Here's an idea. Nuke the Dallas Farmers Market. Seriously. Blow it up. Scrape it. Give the poor thing a decent burial, and then start from scratch.
Jen Sorensen
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Look at it. Everything about it says, "Dead on Arrival." Let's get real.
The homeless issue at the market is by no means the central problem or the root cause of anything, but it's symptomatic of everything else that's wrong. If that part of downtown were strong, the homeless issue would be a mild head cold. As it is, it's double pneumonia.
Last week I get a call from a guy who works in the Dallas Farmers Market tipping me that the cops are rousting homeless people when they try to walk through the market on their way from one mission to the next.
He says the homeless are trying to take a shortcut through the market from The Bridge, the city's big homeless center on Corsicana Street, to a shelter on Hickory Street southeast of the market. But the cops and private market security are making them detour and walk around the market along an unpaved shoulder on a freeway ramp.
Yup. I go down there and watch. That's exactly what they're doing. I watch while the cops try to get Jeffrey Edmondson, a 52-year-old American citizen with a backpack, to understand that he's not allowed to walk through the market, where the other American citizens are allowed to walk.
By the time I catch up with him, Edmondson is trudging along a narrow path next to the East R.L. Thornton access ramp. He has wary, untrusting, rescue-dog eyes, but he talks. He tells me they told him he couldn't go through the market. They didn't tell him it was because he was homeless, but he says he assumes that's why.
"I don't think it's fair," he says, then turns and trudges on along his way.
That sucks.
But, wait. Ten minutes later I'm inside one of the big warehouses that the cops are parked in front of at the corner of St. Louis and South Hall streets, talking to Jim Ingendorf, proprietor of Pro Deuce Services, a refrigerated storage and produce supply company.
The Ingendorfs have been in business in the market area for a long time. They own land, do business, pay taxes. "I'm not against the homeless," he says, but the criminal, addicted and psychotic populations mingled among them have tanked the value of his property since The Bridge opened in 2008.
"I carry a pistol, and I'm up here in the building," Ingendorf says. "I'm not sure of any of them."
He knows why the cops are parked out front of his building. "It's probably to keep me quiet," he says. He's done a lot of complaining. So would I, in his shoes.
It's all Band-Aids and rouge on a pig. The cops are in a hopeless position. So is Ingendorf. So are the homeless. Everybody is trying to survive in a situation that's basically not survivable. What has to change is the whole situation.
Here is this huge parcel, a good 25 acres of land right next to the city's business center, and in terms of the use it's being put to, it's a total dismal failure. The so-called Farmers Market runs hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole every year; every attempt the city makes to jazz it up seems to wind up making it worse; and there is absolutely no vision or plan to make it any better.
So nuke it. Recognize reality. Scrape it. But then don't let City Hall piecemeal those acres out into a bunch of half-assed slum-of-the-future condos that some city councilperson is pushing for his or her church to build.
Turn it over to somebody who will build something iconic there, something that will change the ground forever. The only way to make things better is the long shot.
I feel sorry for the homeless. I hate seeing human beings told they can't walk among the rest of us. But there is also a harsh reality here. They walk into places they perceive as penetrable. Put something very big and busy there, and you won't have to tell them to walk around. They'll do it on their own.
I spent some time last week talking to Tom "Spiceman" Spicer, the specialty broker whose shop at 1410 Fitzhugh Ave. is Mecca to high-end chefs and epicures seeking the very best in locally grown produce. Spicer has an intimate, complex understanding of the wiring between farmers and end-point consumers in the Dallas food marketplace.
He says nuke it, too. Spicer says the universe of food is changing too fast and the machinery of City Hall is too slow. Everything the city tries to do will always fall short.
"It's too little, too late," he says. "I wish it wasn't so. We missed the boat."
The irony is that the forces at play in the universe of food would seem augur well for a farmers market. Other cities do well with them. Farmers markets are burgeoning everywhere from Santa Fe to Detroit. Just not ours.
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