Dallas is taking a fresh look at zoning across roughly 660 acres in Joppa, one of several Southern Dallas neighborhoods where homes have sat beside heavy industry for generations. The review is part of the city's broader effort to untangle residential blocks from the factories, rail yards and asphalt plants that surround them, but even city officials describe the process as generational rather than immediate.
The Joppa land under review currently carries mostly industry-related zoning, though city planners say it could eventually support mixed or commercial uses instead, according to The Dallas Morning News. Southern Dallas reporter Aria Jones, writing in the paper's Curious Texas series, reports that city staff will blend ideas from both business owners and residents into a new land use plan for the area, and that both groups will be included in that process. Any zoning change in Joppa would focus more on standards for new development than on forcing out what is already built, the paper reports, meaning existing industrial operators would not be immediately pushed out by the shift.
Joppa's proximity to industry traces back to its founding. The neighborhood was established in 1872 by emancipated Black residents as a freedman's town along the Trinity River, and after Dallas annexed it in 1955, heavy industry, Union Pacific rail tracks and asphalt plants were sited directly next to the residential community, according to the Center for Health, Environment & Justice. The neighborhood has lived amid those industrial facilities for decades, per the Dallas Morning News report.
A Public Health Gap Decades in the Making
The consequences show up in health data. A UT Southwestern Medical Center study examining 2005 to 2014 records found that average life expectancy in Joppa's ZIP code was under 71 years, compared with 84 years in the far more affluent, predominantly white Highland Park, according to reporting from The Dallas Morning News. Air monitors placed in Joppa by the SharedAirDFW network in spring 2023 also recorded fine particulate matter levels reaching double the EPA's healthy standard, per the Center for Health, Environment & Justice.
Dallas has broader environmental concerns beyond Joppa, including in Oak Cliff and South Dallas, and the city is reviewing land use questions across those areas as well, per the Dallas Morning News report. Citywide, residential land sitting near industrial zoning makes up about 5% of Dallas's total land area, while roughly 10,000 acres of residential land fall within 1,000 feet of an industrially zoned district, the paper reports. Residential areas overall comprise about 32% of the city's total area, encompassing roughly 70,000 acres.
ForwardDallas 2.0 Sets the Long-Term Vision
The Joppa review sits inside a much larger planning shift. The Dallas City Council voted 11-4 in September 2024 to adopt ForwardDallas 2.0, updating the city's comprehensive land use guide for the first time since 2006 with an emphasis on environmental justice and separating heavy industry from residential neighborhoods, according to the Oak Cliff Advocate. The plan explicitly acknowledges pollution concerns and states that land use policy has contributed to disparate environmental burdens near communities of color, per the Dallas Morning News report. ForwardDallas prioritizes environmental justice issues as part of its long-term vision for land use and urban design, and the city plans to reduce the amount of industry sited near homes going forward.
Implementation of ForwardDallas is now underway, and it runs alongside a separate overhaul of Dallas's development regulations, the first such reform in decades. That development code project kicked off in 2024, and the city expects an initial draft this fall, to be followed by public meetings, according to the Dallas Morning News report. Hoodline previously covered the code overhaul's parking reforms, and the city's zoning apparatus gives both the Dallas City Council and the City Plan Commission authority to initiate broad zoning changes in neighborhoods, though the council holds the final vote in all zoning cases.
Floral Farms Offers a Template, and a Warning
Southern Dallas has already seen one version of this fight play out. Floral Farms residents spent six years pushing for zoning changes after the notorious Shingle Mountain crisis, in which a tall pile of illegally dumped roofing debris piled up at a recycling facility in their neighborhood. The Dallas City Council voted 12-1 in February 2025 to rezone Floral Farms, replacing heavy industrial designations with residential and agricultural land uses, according to The Dallas Observer. The roughly 70,000-to-100,000-ton pile was fully hauled away in February 2021, and the city finished excavating 47,412 cubic yards of lead-contaminated soil by late 2023 in preparation for a community park.
West Dallas residents along Singleton Boulevard are going through a comparable rezoning process now, per the Dallas Morning News report. But the Floral Farms outcome took years, and even a formal rezoning vote does not guarantee a quick industrial exit. In West Dallas, city staff confirmed to the City Council's Economic Development Committee in March 2026 that no legally binding agreement exists to close the 80-year-old GAF asphalt shingle factory on Singleton Boulevard by 2029, after the city terminated an inactive rezoning application tied to that promise, according to KERA News.
A State Law Slows the City's Hand
Part of the reason Dallas cannot simply force these plants out lies in Austin, not City Hall. Texas Senate Bill 929, enacted in May 2023, requires municipalities to pay property owners fair market value compensation or lost revenue costs if the city uses amortization to revoke a nonconforming land use. That law effectively raised the price tag on exactly the kind of zoning enforcement that neighborhoods like Joppa and West Dallas have been asking for.
In response, the Dallas City Council scheduled a vote in April 2026 to allocate $200,000 from contingency reserves to hire consultants who would estimate the market value and amortization costs of closing both the GAF shingle plant in West Dallas and the TAMKO shingle plant in Joppa, according to Texas Metro News. The funding request came in response to the “Toxic Twins” campaign led by West Dallas and Joppa activists pressing the city to act on both facilities at once.
Dallas also has a standing environmental commitment that predates all of this maneuvering. The City Council unanimously adopted the Comprehensive Environmental & Climate Action Plan in May 2020, setting a goal of community-wide carbon neutrality by 2050 and an interim target of cutting emissions 43% below 2015 levels by 2030. For neighborhoods like Joppa, the more immediate question is not the city's carbon targets decades out but whether the zoning review now underway on those 660 acres will translate into cleaner air anytime soon, or whether it will move at the same generational pace city staff have already predicted.
