Just south of the Trinity River Audubon Center, across a footbridge and down a concrete trail that snakes along an east-west jaunt of the river, you’ll come to what was once one of Steve Smith’s favorite spots in the Great Trinity Forest. “Go into the [Google Earth] aerial photos from…
Congratulations, Dallas citizen, on your recent decision to examine the nuts-and-bolts operations of your local law enforcement agency(s)! A well-informed citizenry is vital functioning of democracy and, as we all know, crime stats is a particularly dusky corner of local government. Your thirst for knowledge and community spirit are a…
The other day, Dallas Area Habitat for Humanity, which is really good at this sort of thing, published an interactive collection of online maps tracking how the city has changed over the past four decades. The whole thing is worth exploring; the way the maps distill a messy and complex…
Dalton Sherman is a legend. Eight years ago, at the age of 9, he stood before some 17,000 Dallas ISD teachers and staff members packed into the American Airlines Center and delivered a piece of oratory so precocious and so trenchant that, once the speech was posted to YouTube, he…
Just after midnight on March 2, Alvin Jerome Joseph Jr. was walking his dog through the sea of apartments in Northeast Dallas where Skillman Street and Audelia Road briefly join when, for no reason police have been able to discern, a gunman shot him in the face. He died the…
Some day, when chronic water shortages cause green lawns to shrivel to dust, or when transportation planners find themselves unable to extend their sprawling highway network any further, or when an unbroken veneer of concrete has finally covered every square inch of land between here and Sherman, North Texas’ exurban…
On Tuesday evening, Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance president and CEO — with an assist from former homeless czar/current Mayor Mike Rawlings — delivered some bad news in her second annual “State of the Homeless Address.” As we predicted two months ago, the homeless count in Dallas and Collin counties has spiked, jumping…
In an ideal universe, Dallasites would commemorate Ireland’s patron saint by drinking in moderation, designating drivers and otherwise behaving as sensible grown-ups. This, however, is the real world, which means that thousands of Dallasites will spend St. Patrick’s Day doing the exact opposite — i.e., getting smashed and making all…
Avi Adelman was arrested on February 9, ostensibly for trespassing on DART’s Rosa Park’s Plaza, but really, the record suggested, because a DART cop didn’t like that he refused to stop taking photographs of paramedics treating a semi-conscious K2 user. A week later, on February 16, DART notified Adelman that…
At its most elemental level, government — at least the democratic kind set out in America’s founding documents — exists to protect the life, liberty and property of its citizens; the pursuit of happiness is more of a rhetorical flourish. Governments perform this function by passing and enforcing laws, most…
Prescription opioids — painkillers like oxycodone, hydrocodone and the old standby morphine — kill more Americans than any other drug. In 2014, the official death toll was 18,893, which is probably an undercount but is nonetheless more than three times the number of Americans (5,415) who fatally overdosed on cocaine and more than twice the…
On February 5, Dallas Police Chief David Brown delivered some bad news to the City Council’s Public Safety Committee. Through the first month of 2016, violent crime was up by 26 percent over the previous year. There’d been one fewer murders, but the number of rapes (13 percent) robberies (21…
On Wednesday night, NBC 5 carried a report about a DeSoto mother, Ayanna Smith, calling for the immediate dismissal of a teacher at The Meadows Elementary for paddling her son, a kindergartener. Which doesn’t seem that far out of bounds given that Texas’ definition of criminal assault (“intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly…
With the possible exception of our love for Whataburger, nothing unites Texans like their hatred of toll roads. Few reliable public opinion polls directly measure the level of hatred, but the Texas A&M Transportation Institute’s semi-regular statewide transportation survey provides a taste of the depth of feeling on the issue…
Over the past two decades or so, Lower Greenville residents have waged a heroic and largely successful battle to reclaim their neighborhood from the drunk 20-somethings who treated it like a never-ending frat party. With help from the city, they strong-armed problematic bars into closing at midnight. They got the street…
Dallas, thank goodness, is not Cleveland or Detroit. Its economy and identity have never had the Rust Belt dependence on manufacturing, and so it hasn’t been hollowed out by American manufacturing’s collapse. But make no mistake. Even though the Dallas area’s population and economy are both famously booming, the city…
There is, as The Washington Post reported a couple of weeks ago, a new normal in the American housing market. Nationally, the homeownership rate has dropped by about five percentage points since peaking in 2005 just before the country’s real estate bubble burst. In the decade since, an increasingly large percentage…
Donald Trump floated the proposal two-and-a-half months ago with all the careful deliberation of a Fox News comment section troll: Maybe, in the wake of husband-and-wife jihadists shooting up a holiday party in San Bernardino, California, the United States should just ban Muslims. The suggestion was so unapologetically xenophobic and so…
Rebecca Levin, a documentary filmmaker based in Paris, arrived in Tent City on a brisk Wednesday morning in early February with a spiral notebook and a knee-length maroon coat. She’d been assigned by a major French TV network, TF1, to shoot a film about inequality in Dallas, and the sprawling…
There are a handful of things (death, dismemberment, Houston) that are worse than getting a traffic ticket. That said, getting a traffic ticket sucks. A lot. In Dallas, going one mile above the posted limit can cost a driver $201.10 in fines and fees, to say nothing of the headaches…
Between now and May 4, Tent City’s 300-plus residents will have to find a new home. The city set the deadline late Thursday after intensive discussions with the Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance, neighbors and homeless service providers. The encampment, which sprawls for about a mile beneath Interstate 45 just southeast of…
Tent City, the sprawling homeless encampment beneath Interstate 45 just southeast of downtown, has claimed its second victim in a month. Dallas police responded to a stabbing call at Tent City just before 6 p.m. on Tuesday. There, in a patch of dirt near Hickory Street, they found the body…
