By Stephen Socolow
In early June of last summer, I visited my friend, Sohan, who lives in Wylie, Texas, just outside of Dallas. We were best friends in high school, and he had moved to Texas after he graduated so he could live near where he was going to college. I hadn’t seen him in two years and was eager to catch up with him. What I never would have expected was the massive culture shock I experienced during my visit. I came to realize during my week in Dallas what people mean when they say “everything’s bigger in Texas” – everything is so spread out that living in and around the city necessitates owning a car as the primary means of transportation.
I immediately noticed something was different about Dallas when I exited the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and got in my friend’s car. As we left for his house, we got on a highway called the “High Five Interchange,” a collection of roads swirling around each other and going above one another in ever increasing heights. Sohan described it as “like being on a roller coaster,” which I think was a good way to illustrate the insanity of the road system I found myself on. There was something fascinating about driving over and under all of these different roads, but it was just a taste of what was to come. I found that for the entirety of the trip, we were dependent on roads to get around.
Two different perspectives of the High Five Interchange (Wikipedia).
As we talked in the car for about an hour, we approached where he lived, a planned community called Inspiration. I was taken aback by everything about this place. To start, Inspiration is pretty much in the middle of nowhere, and it takes 40 minutes by car to get from Sohan’s house to where he goes to college, the University of Texas at Dallas. I live in Moorestown, New Jersey, and if an out-of-town friend was staying at my house, I would probably take a walk with them into the main part of town to visit some of the local shops. But when staying in Inspiration, we were completely isolated from the rest of the world without a car. James Adams with the American Institute of Architects in Dallas wrote about how “a ten-block walk to the grocery store, common in the early ‘50s, [has] all but vanished as our lifestyles morphed to accommodate the assumption that we must drive to our destinations,” which is something I can corroborate – walking anywhere in Dallas was an impossibility for us (Adams). Any time we wanted to go somewhere, we had to get in Sohan’s car and drive there, including if we wanted to go to other places in the Inspiration development. We rarely drove less than half an hour going from place to place, and I’d say most of the time it would take us an hour to get to our destination, especially if we were departing from Inspiration. Adams wrote how “sprawl has not only made us automobile-dependent, it has changed the organization of our neighborhoods and eroded our culture by chipping away at connectivity,” which I think reflects how out-of-the-way Inspiration is, and how that forces you to need to have a car to get anywhere (Adams).
An aerial view of Inspiration. You can see how, even within Inspiration, the houses are spread out to the point that getting from one end to the other would require a car (Brightland Homes).
Another fascinating thing about Inspiration was its design, both internally and how it relates with the landscape surrounding it. Sohan said to me as we first passed by the big “Inspiration” sign at the neighborhood’s entrance that “Inspiration is like communities within a community,” which perfectly describes the organization of the development. Internally, Inspiration is set up as multiple villages that border each other to make up the overall Inspiration community, including subdivisions called Destiny, Hope, Discovery, Grace, Harmony, Faith, and where Sohan lives, Peace. On the outside though, Inspiration is surrounded by large expanses of farmland with a few rundown-looking houses and trailer parks scattered throughout. Sohan told me that the construction of Inspiration was controversial, as many of the farmers living in the area didn’t like the idea of having such a big community that would take up that much land. Many neighbors of Inspiration are still unhappy about its existence, and oppose any further expansion of the community onto more surrounding land.
A picture I took as we left Inspiration. The development is mostly surrounded by farmland and empty space (Socolow).
One final thing that was interesting to me about Inspiration was how similar all of the houses looked to one another. Every single house had the exact same gray-tiled roof, almost every house was made of brick, and they were all roughly the same size. This was similar across the different subdivisions as well – whether you lived in Destiny, Peace, Faith, or wherever, the houses all looked similar to each other. The houses of Inspiration also stand in stark contrast to the look of the surrounding houses, many of which had peeling paint and overall looked in much worse shape. The houses and trailer parks outside of Inspiration also had much more rural aspects to them, such as how I often saw horses and cows in the pastures of farms, dishes for satellite TV, and other such features that significantly differed from the suburban feel of the Inspiration houses.
A picture I took of Sohan’s backyard, showing the homogeneity of the style of the houses in Inspiration (Socolow).
I had a really good time visiting my friend in Dallas, but I found it ridiculous how spread out everything was. Needing to travel by car to go anywhere was absurd to me, as I’ve always been able to walk places in every other place I’ve ever lived or visited. However, my experience is just a small look into the immense urban sprawl in Dallas. In a 2023 study about American cities with the most undeveloped land, “Dallas led with a whopping 90,739 acres [of undeveloped land]… not to be outdone, Dallas’ sister city, Fort Worth, Texas, boasted 74,835 acres of undeveloped land” (Brown). It wasn’t just me who experienced this sprawl for a week – the residents of Dallas and its environs are experiencing this every day.
A graph showing the cities with the most undeveloped land. Dallas and Fort Worth lead, reflecting my experience of visiting them both for a week and driving past farmland for hours to get places (Yardi Systems).
Works Cited:
Adams, James. “Mobility, Sprawl, and the Future of North Texas.” American Institute of Architects Dallas, 2023. https://www.aiadallas.org/v/columns-detail/Mobility-Sprawl-and-the-Future-of-North-Texas/i7/.
Brown, Steve. “Dallas Tops Cities with Room to Grow, Boasting 90,000 Acres of Vacant Land.” Dallas News, March 27, 2023. https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2023/03/27/dallas-has-more-than-90000-acres-of-room-to-grow/.
Sohan Vidiyala, text message to author, October 31, 2023.
Images Cited:
Brightland Homes. Inspiration Aerial Shot. 2023. Online photograph. https://www.brightlandhomes.com/new-homes/texas/dallas-fort-worth/community/Inspiration-108563.
Socolow, Stephen. Photograph in Inspiration Backyard. June 2023. Personal photograph.
Socolow, Stephen. Photograph Outside of Inspiration. June 2023. Personal photograph.
Wikipedia. High Five Interchange. 2007. Online photograph. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:High_Five_Interchange.jpg.
Wikipedia. High Five. 2010. Online photograph. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:High_Five.jpg.
Yardi Systems. Total Vacant Land Available. March 2023. Online Photograph. https://www.dallasnews.com/business/real-estate/2023/03/27/dallas-has-more-than-90000-acres-of-room-to-grow/.
