logo for print

 

DALLAS

Turning Neighborhoods Around

housing
Dallas

In the 1960s and 1970s, the social fabric of some of Dallas ’s oldest inner city neighborhoods unraveled. Whites fled to the suburbs and largely African American communities were left to deal with vacant properties, highway construction, and increasing drug and crime rates. At the same time, Dallas ’ bare-bones approach to public transportation made it a city of drivers, not walkers. (As of 2000, 70 percent of Dallas ’s working population drives to work alone.)   Now, block by block, residents and development corporations are shifting the focus back to the streets and sidewalks of Dallas neighborhoods.

Ideal: A Neighborhood Lives Up to Its Name

Ideal was once a thriving middle-class African American neighborhood. But by the mid-1990s it had become a wasteland of drug abuse and dilapidated housing, notorious as the heroin capital of Dallas . Poverty was rampant, while those earning low-to-middle income salaries were finding it impossible to set down roots. Then in 1997, Enterprise Dallas joined with the city to launch the Ideal Neighborhood Redevelopment Project, an ambitious plan to turn the area into a livable, revitalized community. In addition to new housing, Ideal now boasts a $500,000 community center, which provides counseling and other forms of assistance to potential homeowners.

garden
Dallas

Maple Heights : Planning With Panache

Once filled with weeded lots and contaminated brownfields, Maple Avenue is now being transformed into a neighborhood with affordable housing and a pedestrian-friendly environment. The Maple Avenue Economic Development Corporation (MAEDC) is one of the prime movers behind this effort to provide low- to moderate-income families with opportunities to own homes. One of its pioneering projects is Trinity Union, a new form of housing development geared towards mixed-income communities. While housing projects of the early 1960s were notorious for their anonymous, cookie-cutter layouts, MAEDC’s approach looks beyond the merely functional: Trinity Union features winding streets and open, grassy spaces.

Dallas has the resources and the will to tackle the challenges it faces, and calls for revitalization have gradually gained momentum among businessmen and community groups. But sprawling size and rapid growth have hampered focused responses on the government level. With Living Cities support, the Enterprise Foundation has been teaming up with CDCs to meet this challenge with comprehensive neighborhood planning strategies that will not only bring new housing opportunities, but also give Dallas’s inner city residents the infrastructure necessary to turn a fast-growing city into a thriving community.