It doesn’t do us any good to just get mad at Dallas Area Rapid Transit, the regional transit agency, for doing such a terrible job. DART is not a guy; it’s an institution. Institutions don’t have feelings. They have budgets. Nor does it do any good, even in the wake…
Dear Dallas Police Chief U. Renee Hall: When people here talk to you about criminal nuisance abatement ordinances, you need to be very cautious. You came here four months ago from Detroit to take over as our new chief. Detroit has made good use of certain kinds of nuisance laws,…
Wow. This does not feel like our finest hour. Joe Straus, Republican of San Antonio, just announced he will not seek re-election in 2018 after five terms as speaker of the Texas House. U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee, is bailing. So is Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake. They…
The bloody handprint could not be more clear. In a city that should be enabling upward mobility for everybody, a core of impacted poverty only grows and deepens. The giveaway, the paw print that explains it, is Dallas Area Rapid Transit, our regional mass-transit agency. No, I’m not saying DART…
Why does Dallas always want to get the big corporate headquarters relocation? Wouldn’t we be a better candidate for and better off with the factory? Or even better, maybe, with the warehouse? In the national race to land the new Amazon subheadquarters, the depressing news for Dallas a week ago…
You and I will be asked to vote Nov. 7 on killing the Dallas County school district, or Dallas County Schools, as it calls itself. The proposition is to let DCS “continue,” or stay alive. To kill it, you have to vote against. In the drumbeat of bad stories over…
All right, I beg you, just this one time. Break with habit. Normally, I assume you are like me. You never really read all that fine print on a city bond proposal when you go to the polls. If it’s something about more money for the cops or the libraries,…
When I go to the state fair, as I did yesterday with my wife, I’m looking for three things. Something the same as always. Something different. And something really and truly fun. I have to have all three, or I’m not going. Yesterday my two same as always things were…
Last week, the national PBS television program Frontline did a long story focused on West Dallas landlord Khraish Khraish, part of a series on the national affordable housing crisis. Khraish is somebody I have written about a lot in the last year, and the Frontline piece evoked strong feelings in me —…
Since T.C. Broadnax took office as Dallas city manager in February, I have had the feeling he was waiting to see just how sacred some of the city’s sacred cows were. Yesterday, he got a clear message that at least one of them, the weirdly named South Dallas Fair Park…
Last week, I wrote about Kevin F. Lawrence, executive director of the Texas Municipal Police Association, the state’s largest law enforcement association. I took him to task for blaming the NFL knee-taking protest on dishonest reporting about police brutality by the national media. Maybe we need to get back into…
Dallas’ mayor is crowing about a settlement on rates that the city attorney reached recently with an East Texas water authority, and he’s right. Our new city attorney, Larry Casto, did way better than his predecessors, meaning he more or less pulled our bacon out of the trashcan, where somebody…
If you have been watching the Ken Burns PBS documentary on the Vietnam War, then one of the themes you have seen powerfully depicted is the campaign of public lying carried out by President Lyndon Baines Johnson and his team in defense of the war. Long after LBJ’s own Secretary…
As terrible and heartrending as the impact of Hurricane Harvey was on the people of Houston, the sick backstory was almost worse. Everything awful that happened to Houston was known beforehand. The same things are known here, too. It just hasn’t happened here. Yet. Houston is learning, to its dismay,…
Amazon, if you’re still out there somewhere and you’re still looking at us for your new subheadquarters, I have a favor to ask. Please don’t judge our book by the cover. I know, I know. We have to talk about the cover. In fact, let’s do that first. As far…
Faced with the real threat that Dallas could go bankrupt if it loses a bundle of police and firefighter pay lawsuits, the mayor and a majority on the City Council are ready to roll the dice. They’ve rejected a potential $300 million settlement offer, choosing instead to take their chances…
People can say anything, but if you want to see what people really mean when they talk about improving poor neighborhoods in Dallas, look at State-Thomas, look at Little Mexico, look at what’s going on today in West Dallas. Don’t even call it gentrification. Nobody who used to live there…
When Dallas City Council members grilled city staff during a committee hearing Monday about a lack of progress on affordable housing issues, staff forgot to mention the team of feds breathing down their necks. They could have told the council: “We’ll know more after we figure out who’s going to the pen.”…
Something I did not know about Amazon’s search for a new subheadquarters — I guess they forgot to tell me — is that Amazon wants to see a lot of regional cooperation and coordination coming from the metro areas vying for this $5 billion prize. Rather than a bunch of…
Obviously we all get why Dallas and other cities are genuflecting before the great god Amazon, devourer of all retail. Every city hopes devoutly that Amazon will deign to make it the home of its second headquarters, which, if you don’t mind my pointing out, is an oxymoron. Companies are…
Call this a pet peeve if you must, but it’s way bigger than a peeve to me. You cannot walk your dog off the leash in Dallas. In Dallas, you cannot allow your dog out into your unfenced front yard off the leash. And in Dallas and all of the…
This weekend, I attended a memorial service, after which I fell into conversation with a well-known Dallas landscape architect and planner, commiserating ruefully about the effect Texans like U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert have on the rest of the state. We agreed that every time Gohmert shoots from the hip, a…
