"I'm like the old man from Up," Tracy Popken Springer said when I called her last week, referring to Pixar's cartoon hold-out who refused to sell his beloved home to developers drowning his neighborhood with concrete towers. That's exactly what I hoped she'd say, which is why it's at the top of this piece about Springer's refusal to sell her 90-year-old red-brick two-story to the latest developer plopping apartments in and around Bishop Arts.

By way of introduction, Springer's a designer of some renown: The Dallas Observer included her in its 2013 "Dallas People" issue, alongside people whose radio shows you listen to, whose movies you watch and whose food you've eaten. She makes new clothes that look old, timeless, and she designs smart-looking aprons and apparel for people serving food and pouring coffee at Emporium Pies, JOY Macarons and other North Oak Cliff eateries.

Which is all impressive and cool. It also has nothing whatsoever to do with why she got a shout-out during a recent meeting at Dallas City Hall or how I wound up spending an afternoon at her charming home talking about why she's never, ever going to sell her house, even when she's eventually surrounded by apartments and parking lots and all the other Uptown amenities that will wind up jammed into a North Oak Cliff neighborhood that was supposed to be the opposite of Uptown.

The apartment building going next to Springer's house. ((Urban Genesis))

"In my heart, I know I want this house to stand," said Springer, who, seven years ago, rescued it from weeds and years of neglect. "And I want to know it was me who saved it. It would feel so good to look back and say, 'It's beautiful and a place of calm and charm in the midst of all this.' And maybe that's a little egotistical. But it feels so good."

Springer's house — which she shares with her furniture-making husband, Sean Springer — sits at the corner of Melba Street and North Madison Avenue. It's hard to miss, because it's the only one left standing on her side of the street. It's directly across from the sprawling, slightly overgrown nothingness where, some day, Farrokh Nazerian and his son Michael will build their long-promised, sprawling, $50 million-ish mixed-use Bishop Arts Village.

Her next-door neighbors sold out months ago to a Houston-based developer called Urban Genesis, which is going to build the two-building, four-story, 118-unit Bishop Highline apartment complex along two blocks of Melba, both east and west of North Bishop Avenue. The homes were demolished a few months ago.

And the house catty-corner to hers was razed by a doctor who's getting into the development game.

"Let's sit on the porch," Springer suggested, carrying a pitcher of ice water on a warm afternoon. "There's a breeze." Over the long tables that fill her front yard, where she likes to host dinner parties and Sunday brunches, she gazed at the empty properties surrounding hers. "I also have a lovely view of the park."

Urban Genesis' "context" map presented to the city a few days ago

Springer, who's 31, knows a lot about her house, which also serves as her design studio: when it was built (in 1926), its first resident (T.J. Easterling) and names of others who lived there (including Eunice Tilly, who taught chemistry at nearby Adamson High School from 1925 to '66).

She also knows her neighbors — the ones who've sold, and the ones who stayed. She even knows what they were paid to leave. Some got a lot, around $300,000; others, about half that. She begrudges them nothing, and said she's actually looking forward to having a lot of new people around. She's all for density. She just hates ugly apartments.

Springer bought the house in 2009 with money saved from a childhood accident settlement. The bank almost didn't make the loan: She paid slightly more than $100,000 for a house then valued at far less. The moneylenders weren't yet buying what Bishop Arts was selling.

Now it's being sold off in hunks: A map of the neighborhood prepared by Urban Genesis for a recent City Hall meeting shows rows of homes swallowed by yellow boxes that read "For Sale" or "New Townhomes Coming" or "Alamo Manhattan" or "Crescent" or "Owned by Bishop Arts Village Developer." There goes the neighborhood, which is being carted off to the dump one block at a time.

What the house looked like before Springer rescued it in 2009 ((Courtesy Tracy Popken Springer))

Springer vows you'll never see her house in one of those boxes. It's a promise. And a warning to anyone else who tries to get her to sell — like Urban Genesis, which, about a year ago, sent two young guys to size up and buy her place so they could knock it down.

"I never even asked for a number," she said. "I just told them no and laughed at them and told them, 'Go away.'"

When I first heard Springer's story, it was from one of the architects who designed the Bishop Highline apartments.

A few days back, the Urban Genesis folks took their renderings to the city's Urban Design Peer Review, a panel of architects and planners that needs to bless projects asking for public money. City officials say Urban Genesis wants around $5 million in city tax subsidies for "pedestrian-friendly amenities."

The panel was unimpressed with the structures presented in the meeting. Landscape architect Kevin Sloan shrugged them off as mere product and bemoaned their "penitentiary-like features." Others didn't like the way the two apartment buildings were set back from the street, closed off, isolated — just what you don't want in a neighborhood where every house had a front porch.

Tracy Popken Springer's home sits next to a cleared plot of land owned by Urban Genesis, which will build the Bishop Highline apartment complex along Melba. ((Rose Baca / The Dallas Morning News))

Sloan wrung his hands a bit over the coming commodification of Bishop Arts, which, he said, has become "a developers' playground." He said that "what was once a genuinely urban environment where you knew the shopkeepers' names ... is giving way to urban tourism, gift shops and franchises."

And, if I may, boring-looking apartments built by people from Houston.

At one point developer Paris Rutherford wondered why the building on Melba and Madison didn't go all the way to the street, which would at least allow for a nice corner unit with a decent view. Erik Earnshaw, of BGO Architects, explained that the woman who lived in that two-story red-brick house "is very active in the neighborhood and refused to sell."

Springer was amused by the story. And proud.

"I have a responsibility to this house," she said. "It works for me and my life. My mom calls it a light house: It's tall and at the top of the neighborhood, and it claims the corner. It deserves to remain."