The accusation here is a touchy one, because it involves Ted and Larry Hamilton, who enjoy high respect for the quality of their work in downtown on other projects, and John Greenan, executive director of Central Dallas Community Development Corporation, an offshoot of Central Dallas Ministries.
Greenan is the financial maestro behind downtown Dallas' one affordable housing success story, Citywalk@Akard, which opened two years ago. The Hamiltons, meanwhile, were trying to do an entire building of affordable housing as part of their Atmos Complex Project.
Hal Samples
Developers Larry Hamilton (left) and Ted Hamilton are good guys, but even good guys can use a whop with a two-by-four once in a blue moon.
Related Content
More About
There is a school of thought out there that the Hamiltons and Greenan are heroes—the last people who should be accused of practicing discrimination. That's certainly how I have always felt about them.
But Lockey and MacKenzie asked the State of Texas to take a close look at the way the Atmos project was being proposed. In order to get HUD money and state tax credits for the whole project, the Hamiltons and Greenan were going to jam almost all of their affordable units into one building of the four being rebuilt.
Lockey and MacKenzie are successful developers themselves, who have dealt with the City of Dallas on a number of projects. They say the Atmos project, as proposed, was a perfect expression of the culture of The Obscure Body, of the city's Economic Development Department and even of the city council.
It was segregation.
Hold on. Here is what you need to know. Larry Hamilton confirmed to me last week, a day before the meeting of The Obscure Body, that HUD had agreed with Lockey and MacKenzie.
Hamilton told me: "[HUD] alleged that because all of the 60 percent [low income] units were in one building and minorities would tend to make up a greater percentage of the low-income population, therefore we were engaging in racial segregation."
That's why the project came back to The Obscure Body last week, greatly modified to resolve HUD's objections, in part by increasing the overall amount of affordable housing in the whole project but also by mixing more of the affordable units into the fancier-schmancier buildings.
I called HUD and asked them to confirm or deny this. They would say only that the new version of the plan is under review, and they declined to comment on the old plan.
So if Hamilton is telling the truth—and of course he is—then we have to ask how it came to pass, before Lockey and Mackenzie raised their objections, that the Hamiltons, Greenan and The Obscure Body were about to launch on a project that HUD ultimately decided was racist.
Was it an accident? An entirely unintentional consequence of actions taken with the best of intentions? Given the players, that's where I want to fall.
But MacKenzie said to me last week that his research has led him to believe there are precious few accidents in the Dallas affordable housing picture.
"In the last decade, the City of Dallas has sponsored almost 8,000 low-income housing units in South Dallas," he said. "And in the same time-frame, guess how many they sponsored north of I-30. Twenty-five hundred."
Given the fact that most of the city's population lies north of I-30, MacKenzie said his calculations show that Dallas has built low-income housing in minority neighborhoods at five times the rate per capita of residents in those neighborhoods as in white neighborhoods.
That doesn't sound like an accident. It sounds more like the use of government policy and money to preserve and increase patterns of racial segregation.
But you know what else? People live and learn. MacKenzie was effusive in his praise for the way the Atmos project seems to be headed now.
I want to be effusive, too. The Hamiltons are good guys. Greenan is a brave pioneer. I even suspect the members of The Obscure Body are fairly OK, probably don't kick their dogs or pull their sisters' hair or anything.
But this vote of The Obscure Body came about because Lockey and MacKenzie whopped the city upside the head with a two-by-four by going to HUD with their complaints. This is a case of hurry-up, catch-up and probably a little bit of cover-up by a City Hall worried about even worse repercussions as HUD continues to examine the Lockey and MacKenzie complaint against the city.
All of which is great, in my book. Some lessons are hard to learn. Me, it was trigonometry. Dallas, it's always going to be race.
If you ask me, we all owe a huge vote of thanks to Lockey and MacKenzie for being resolute and forcing local government to do what it should have been doing all along—using our government money to create a cool, diverse, exciting downtown and not some pale imitation of Highland Park Village (a fancy place, if you're not from Dallas and reading this).
The point is learning the lesson. And if that's what the vote of The Obscure Body was—the lesson learned—then downtown Dallas finally will get out from under the albatross of discrimination and boredom and become the cool place to live it should be. I do think it's coming. I'm excited.
![Police Say an Asian Massage Parlor and Far North Dallas House are Part of a Massive Prostitution Ring [Updated]](http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/common/assets/707009.75x75.jpg)
