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Deep Ellum noise plan hits the right notes

We must preserve the past but look to the future.

Throughout its storied history, Deep Ellum has been loud. It was a place for dancing and singing and guitar playing and all the boisterous trouble that has made it not only fun but culturally important to our city.

But we also know it is changing. In its early history, Deep Ellum was an isolated commercial and even industrial corner of the city. Walled off by a railroad track, it was one of the few places where Black and white residents might mix in clubs, restaurants and bars.

From that rich place came great music. The blues are rooted there, and that spirit continues today.

The difference now is that music flows seven nights a week from amplifiers turned up loud and echoing out towards an increasing number of new apartments where residents are trying to get sleep and toward businesses that aren’t all about the music scene.

For many months, the Deep Ellum Noise Task Force, supported by the Deep Ellum Foundation, has been working on solutions. Their suggestions deserve strong consideration for adoption.

First, they want to be sure Deep Ellum is preserved as what it is, a cultural district centered on music, even as it inevitably becomes the residential neighborhood that it wasn’t historically.

As the task force notes, Deep Ellum has seen a massive increase in apartments, with more than 75% growth from 2018 to 2020. More are on the way. This is not a place that is tucked away anymore.

As more people have come, noise complaints have increased. The task force proposes creating an overlay district that would increase the permissible noise levels in two separate “tiers” of the neighborhood.

The proposed noise tiers in the Deep Ellum Noise Task Force report.
The proposed noise tiers in the Deep Ellum Noise Task Force report.(Deep Ellum Foundation)

In Tier 1, really the core of Deep Ellum roughly from Good-Latimer Expressway to South Walton Street, between Commerce and Main streets, the noise level can reach 92 decibels until midnight five days a week and until 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. (A fire truck with its sirens on hits about 100 decibels, according to the task force.) In Tier 2, which stretches east from Walton just past Exposition Avenue, the level is a lower 78 decibels for the same days and hours. For the rest of the area, it just follows the normal city ordinance.

That’s late and loud for the area in Tier 1. That seems just fine given the history of this area of the city. People who move to Deep Ellum or who set up a business there should know going in what they are getting into. And most do. But complaints still happen because the rules aren’t designed for what the area is now.

Clearer standards for everyone will help. We applaud the Deep Ellum Foundation for taking this effort so seriously and putting something forward that the council should review for adoption.

This is about protecting Deep Ellum, both its legacy and its future.


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