Where to live in Dallas
Dallas is 340 square miles of land and 1,329,491 people on the Census Bureau's estimate for July 2025, and the neighborhood decides more about an address here than any citywide figure does: which county and school district the tax bill is drawn on, whether a public improvement district adds an assessment, whether a historic or conservation district governs the front of the house, and how close the lot sits to the Trinity or one of its creeks. These are 20 neighborhood guides, filterable by area below.
Browse dedicated pages for Downtown, Uptown and Oak Lawn, East Dallas, Swiss Avenue to Lakewood, North Dallas, Vickery Meadow to Prestonwood, Oak Cliff, across the Trinity, The Cedars, South Dallas and Pleasant Grove.
20 communities across the city
A start on a city of 1.3 million people that publishes no layer of neighborhoods of its own. Filter by area of the city, then page through the rest.
Bishop Arts
The shops around Bishop Avenue in North Oak Cliff and the streets the Bishop Arts association files around them, part under a conservation district and the rest under the Bishop/Davis planned development district.
Deep Ellum
Elm Street's clubs and restaurants east of downtown, inside their own improvement district, where the nightlife is on the block rather than a few blocks away.
Downtown Dallas
Living inside the freeway loop, where home is a unit in a building rather than a house and the address sits inside the downtown improvement district.
Hamilton Park
The subdivision built for Black families in the segregated city, in Richardson ISD, with a civic league that has enforced its deed restrictions.
Kessler Park
A conservation district rather than a historic one, so plans go through a work review against the district's own standards instead of a certificate for every exterior change.
Lake Cliff
The small historic district around Lake Cliff at Oak Cliff's northern edge, the nearest of the Oak Cliff guides to downtown and under the same certificate rule as Winnetka Heights.
Lakewood
The streets east of Lower Greenville toward White Rock Lake that the Lakewood association files, with a City conservation district at their center that governs what a new house may look like.
Lower Greenville
The streets east of Greenville Avenue's bars and restaurants, up to the avenue's center line, which the Lower Greenville association files as one area, so the avenue's nights are part of the address.
M Streets
The M Streets conservation district west of Greenville Avenue, where an ordinance written for these blocks governs what a new house or an addition may look like.
Munger Place
A compact City historic district just south of Swiss Avenue, under the same certificate rule for most exterior work but on a smaller footprint than its neighbor.
Oak Lawn
West of Uptown and several times its size, and zoned subdistrict by subdistrict under the Oak Lawn special purpose district.
Old Lake Highlands
The older streets just east of White Rock Lake, on the Dallas ISD side of the line that puts much of Lake Highlands to the north in Richardson ISD.
Photographs: Shops in the Bishop Arts District by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · Main Street, Deep Ellum by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · Downtown across the Trinity by Tony Webster, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons · A park in Kessler Park by David Nash, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Lake Cliff Park by Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · White Rock Lake by DronePhotographer, CC0, Wikimedia Commons · The Granada Theater on Greenville Avenue by Ian D'Andrea, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · Houses in Munger Place by Renelibrary, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.
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Showing 1–12 of 20 communities
The five areas at a glance
None of these five is drawn by the City. They are the names people here use, set on the lines Dallas already divides itself by: the freeway loop around downtown, Central Expressway, the Trinity River and Interstate 30. Where one area stops and the next begins is our judgment rather than a map anybody publishes.
| Area | Neighborhoods | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown, Uptown and Oak Lawn | Deep Ellum, Downtown Dallas, Oak Lawn, Uptown | Downtown, Uptown, Deep Ellum and Oak Lawn, inside the loop and north of it, where most homes are in buildings and much of the area pays a public improvement district's assessment. |
| East Dallas, Swiss Avenue to Lakewood | Lakewood, Lower Greenville, M Streets, Munger Place, Swiss Avenue | Swiss Avenue, Munger Place, Lower Greenville, the M Streets and Lakewood, east of Central Expressway, where historic and conservation districts govern the front of many houses. |
| North Dallas, Vickery Meadow to Prestonwood | Hamilton Park, Old Lake Highlands, Prestonwood, Vickery Meadow | Vickery Meadow, Old Lake Highlands, Hamilton Park and Prestonwood, where the school district on the tax bill is sometimes Richardson ISD rather than Dallas ISD. |
| Oak Cliff, across the Trinity | Bishop Arts, Kessler Park, Lake Cliff, Winnetka Heights | Bishop Arts, Kessler Park, Winnetka Heights and Lake Cliff, across the Trinity, with nine of the City's nineteen conservation districts. |
| The Cedars, South Dallas and Pleasant Grove | Pleasant Grove, South Dallas, The Cedars | The Cedars, South Dallas around Fair Park, and Pleasant Grove out to the southeast, where the Trinity and its levees are the flood question. |
Where the neighborhoods come from. The City of Dallas publishes no layer of neighborhoods on its open data portal. What it does draw at neighborhood size is a patchwork: historic districts and conservation districts, public improvement districts, the Oak Lawn special purpose district, and a public map of the neighborhood and homeowners associations that have filed their boundaries with its planning staff, which the City says it does not check. So each guide here is a neighborhood with a boundary somebody official draws or files: a historic or conservation district where one carries the neighborhood's name, a public improvement district or the Oak Lawn district for the central districts, and an association's filed area where there is nothing else. Each guide names which one it uses and what the name covers, and its population is the 2020 census count of the blocks inside it.
The five areas are ours. The City does publish divisions, and none of them is a way to choose where to live. Its fourteen City Council districts are electoral and are redrawn every ten years on the new census. ForwardDallas 2.0, the land use plan the Council adopted in September 2024, maps the city by placetypes rather than by named regions. And the historic districts, conservation districts and improvement districts are the right size for a guide and far too many and too uneven for a grouping. The grouping here uses the names residents use instead, and which neighborhood lands in which area is our judgment.
What is not here. Highland Park and University Park, the Park Cities, are separate towns with their own councils and their own tax rates, and Dallas surrounds them; so is Cockrell Hill, a city of 3,638 people on the Census Bureau's 2025 estimate that Dallas surrounds on every side. None of them is covered here, and neither are Richardson, Garland, Irving, Mesquite, Farmers Branch, Addison or the county's other cities. A Dallas mailing address is not proof of a City of Dallas address either: the appraisal district's record for a property lists the city, county and school district that tax it, and that is the one to read. Inside the limits this selection still leaves real places out, Preston Hollow among them, for which the City's map carries no boundary of that name, and they come as the guides do.