Live in The Cedars

The Cedars is the ground just south of downtown, across Interstate 30. It was first built up in the 1870s, and in 1876 the City began buying the land around Browder's Spring for City Park, its first park. The freeways came in the 1960s, and Wikipedia says virtually every house left in the Cedars was cleared for highway projects in that decade. This guide covers the Cedars Neighborhood Association's area as it is filed on the City's map, about 917 acres between Interstate 30, Interstate 45, the Trinity levee and Interstate 35E, lines the City says it does not check. The appraisal roll shows what stands inside them now: 273 commercial and 35 industrial buildings, and 513 vacant commercial lots covering about 226 acres, 41% of the land in parcels.

The census counted a small neighborhood of renters. In 2020 the blocks inside the line held 2,710 people in 1,619 homes, against 1,818 in 995 in 2010. Renters held 1,139 of the 1,415 occupied homes, and 200 residents lived in group quarters, all in the census category that includes shelters. The roll shows where they rent. Old buildings came first, among them the Sears warehouse on Lamar Street, dated 1915, which became the lofts of Southside on Lamar in 2000. Twelve apartment accounts dated 2013 or later hold 1,223 units, and 515 of them are dated 2022 and 2025, after the count. What a buyer can own is narrower: 143 townhouses and 47 houses, and no condominium units on the City's parcel layer. One account from each of the sixteen townhouse subdivisions dates from 2004 to 2023.

PD 317 decides what can be built on the empty lots. The Cedars Area Special Purpose District has zoned most of the area since 1989 and takes about 548 of the 917 acres; the Council rewrote it on 10 February 2021. It allows 90 feet in its residential subdistrict, 180 on the mixed-use corridors, 300 on the blocks facing the freeways and up to 500 for a qualifying mixed-use project. Across Interstate 30 the City is rebuilding the Kay Bailey Hutchison Convention Center for a 2029 opening and says the center will anchor a district that reconnects downtown to the Cedars. On the west side, Texas Central holds about 60 acres on the roll for the Dallas station of its Houston line, whose $63.9 million federal grant was ended in April 2025. The City's documents give 2029 for the center and no date for anything on the Cedars side of the freeway.

No price index follows the association's line. Zillow's figure for ZIP code 75215, which held 98% of the Cedars' residents in 2020 but is about five times its area and mostly South Dallas, was $173,515 in August 2026, down 6.6% on the year, and its rent index for the ZIP was $1,588 a month. Neither describes a townhouse built since 2004, and the MLS reports only the whole city, where the median townhouse sold for $543,000 on 30 sales. On the 2025 rates a homestead at Zillow's figure owes the five taxing units about $1,872 a year, and the same home without the exemption about $3,864; the arithmetic is on the Dallas page. Around Cedars Station and Botham Jean Boulevard, about 213 acres fall in the South Side improvement district, whose term on the City's layer runs from 2020 to 2026, and its assessment comes on top there. On the City's floodplain layer 16% of the area is protected by the Trinity levee, 12% is a stormwater hazard area, and about 2% along the levee is floodway or the 1% annual chance zone.

The train stops in the middle of it. Cedars Station, on Belleview Street two blocks east of Botham Jean Boulevard, has had DART's Red and Blue Lines since 1996, with a train every 7.5 minutes at the peaks on the two lines combined and no parking; Union Station is two stops north. Police headquarters, completed in 2003, stands beside it at 1400 Botham Jean Boulevard, the stretch of South Lamar Street the Council renamed in January 2021 for Botham Jean, killed in his apartment on that stretch in 2018 by Amber Guyger, then a Dallas police officer. The City's grocery layer lists no supermarket inside the line. The nearest groceries are the 800-square-foot Southpoint Community Market on South Ervay Street and the Dallas Farmers Market across the freeway, and Fiesta Mart on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Tom Thumb on Field Street are each about 3.6 km away.