Neighbors who decided to organize
South of Highland Park is seventy-two square blocks and about six thousand residents, roughly seventy percent of us renting. It's where first-time homeowners, young professionals and empty-nesters end up together, steps from the city's energy, with a neighborly feel all its own.
What we do
We read the filings on our blocks and brief the neighborhood. We organize volunteer days on the alleys, medians and tree canopy. We show up at the Oak Lawn Committee, the City Plan Commission and City Council, and we bring residents' input with us.
How we're funded
Membership dues, at twenty-five dollars a household per year. SOHIP Neighborhood Association, Inc. is a Texas 501(c)(3), so dues may qualify as a charitable deduction. Dues pay for the beautification work and the case research — nothing else.
How decisions get made
An elected board, seated through December 2027, with standing committees for zoning, beautification, crime watch, events and communications. Committee positions are voted, minuted, and published. When our position on a case changes, we say so in writing.
Fairways, a schoolhouse, a cathedral, and a motorcade.
Seventy-two blocks is not much ground, but a surprising amount of Dallas happened on it. Here is the short version.
A Welsh cotton broker and two British expats lay out six holes near Oak Lawn and Lemmon — quart tins sunk for cups, barbed wire strung to keep the cattle off the fairways. Within a year it is the Dallas Golf and Country Club.
The club moves north to Highland Park. The old fairways are sold and platted, and Bowser, Holland and Gilbert are laid down over them. If you live on those blocks, your house sits on a golf course.
Two stories of red brick, Tudor and Classical Revival, built for four hundred students. Named for Stephen J. Hay, the first mayor elected under the city's mayor-council government. It is still a City of Dallas Landmark.
Three converts found the parish and begin some of the first English-language Orthodox services in the region. It reaches Wycliff Avenue in 1972, and the cathedral is consecrated in 2001.
At 12:06 p.m., at Lemmon and Lomo Alto, the President orders the car stopped because children are holding a sign asking him to shake their hands. He does. It is one of two unscheduled stops before Dealey Plaza.
Sculptural stairs, barrel-vault skylights, plate glass and stained concrete. Few Dallas neighborhoods carry one architect's signature as visibly as ours does.
Neighbors who had been organizing informally for years file as a Texas nonprofit corporation, and the association becomes something you can actually join.
The board
Elected by the membership and seated through December 2027, with standing committees for zoning, beautification, crime watch, events and communications.
Terrie Booth
Edwin Blair
Susan Brown-Nelson
John McCarley
Chair, Zoning Committee
Bob Griffo
Jeff McLaughlin
Six thousand neighbors are stronger than one letter
Twenty-five dollars a household, a year. It funds the beautification work, the case research, and the ability to say we represent this neighborhood and mean it.