Monday started in a northwest Dallas park talking to a trail walker about a broken water fountain. It ended in a southern Dallas neighborhood with a stray dog tearing my jeans while sinking its teeth in my right calf.
In between, I freaked out a few nannies in a branch library for asking a few too many questions about furloughs and entertaining infants on brutally hot days. I ran into a housing nonprofit CEO at a barbecue joint. And I followed a few cops into the floodway as they questioned a man nicknamed Wolf, who city employees say lives in the abandoned Argos concrete plant across the street, for refusing to leave his perch beneath the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge.
I woke up planning to work on something else, but everything I needed to write that column is on the city’s website, which was down Monday. As metaphors go, the city being offline is a bit too on the nose.
So, instead, I got in the car without a destination, my favorite way to spend a day. It took a few side trips and pit stops to get there, but eventually I wound up on South Corinth Road, near Roosevelt High School. I made a random left turn onto Warsaw Drive, which runs parallel to the Roosevelt football field, and landed in the driveway of a three-story half-million-dollar house owned by a Flower Mound-based LLC that has Modern Treehouse vibes.
Article continues below this ad
A new home towers over an older one along Faulk Street in east Oak Cliff, where residents are being inundated with calls from developers who want to buy their properies.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
That house, which sold in November, wasn’t here two years ago. Neither were several other modern homes built, or being constructed, along Avenue B or Faulk or Crete or Sicily streets down here in Cedar Crest, where the ride can be rough and shuttered churches and vacant lots used as dumping grounds sit next to construction sites.
“They’ve all gone up in the last year,” said 22-year-old Lania Mixon, who lives on Sicily. She was sitting on the front porch talking on the phone when I stopped by. She was relieved to find out I wasn’t trying to buy the place.
Mixon has enough new neighbors as it is. Like the couple in the big house across the street. They seem nice enough, she said. Except residents say they keep to themselves, as does the woman around the corner in the funky new wood-slat complex with the fake lawn.
The newcomers didn’t answer their doors Monday. The lifers were happy to talk.
Article continues below this ad
Mixon’s great-grandmother used to own this house, which the Dallas Central Appraisal District estimates was built in 1945. Her whole family was raised or still lives here — “mom, cousins, grandma, her siblings.” And so on. And not a day goes by, she said, that some developer or investor doesn’t call or stop by to ask about buying the house, Mixon said. Been happening for years. Except now it’s worse than ever.
The half-million-dollar home recently planted on a long-vacant lot overlooking the Roosevelt High School football field and tennis courts
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
“I wish they’d call to offer to help fix the house rather than buy it,” she said. “You know these old houses. Always something wrong.”
Which doesn’t escape the council member for District 4. The very morning after my visit, Maxie Johnson’s office dispatched a media release announcing that Volunteers of America Texas will use $2 million in tax increment financing funds to fix up the older homes being overshadowed by new builds. An additional $4 million, he said, will go toward rehabbing nearby 10th Street, whose neglect might be the most historic thing about it at this late date.
“I see a lot of two-, three-story houses sitting over those old homes, and I don’t support that,” Johnson told me Tuesday. “We should be able to preserve these neighborhoods. Some developers don’t like that approach. In fact, I don’t even talk to developers unless I have someone from the neighborhood at the table with me. I am not going to support pushing out residents with new builds and high prices. I believe we should be pro-neighborhood and pro-business at the same time. You can do both.”
Article continues below this ad
Mixon figures that sooner or later, this neighborhood will tilt toward the new. In 10 years, she guessed, it won’t look the same – the houses, the people. She said one of the newcomers came from California.
“Every time a house is finished, someone moves in, like they’re just waiting for it,” she said. “They never sit empty.” Except, maybe, for a couple of new builds on Faulk, which longtime residents say are being rented out as Airbnbs, bringing with them visitors who make a lot of noise for a few days before moving on.
A tossed-out recliner in an overgrown lot along Avenue B, just off South Corinth Road.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
As Mixon and I spoke, a couple of loose dogs ran up and started barking, loud enough that we couldn’t hear each other. She said she didn’t think they’d bite.
A man who lives on Crete, dressed in Sherwin-Williams painters’ clothes stained after a day’s work, came out to curse and chase off the dogs. He introduced himself as 70-year-old Mario Lopez, and said he, too, gets about 10 calls a day from developers, builders and investors trying to buy his house and the rent house he owns across the narrow street.
Article continues below this ad
“Ten calls a day,” he said. “At least.”
He said he’s lived here for 40 years, long enough to remember when this was an undesirable neighborhood. “It was pretty bad,” he said. “It’s OK now. But these new houses …”
Lopez said he saw this coming a decade ago, back when he was painting the new houses that began transforming swaths of Oak Cliff and West Dallas that are no longer recognizable to longtime residents who pushed for area plans seemingly written in invisible ink. He pointed over his fence, toward Sicily, where it dead-ends into a thicket of trees separating it from Corinth.
The very old and the brand-new sit side-by-side along Avenue B.
Robert Wilonsky/Staff writer
“There are two empty lots there,” he said. “And if that guy sells, I may have to. Because I won’t be able to have something like that right next to me. The taxes alone! But we’ll see.”
Article continues below this ad
We parted ways when Lopez’s young grandson came out to play. A few steps toward Sicily, I thought I’d been shot in the back of the leg. That dog came out of nowhere; so, too, the steady stream of expletives that caused Lopez’s wife to rush out with a bag of cotton balls and a bottle of isopropyl alcohol filled with eucalyptus leaves.
“We are fighting against these wild dogs, stray animals,” Johnson said Tuesday morning. “I’ve been talking to animal services, and we have a meeting about that soon. Streets, strays – a lot of things that influence public safety. The council is on recess. But I’m still working for these neighborhoods.”
Just be careful, I told him. Because these streets bite back.
Have thoughts about this? Send a letter to the editor using our letters form or email letters@dallasnews.com. Letters should be no more than 200 words and include the first and last name of the writer and city of residence.