Today as the Dallas City Council returns from its summer slumbers, it takes up a number of prickly questions, none more so than the debate over asking developer Trammell Crow Co. to include some affordable housing in exchange for the company’s getting an enormous grant of extra development rights from…
My favorite part of the audit released yesterday of the city’s water meters: In 2008, when the water department was taking flak for too many “implausible” meter readings — meter readings that are either crazy, totally whacked out or you-gotta-be-kidding-me — they did what any head-up self-defending bureaucracy would do…
Recently I came across a great term of art I think aptly describes the contrast between the way the Bishop Arts/North Oak Cliff district of the city is growing and the way West Dallas is developing. It’s, “Orderly but dumb versus chaotic but smart.” A tight fit. In a conversation…
All right, I understand that very few readers of the Dallas Observer are worried about Social Security yet, but you all have to have Social Security cards. Right? That’s all I’m talking about. Just the card. And, yes, it’s more than that. I’m a lifelong libtard. I am pro-government. I…
Clint McDonough is chairman of the Dallas office and a managing partner in an accounting firm that was known since 1903 as Ernst and Ernst, since 1989 as Ernst and Young, now calling itself “EY,” which I thought was the name of a character in an A.A. Milne children’s book…
A week from Wednesday the city council will vote on a zoning deal adjacent to Klyde Warren Park, where the developer wants permission to build a residential tower more than 60 percent higher than the law allows. It’s permission to make 60 percent more money. Oh, but you know our…
The redevelopment of West Dallas as a hip dining and apartment area proves one thing: Give the big boys in Dallas a quarter billion dollars in public subsidy, and they’ll make some money for themselves. The renaissance of nearby North Oak Cliff proves another thing: Stay the hell out of…
Every once in a while, often in the hottest weeks of the year for some reason, I get an enormous hankering, a craving from deep in my soul, a raw hunger that can only be quelled with a great steaming plate heaped high with the well-sauced meat of that great…
I have so many conflicts of interest here, I shouldn’t even open my mouth. But, you know. In a letter to Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, the Dallas Women’s Foundation has expressed its “deep concern and disgust” that the Dallas Convention Center will host a porn convention, Exxxotica Expo, on August 7…
So excited earlier this month. We read that Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro and his boss, the president, are not the pushovers on fair housing we thought they were. Not anymore. Apparently, now they’re tough. Nine months ago it was looking pretty sad here. That’s when Castro, former mayor…
Yeah, but the thing about Dallas being so screwed up is that being screwed up is also what’s cool about it. In everybody’s understandable push to make this a perfect city, we never should forget that Dallas’ glaring imperfections have always been among its attractive qualities. Many years after the…
The new Dallas school superintendent, Michael Hinojosa, could have done a lot of things to signal he was the new sheriff in town. Reform the teacher pay system. Look at testing. The enemies of the old one, Mike Miles, claimed they were mad about everything, so Hinojosa had everything to…
Mouthy women populate my lineage. My mother’s mother, college-educated before many women were in Kansas, widowed with two young daughters, so a single parent when few middle class mothers were, was what I believed would have been called at the time “outspoken.” She was a woman who had made her…
Yesterday’s announcement in The Dallas Morning News of a new Dallas-based $75 million private bullet-train fund was not actually about a new Dallas-based $75 million private bullet-train fund. It was about screwing southern Dallas. Not since southern Dallas got screwed out of the Richard Allen Inland Port opportunity — a…
Dallas City Hall took a big head-slam yesterday in the Cityplace Sam’s Club suit. 5th Court of Appeals Judge David J. Schenck shot down the city’s argument that neighbors had no right to sue over a big-box store on the east side of Central Expressway north of Haskell Avenue. Schenck…
Two recent city documents to call to your attention: 1) showing that we have spent almost $610 million so far on the Trinity River project, which is mainly unbuilt, and 2) showing that we need to spend $121 million, which we supposedly don’t have, just to stop our terrible street…
OK, this is one of those stop, do not pass go moments. The Dallas Morning News published a story yesterday about the University of Texas admissions scandal that was so far off the mark, so wide of the target, so separated from reality that we need to call a halt…
Hey, Julian Castro. Thanks a ton. That was sarcastic. You’re the Obama administration’s new secretary of Housing and Urban Development. First thing you did when you took office nine months ago was yank the rug from under a major housing segregation investigation of Dallas. Before you took over, HUD had…
When a crime is seen from a distance, everybody’s macho about it and wants to lock up the bad guys for life. Sometimes things look different to the people who are in the moment. My wife and I were shocked to see video on Facebook of Alice Zaccarello getting mugged…
The title of Dutch documentary filmmaker Kasper Verkaik’s 60-minute film, Plaza Man is a reference to Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist Robert Groden, the guy who sells books and DVDs every fine weekend at Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas. But the Kennedy assassination, the conspiracy theories, even Groden’s long-running battle with…
Maybe because I have spent a lot of time as a reporter writing about our own racial history in Dallas, the great angst over Watchman seems goofy to me. First of all, we must remind ourselves that these are not real people. This is about some made-up stories that a lady…
“Revered” is a bad word, I know, for Dallas playwright, social activist and teacher John Fullinwider, because it means old. But, look, he is old. And he is revered. He had a piece on the op-ed page of The Dallas Morning News yesterday suggesting a much better approach to the…
