Behind the wheel of his black Hummer, Jonathan Maples drove slowly down streets he has known his whole life that are beginning to feel foreign, unrecognizable. We spent more than an hour without ever leaving his neighborhood, which is no bigger than 2 square miles, traversing quiet streets where new houses shaped like boxes tower over modest wood frames. Even the vacant muddy lots are decorated with real estate agents’ for-sale signs.

“The poor man’s Highland Park,” the 54-year-old Maples said of this place called Elm Thicket-Northpark. The area — bound by Lemmon Avenue, West Lovers Lane, Inwood Road and West Mockingbird Lane — was once a black neighborhood. Now, it’s the color of money.

We were parked, for a moment, on Prosper Street, in the heart of the neighborhood. On all sides were white houses trimmed in slate and timber with tall and wide windows. Late-Period Dentist’s Office, a friend once said of this fast-casual style of architecture.

Only five years ago, the houses at the intersection of Prosper and Linnet Lane were small and slightly worn and nondescript. They sat on the tax rolls for around $43,000, including the land . The new builds that replaced them are valued closer to $800,000.

Nearby, Clay Stapp + Co. is selling houses, on Linwood and Newmore avenues, for $1 million. And a small patch of dirt on Hopkins Avenue is going for $249,000 — “lot value only!” says the online flier.

Jonathan Maples, president of the Elm Thicket/Northpark Neighborhood Association, points out old homes and new home builds in the Elm Thicket-Northpark neighborhood in North Dallas. Maples is concerned about the rapid development happening in the neighborhood that is displacing the area’s longtime residents. “It’s important for people to know that we’re here, and we’re still here,” he said. (Lynda M. Gonzalez / Staff Photographer)

Maples was born on Hopkins after his father, a baseball player, moved to Elm Thicket to work for Sky Chefs Inc. at Dallas Love Field; his mother, now 80, worked at Baylor University Hospital. Maples went to K.B. Polk Elementary, the school that anchors the neighborhood; then to Cary Middle School and Thomas Jefferson High School, where he was a standout on the varsity football team. Then he was off to Oklahoma State University; after that, the Marines. Maples, now a seller of online ads, moved back to Elm Thicket, where he serves as its neighborhood association president, “because it’s in my blood.”

Maples asked me over to show how his neighborhood has changed in recent years — how its slow vanishing has revved up to “warp speed.” The story of Elm Thicket is one most of this city now knows by heart. It often seems there is not a neighborhood in any part of Dallas untouched by crews erecting something new next door to something old, something expensive replacing what once was affordable.

City Hall pleads for patience, but Elm Thicket, long surrounded by and separated from affluence, is especially imperiled now, as Realtors divvy up and rebrand the area — as “Inwood Park,” as “the Bird Streets” — to sell their “modern take on a farmhouse” in a “flourishing neighborhood.”

The houses are disappearing; so, too, the lifers who find it easier to take the money and run rather than suffer property tax bills breaking banks and backs. On our drive, Maples noted that every street in Elm Thicket has at least one new house — one “monstrosity,” he likes to say — with even more under construction.

Workers constructed a two-story house in the Elm Thicket-Northpark neighborhood in North Dallas on Thursday. (Lynda M. Gonzalez / Staff Photographer)

“The taxes will kill everybody; they will eventually squeeze everybody out,” Maples said as we drove down streets clogged with construction crews. “Where do you want the lower middle-class, people making $40,000 to $60,000 a year, to live? And what history do you want to hold on to? Because if you just wipe away all the history, you just don't know anything.”

Only a few years ago, most of Elm Thicket looked as it had for decades — modest and middle class, filled with brick-and-wood residences built between the ‘20s and ‘50s for doctors and educators and Love Field workers atop farmland and cornfields now barely a memory to most. Here, for decades, the streets went unpaved, and the streetcars and buses didn’t run. City Hall brought water here in the 1930s only after the residents fell ill and the county shut down contaminated wells.

In the ‘40s and ’50s, the city finally came to Elm Thicket — to devour some of it for the Love Field expansion. It eminent-domained homes and the short-lived Hilliard Golf Course, the first in the city open to African Americans, and rezoned single-family land for duplexes and townhomes over the protests of Elm Thicket residents led by a black doctor named John Chisolm.

By the ‘60s, black and white, and eventually Hispanics, lived side-by-side in Elm Thicket, closely but not always comfortably. The row of red tip photinia that still runs along Roper Street, down the middle of Elm Thicket, was planted as the dividing line — this neighborhood’s version of railroad tracks.

By the 1980s, crime crept in — dope, prostitution, gangs, troublemakers from Highland Park and the other affluent areas surrounding Elm Thicket. It took two decades for community activists and cops to put out that fire. And by the time the smoke cleared, there was Love Field again — completely freed of the Wright Amendment’s restrictions in 2014, once again cleared to fly beyond Texas’ four neighboring states. What came next surprised absolutely no one.

“My father was the election judge and precinct chair in this neighborhood for 45 years,” Maples said. “And he told me, ‘When the Wright Amendment is lifted, everything will change in the neighborhood.’ And that is exactly what's happening. I’ve got friends who live on Cowan Avenue and they tell us, ‘Man, we get so many white people coming here now in nice cars.’ And they're not stupid. They know. They're not riding up and down the street for nothing. They're looking.”

Vera Reece has lived in Elm Thicket-Northpark since 1961, and has been in her home on Wenona Drive since 1964. She is not troubled by the big builds surrounding her home, because, jokes the 83-year-old, "I only have a few more months to live." (Lynda M. Gonzalez / Staff Photographer)

The timing was good for the land buyers and homebuilders. The Elm Thicket holdouts, the lifers who fought off the politicians and criminals, were aging. Beginning about a decade ago, speculators offering fistfuls of cash went to see Vera Reece, who long served as the neighborhood’s Realtor, asking who might be willing to sell. A lot of her friends raised their hands.

“And I didn’t try to tell them, ‘Don’t sell,’ because a lot of them had reasons,” the 83-year-old Reece told me.

She moved to Elm Thicket in 1961. Her first house, on the west side of Lemmon, no longer exists, having long ago been swallowed up by Love Field’s expansion. Reece still lives in the one she bought in 1964, on Wenona Drive, surrounded by old houses expanded and renovated by newcomers who bought cheap and built high. A decade ago, the Dallas Central Appraisal District said her house and land were worth $139,000; today, it’s three times that.

The new houses don’t bother her because she has the 65-and-up property-tax cap. Besides, she said, “I wasn’t going anywhere, and nobody could make me go.”

The people who did sell “needed the money,” Reece said. “The house was in poor condition. Some of them were as old as I am now and couldn’t take care of themselves and their house. Their family convinced them to leave, to live with them or go to a senior home. It’s happening now.”

Reece is resigned to the inevitable. Her children long ago moved away and have no intention of coming back. And, besides, she said, “I only have a few more months to live.” She laughed, long and hard, to let me know it was only a joke.

Houses like the one on the right fill streets where once there were only modest homes built for the black middle class. (Lynda M. Gonzalez / Staff Photographer)

City Hall insists it has not forgotten Elm Thicket, which in 2016 was named a Neighborhood Plus Target Area — back when that was a thing. Money was made available for home repairs; a video history was made; and a spray park was planted a year ago next to the K.B. Polk rec center.

David Noguera, head of the city’s housing department, told me this week that “Elm Thicket has been a focus area for planning efforts for the past few years, and the city recognizes the need to protect vulnerable families from displacement while encouraging additional investment in the city’s housing stock.”

But for more than two years, this neighborhood has waited for the city to let it have a say in its future. On Sept. 7, 2017, the plan commission approved giving Elm Thicket a so-called authorized hearing, a long and occasionally painful process that in the end will determine the proper zoning for the area. Yet, it’s still No. 2 in the queue — “if that order stays the same, yes, it should start this year,” said Kris Sweckard, head of the city’s sustainable development department.

But the longer Elm Thicket waits, the further and faster it vanishes. Maples only hopes that there is a neighborhood left to fight for whenever that process begins.

“It’s like they’re ringing the dinner bell,” he said as we drove. “At the end of the day, where do you want the average man to live? And what part of history do you want to hold on to? Because if you just come in and wipe out a neighborhood, even the churches, then the history is gone.”

Maples worries that in a decade, maybe sooner, all this will go. The houses. The history. The people. His people. “And,” he said, “it makes my stomach turn.”