Dallas Morning News
Leading the Editorial Department's "Closing Dallas' north-south gap" project has taken me back to my roots.
Newly engaged 25 years ago this month, my husband and I bought our first home in Dallas. We fell in love with everything about it: A neighborhood of unusually large -- even rolling -- lots with trees, cottage architecture and a pastoral feel completely out of character with our previous East Dallas rentals. Even better, we could drive to our downtown jobs without ever touching an interstate.
Our first real home was in a part of southeast Dallas we thought of as Pleasant Grove (although longtime Groveites might disagree). Still fairly new to Dallas, we couldn't understand why friends were so put off by our choice. Sure, we had more than our share of pawnshops and dollar stores. And our street not only lacked sidewalks, it didn't have curbs, either. And, yes, we'd say, those are chickens next door.
Still, we mostly wore the Pleasant Grove badge proudly for seven years, as those days marked our transition from party-happy young marrieds to more responsible parents.
Then, in the late 1980s, things became a lot less cozy on our street -- and beyond. Ultimately, we swallowed the financial loss to sell and moved our little family to the suburbs.
Seventeen years later, I still occasionally feel as if we gave up too easily. And that's part of what fuels my passion about our department's "bridging the gap" project.
Our goal is a big one: To help build the southern part of our city into a vibrant, growing area where people want to live and work.
We are talking about an area that makes up more than half of the city's landmass -- from West Dallas through Oak Cliff and historic South Dallas to the city's southeastern line. These are distinct neighborhoods with distinct problems and successes, linked only by geography -- and by a large gap in many metrics between them and their counterparts to the north.
Our crusade, if you will, is to close that gap.
We started in late summer with a listening campaign; our seven-person team has now talked with well over a hundred people -- and we're far from through. We've listened in roundtable sessions that have included Mayor Tom Leppert, Dallas Weekly publisher Jim Washington, Plan Commission member Michael Davis, DART chair Lynn Flint Shaw and Dallas schools trustee Jerome Garza.
We've listened in communities, like the day we spent driving South Dallas with former gang member-turned-peacemaker Antong Lucky; the afternoon I spent lending a hand to Sylvia Baylor as she taught math at the After School Academy in Turner Courts; or the bus trip to West Dallas to meet with community prosecutor Sayuri Beltran.
We've listened to juvenile justice experts and affordable housing advocates at a Williams Institute conference. We've listened one-on-one with the Rev. Frederick Haynes of Friendship West Baptist, Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Dwaine Caraway and other southern Dallas council members, Paul Quinn College president Michael Sorrell and Dallas South blogger Shawn Williams.
Our project team includes editorial writers Colleen McCain Nelson, Jim Mitchell, William McKenzie and Tod Robberson, as well as Assistant Editorial Page Editor Mike Hashimoto and Editorial Page Editor Keven Ann Willey.
Our next step is to listen to more community voices through town hall meetings. We've already begun publishing new op-ed voices from southern Dallas who focus on "the gap" issues in diverse ways, as well as some of our own ideas .
Based on what we've learned so far, southern Dallas needs these things to succeed:
-- Overinvestment -- in development dollars, infrastructure, code compliance and extra care -- to make up for decades of neglect.
-- Political accountability, particularly from our new City Council.
-- A reprogramming campaign to help the northern half of the city better understand what makes up the southern half -- and to help the southern half see itself as stronger.
I can imagine some of you are rolling your eyes by now. In the years since our first house in (or near) the Grove, I too have been beaten down by the scores of plans and promises aimed at helping southern Dallas -- most of them quickly forgotten. Too often, good intentions, including from this newspaper, were sidetracked by other pressing challenges.
Not this time. We're in it for the long haul, and we'd like your help. Let me know how we're doing.