Just rode up to the briefing room with Tennell Atkins, who -- and I'll try not to take it personally -- seemed awful anxious for those elevator doors to open on five, and we're shooting the breeze in the gallery as the rest of the Economic Development Committee trickles in -- Natinsky another of the first ones in, taking a stroll along the rail to meet his public.
A guy with a shattered iPhone is talking Angry Birds with the guy beside him -- "You put them little birds in a slingshot and you hit these little trolls," he explains -- and it's appropriate, because the City of Dallas is about to get the thing those birds could use most of all -- a bold, new shift in strategy: "A New Paradigm: Strategies for Revitalizing Dallas Distressed Neighborhoods."
Natinsky's getting things rolling, promising a high, "25,000-foot" look at a plan to be presented by Bill Carson, VP and Director of Sustainability at McCormack Baron Salazar (part-owned by the good people at Goldman Sachs), who'll deliver the presentation on this new plan for bringing development to Dallas' inner-city.
Linda McMahon of the The Real Estate Council just spoke briefly, explaining how glad she was to have helped fund the study -- $275,000 from TREC and the same amount from McCormack Baron, we're told, so no money for this study came out of the city's general fund.
Carson has launched into the PowerPoint now -- it's not posted on the City Hall site -- by running through a description of each branch of the McCormack Salazar family tree. Altogether, he says, they're the "leading for-profit developer of mixed-income housing in the USA."
Carson says the report they're presenting "represents the collective knowledge" of each of those branches of the company, based on think-tank research and repeat trips to South Dallas.
Carson's pulling us up to "a 40,000-foot view" of development now, with a list of 11 bullet points they assembled for development projects, beginning with community involvement. So what are Carson's last 10 ingredients to shift our paradigm? Join me in the comments.
