compared to other land use cases. We will see how they do over time. If the sea rises, does it not lift all boats? Is there any consistency and pattern? Do automotive uses keep up? I think you know the answer.
For the sake of brevity and ease of reading, I am going to show you some bar charts. You will see some instances named across the bottom, and taxable value per acre on the y-axis. The two bars for each set are before and after. Before and After what? After is always 2023 data. The before varies but it is between 2013 and 2016 depending on the case. If a property was upgraded I picked two years before it was upgraded. (In one case I had to pick 1 year because the property was replatted and had no previous data.)
I added two adaptive reuse cases not on the box plot above. (They are not precisely in the US-75 corridor.) They are both former automotive properties converted to other uses. Why add them? Because that is what should be successful in the Interurban District (and other areas of the city for that matter). The Automotive dealers are two dealers which upgraded property including adding buildings according to DCAD.
Take a look: (Click to Expand)
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| Case 1: Adaptive Reuse vs Auto |
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| Case 2: Established vs Auto |
The adaptive reuse cases are astounding. Owners and small operators taking these properties and retrofitting them into to different uses while being sensitive to their context causes them to outperform many other use types. Those efforts not only breathes useful life into the properties but they enhance the purpose and culture of any district. Unlike a body shop, these changes clearly and unequivocally meet all the desires and visions of the Interurban District or any other district for that matter (even though in these cases they aren't located there.) As a bonus to all of us they enhance the community's return on investment goals above.
Body shops and automotive uses do precisely none of that.
I regret not showing adaptive use in the Interurban district because those also display this pattern. One adaptive reuse case in the Interurban District is owned by a group of attorneys who want to be part of the vision. In 2013, the property was worth about $456,000 per acre in tax value. After their retrofits and upgrades which went along with the districts zoning and required no zoning changes? In 2023 that property is at $2.1 million an acre. By the way, they sent a letter to council that I acquired through public records requests. It stated that passing zoning cases like Clay Cooley's made them think they might have made a mistake locating here.
During the September 23rd hearing a council member tried to claim Clay Cooley's body shop and parking was "adaptive use." Those are unequivocally not adaptive reuse. Parking is never adaptive reuse and using a auto repair building as auto repair again is not, in any sense, adaptive reuse.
You can see how the automotive uses are left in the dust by other uses. The body shop cases are amazingly terrible. It is simply irresponsible to zone new ones. The office property was built in 1984. The retail case is nothing but 4 walls and parking and was built in 1980. The shopping center whose name I think you know.
Both dealerships cannot keep up despite upgrades. Dealer 2 looks like it gained value but the "after" 2023 value is actually down from its peak value. So it gained and then lost value. I know you are thinking, "You must have cherry picked these!" No. This pattern repeats itself. Showing you more bar charts won't help their case. If I had cherry picked I could have made the auto uses look far worse.
The adaptive use values start close to the automotive values before adaptation. Afterward they blow them away often multiple times the productivity value. The Established uses are unremarkable for what they are. Two of the three added no square footage yet as time goes on they gain value.
If you own a business which one of these, do you want next to your business? If you bought property in the Interurban District, set up a business in central Richardson, and you did so to stick to the vision which ones of these do you want next to your investment? Which one of these would you reason might harm your investment?
So now that we have all of this data presented from the general to the specific how are the questions above answered?
How do automotive uses (especially body shops) compare to others in property tax generation? A: Very poorly. They are a drain in the tax base.Does the sea lift all boats? Well it lifts a lot of boats but automotive uses like body shops are submarines. They ain't rising. In fact, they are descending to deeper depths.
Does the data show categorical patterns on or very close to the US-75 corridor in Richardson? A: Yes, and automotive uses show up on the bottom.
Is there temporal evidence that these uses do worse, better, or neither over time? A: Yes. Automotive uses fall behind other uses even when other uses are older properties.
Conclusions
The data here is unequivocal. The numerous analyses performed could have concluded with different results on automotive uses but they simply did not. They won't. One might change the margins and tweak a few things but the overall results won't change.
Murals, landscaping and promises won't fix this. They will not double and triple the output of these properties.
Automotive uses are among the least productive uses of all uses with body shops at the bottom.
Compared to other uses auto uses are well behind these other uses with little exception.
Automotive uses fall behind other uses whether those are adapted properties or not.
Automotive uses like dealers and body shops are a drag on Richardson's tax base. They will repel productive development nearby. It is utterly irresponsible to approve expanded automotive uses like these in the Interurban District.
Postscript on vision:
Much of the discussion revolved around whether or not this proposal fit "the plan" or "the vision." No district or corridor plan has a goal to go backward. None have a goal to get worse. They always aspire to be better. They aspire to move their area forward. Under no reading of the plan does it suggest body shops are acceptable. Most mentions of auto uses in the plan document (especially when quoting stakeholders) were negative. This data shows you one reason why. They are unproductive and a drag.
Comparisons to Plano were made in the meeting that were (to put it kindly) not based in reality. Both Plano and Garland's downtown areas are being built on the backs and investments of small operators making small bets and incrementally moving their cities forward. That is how great places are always built. It doesn't matter if it is here, Plano, or Podunk, Utah.
If you are a city council member reading this, do the right thing. Pull this item off the consent agenda and vote against it. If you voted against it the first time, and think it will still pass do it anyway. Give your colleagues a chance to redeem themselves. If they don't it isn't your fault. Let them live with the legacy of harming this area of Richardson for a generation. Don't join them. This is about more than this single proposal. This is about more than the Interurban District.
Thanks for reading.
Links:
Mark Steger: Council Recap: Sell Out for a Mural
The Richardson Independent (from Lauren Decker): Blurred Vision
If you are on Facebook find any number of groups where Justin Neth posts his thorough council meeting summaries. Not in any of those groups? Here is a Google Doc.
Mapping the Dollars and Sense of Land Use Patterns | Joe Minicozzi, Urban3
(Thank you for your input, Joe!)
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