Shannon Wynne, Who Made Dallas Hip, Now Just Wants to Make Living Here Affordable

Until Monday I hadn't spent much quality one-on-one time with Shannon Wynne since we watched the Knack play "My Sharona" outside his late landmark bar-eatery 8.0 in The Quadrangle. So, yeah, it has been a while.And that feels especially forever-ago considering Wynne wanted to talk this week about some decidedly modern problems: affordable housing, the homeless and historic preservation in the Cedars.If you are new to this city, or not old enough to remember when the Taco Cabana on Lower Greenville was a placed called Tango, Wynne is the man "who gave Dallas hope that it could be hip," as this newspaper wrote in a 1989 High Profile. And 30 years on that's probably still his legacy. You might have known his works when his eat-and-drink destinations had names like Nostromo, Rio Room, Rocco. Now they're called the Meddlesome Moth, Mudhen, Rodeo Goat, the Flying Saucer, Flying Fish and, until recently, Lark on the Park at Klyde Warren.I've never thought of Wynne as a real-estate developer — that was his old man Angus G. Wynne Jr, who gave us the Wynnewood neighborhood in Oak Cliff and, oh yeah, Six Flags Over Texas. Never thought of 67-year-old Shannon as a preservationist, either — that was his mother Joanne, among the first to move old houses to Dallas Heritage Village. And though he's on the board at The Bridge Homeless Recovery Center, I never took him for a savior of rundown properties and maker of low-income housing.   Continue reading...