Hensley Field is located in the Southwestern part of Dallas, adjacent to Mountain Creek Lake and Grand Prairie. It used to be a US Navy Air Station. Now, it mostly serves as a storage unit for the city’s unwanted police vehicles and confederate statues. In the future, the Dallas Economic Development Committee, hopes the field can be transformed into something more useful.
The Field is said to be redeveloped into a “authentic, climate-smart, diverse, mixed-income and walkable community with a mix of jobs, housing, services and amenities.”
Which means its going to be your typical progressive mini-paradise. The council plans to have things such as solar panels, bike lanes, water-based green spaces along Mountain Creek Lake, and more. The goal is to hopefully turn Hensley Filed into a ‘diverse and carbon-neutral community’ that relies more on walking and public transit than driving.
The Designing of a New Hensley Field
Muller, Austin, Texas serves as the model for what Dallas will try and replicate in Hensley Field. In fact, McCann Adams Studio Team, who oversaw the redevelopment of Muller, is listed as the preferred vendor for the redevelopment of Hensley Field.
A draft of what Hensley Filed might look like is shown below.
COVID19 budget concerns for the local economy mean everything is subject to change. The current budget is $2,000,000. This project is in its begging stages and still has 18 months to before any City Action can be taken. For any updates be sure to check out Other Side Dallas.
This site is as polluted as can be! At one of the LTV sites in Dallas, radioactive waste is buried, but the public cannot know where! This is craziness, as if we Dallasites do not remember history. Cesium is in the lake. I would like to see the area developed for people, but let’s talk about the true situation when we sell these plans.
If Dallas had taken the millions it got for damage for this land-lake, and done something to fix it, there would be plenty of money! But at the time, clean to a high enough standard was not possible. The idea was that nature would clean up the lake, but of course it would take 75 years! The Navy has records on all of this.
In a post-COVID-19 America, I am skeptical that projects of this kind will get economic traction. Our economy has been devastated and it will take a decade or more for the impacts of this social, economic, and medical WHAMMY to settle.
I am NOT against good ideas at all. I just feel that the New World environment has to be factored into all future planning and investment strategies and decisions.