“We live in a contemporary home, and we like contemporary homes, but we couldn’t find a contemporary home to buy that we liked. So for us it made sense, if we wanted to stay in Preston Hollow, to buy a lot, scrape it and start over from the foundation up.”

This quote from one of our stories in this quarterly edition of Preston Hollow Home & Heritage magazine says it all about teardowns, which our neighborhood is beginning to view from several perspectives.

From the bricks and sticks mentality, it’s pretty clear that doing a teardown – buying and demolishing a home and then building a (usually) larger one in its place – is just about the only way to build a new home in the heart of the Preston Hollow. At least, that’s what 130 of our neighbors decided last year.

But from a long-term perspective, what happens when a teardown or two on the same street begin eroding the cohesiveness and homey feel that same neighborhood was so proud of just a few months earlier?

One of the longtime neighborhood residents we spoke with in researching this story recounted how teardowns and new move-ins had slowly but surely “destroyed” the neighborhood she had come to love over the years.

Once upon a time, she recalled, the neighbors hosted an annual party for newcomers, going all-out with homemade cookies and punch in an attempt to welcome the next generation of residents to their new home. But over the years, she says, the newcomers have come and gone with such dizzying frequency, and they’ve exhibited so little time or interest in meeting their established neighbors, that the tradition turned instead into a personal gripe session about neighborhood changes – all for the worse.

There’s nothing wrong with buying a piece of property and molding it to your wishes – that’s pretty much anyone’s right, as long as city building codes are obeyed.

But there’s something not quite right about spending a million dollars transforming not just a house but a whole neighborhood, and then flitting away a year or two later.

There’s no easy solution short of a moratorium on new construction, and that’s really no viable solution at all. But you know, it’s almost easier to legislate new construction than to repair the damaged feelings of neighborhood and continuity built up so carefully over generations and then tossed aside with the latest stock option opportunity.

Let us know what you think about this and the rest of our fall issue. We’ll see you again in November.