Dear Mr Kennedy,
I lived in Dallas after graduating from Southwestern Medical School in [date redacted]. Six years ago I moved to Chicago. Chicago is a bustling, beautiful city. I felt immediately at home there. In Dallas I always longed for something but could never put my finger on it. In your article you beautifully said what I felt all along (I'm not sure which article he's referring to here).
I believe, however, that there are forces arrayed against Dallas following your call to action. [The powers that be] are too satisfied [with the status quo]. Change frightens them. They are too pleased with the way things are to be troubled by the inherent, albeit temporary, discomfort of change.
I enjoyed your piece. If you really want to live in a city like you describe you best pack up and follow me.
Cheers
Critics suggest that Dallas's larger-than-life image may be shrinking for another reason. They say that officials' lack of investment in public schools, streets, parks and pools -- the real-world priorities outside the city's highbrow Arts District, with its cultural monuments designed by the hottest "starchitects" (Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, I. M. Pei, Renzo Piano) and soon-to-be sky-high Santiago Calatrava "signature" bridges -- is sending white families and middle-class minorities moving to the suburbs.
What should outrage us is not so much Wal-Mart’s apparent disregard for what Jason calls “a pedestrian form,” but instead the Fort Worth Avenue Development Group’s blatant disregard for the residents of the Colorado Place apartments. When the apartments were torn down (at the urging of the Fort Worth Avenue Development Group), Scott Griggs (of the Fort Worth Avenue Development Group) declared that it marked a “great opportunity to bring something new.” Many people would like to think that the “something new” only involves walkability, organic grocery stores, and coffee shops, but in fact the “something new” unfortunately also involves the replacement of working class black and brown people with affluent white people who “read the New York Times.”
We should be less interested in an appeal to what Jason calls the “thousands of years” of history that have supposedly “proven” the “pedestrian model” than in an appeal to the twentieth-century history of Fort Worth Avenue. The cheap motels and apartments on Fort Worth Avenue (like Colorado Place) may be what some call “eyesores,” and they may not make us feel like we’re living in Portland, but they have also made possible the social and economic mobility of immigrants and working class people in Dallas. Or at least they have functioned as affordable places for people to live.
Dallas has a long history of so-called urban development that involves displacing working class people of color to make room for playgrounds for people who “read the New York Times” (for example, the West Village). If this is the same vision of the Fort Worth Avenue Development Group-and it is-they should start being honest about it, and stop pretending that it’s somehow part of a progressive community politics, which it just isn’t. (Remember their opposition last year to the Cliff Manor zoning issue.) A progressive community politics would be less interested in what Jason calls the “right” to “walk” to coffee shops, and more interested in people’s right to live where they currently live and have equal access city services which are rightfully theirs (such as pools, policing, and public transportation).
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1 comments:
I'm hoping you'll do a post on why the Unfair Park guys are wrong. Dallas had slow growth because the city didn't annex any greenfields to develop. Ft Worth and San Antonio both did (don't know about Houston).
Do we have stats on the densities of the Texas metros? How would those growth comparisons look? I'm fairly certain the density of developed Dallas grew compared to Ft Worth and SA.
Dallas had tremendous growth in the core, like say DC. A hollowing out of undesirable suburban style homes in Fair Park/South Dallas, like say Detroit, and uniquely, the tearing down of very dense apartments-- speculation gone wrong (maybe like Miami?).
It's very hard to compare Dallas to another city because it is so many cities at once. Blacks were leaving for new suburban homes financed by ARM mortgages like in Chicago. Hispanics are clamoring to get here, like in LA. New economy young people are moving into condos like in Seattle. And the old dying whites are dying, like in Providence.
Seemed like all the commenter's on Unfair Park were trying to say the city had a low growth rate because of xx factor in their neighborhood and extrapolating to the city as a whole. Someone needs to put the picture together. I volunteer you.
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