D

Little Forest Hills

Small wonder.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

I agree with Tim: James Ragland’s column on Preston Hollow, where I live, is a waste of paper that Belo should not waste. We explained the deed restriction “non-issue” that Huffington was trying to “stir”. Item 11 in the deed restrictions that cover the President’s new property (properties) on Daria Place was NOT an issue in 2000. Nor were racist-toned covenants an issue when he bought the family’s home on Northwood in the 1990’s. That racist language has been illegal for many years, but because it was written into legal documents, the graphs could not vanish. The Texas legislature passed recent legislation that enabled homeowners to amend racist language in deed restrictions, which is why many home associations chose to alter them. Real estate reflects history, and truth be told our history is loaded with discrimination… and garbage. Until the 70’s, women could not obtain mortgages or buy homes on their own. They couldn’t even obtain credit cards in their names. We were considered our husband’s chattel. I would not be surprised to find deed restrictions somewhere saying it’s illegal for women to own property — unless they reside in the back-house kitchen.

If Ragland’s point was to give a thumb-nail sketch of Preston Hollow, then I suggest you find a copy of Eva Potter Morgan’s “Preston Hollow”. Preston Hollow was briefly incorporated as a town after an election on November 18, 1939, the voting taking place in the real estate office of Mr. Ira P. DeLoach, also the man who hired Ebby Halliday. Her name and company now occupy what was the town hall of Preston Hollow, the “little white house” at the corner of Northwest Highway and Preston Road. Initially the notion of incorporating PH into a town was controversial, the heart of the discussion being fiscal concerns and higher taxes with annexation. But it was one of humanity’s most basic dilemmas — sanitation — that united Preston Hollow with Dallas while the Park Cities would remain the Golden Bubble in-between:

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Bush/Meaders Restrictive Covenants: For Whites, Only?

I wondered when this would come up — and now it has, thanks to The Huffington Post. (Channel 11’s Bud Gillette called me about this Friday.) HP is stirring trouble, not telling the whole story. The James Meaders Restrictive Covenants are (sadly) typical of the way developers created sub-divisions post World war II in Dallas when the city was growing. I have experience with these because we also have them in our neighborhood. In fact, almost every Dallas neighborhood does! When we closed on our home in 1999, I was shocked when I read them. Homeowners in our ’hood extended our deed restrictions in 2005 as a means of “protecting property values” — so they are, in fact, effective today. But the racist clauses are illegal and un-enforecable and have been so since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Our ‘hood fixed our’s in 2001, and it appears that Mayflower beat us to the punch and amended, second to the last page, on July 16, 2000:

“Item 11 shall be deleted.”

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