Ahem. One hates to be Miss Penny Pinch-Pinch, but the deadline is now two weeks gone for the outfit in charge of the proposed fancy park on the Trinity River downtown to come up with about $150 million to pay for it. They’ve had three years. One doesn’t see a…
In the end, everything about Hollywood is basically absurd, so the same is true for the prosecution of two actresses, Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, on charges they paid bribes to get their kids into college. But a story based right here in Dallas reminds us that stupid Hollywood tricks…
Would it have been nice for the Amber Guyger story to have unfolded in the community without reference to race? Do those words, as you read them, sound as absurd to you as they do to me as I write them? Nothing is not about race. Not at the local…
Any time City Hall plays with the facts, there’s a reason. It should raise a red flag. A case in point right now is a new plan to turn over the baseball field at Reverchon Park to private interests. Think of it this way: This is about $20-$30 million worth…
In a ruling a week ago, 44th Judicial District Judge Bonnie Lee Goldstein found that the Dallas City Council violated its own rules and passed an illegitimate ordinance last February in a bizarre proceeding starring former Dallas City Council member-turned-hired-gun Angela Hunt and real estate person Ralph Isenberg, who married…
So far The Dallas Morning News podcast on the Botham Jean/Amber Guyger murder trial has all the stylish podcast elements — spooky theme music, random sound bites, breathy voice-overs — with the exception of one big one. Suspense. In the best podcasts I have listened to (“Buried,” the disappearance of Carey Mae Parker), you…
In case anybody still has any doubt the city is trying to force Dale Davenport to sell his car wash, get a load of this. He’s the guy who owns a car wash on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in South Dallas — the one I call the only white…
On the one hand, this new story about the city screwing over some affordable housing developers is depressingly familiar. On the other hand, it’s utterly inexplicable. Every single thing I ever reported in some 15 years covering the Lockey & MacKenzie case about the city shafting affordable housing developers is…
Wednesday morning in a clearly written, earnest, heartfelt letter to the editor of The Dallas Morning News, Susan D. Cox conveyed her dismay about a big zoning case at Northwest Highway and the Dallas North Tollway that would go before the City Council later that day. The council member for…
If old South Dallas can bloom, if the open wounds of racism and red-lining up and down Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard can be closed and healed, then the entire body of the city will breathe heartier and happier. And maybe, just maybe, that’s what we are beginning to see…
Let’s play a game called, “What is Dallas so worried about?” The city has ordered all of its cops not to take time off beginning this week for the duration of the trial of former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger. Guyger, who is white, is accused of murder in the…
As you know, shortly after Eric Johnson took a job as mayor of Dallas, he took another job as an attorney with the Locke Lord law firm. He said he could do both jobs at the same time, no problem, and that he would keep a sharp eye out for…
Soaring property values in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods should not have to be bad news. Especially when we take into account the decades of racial oppression and red-lining that have kept a neighborhood poor, we ought to rejoice when it rebounds. Unless. Unless the people who live there…
Last week, I wrote about some astonishing trends in property values in what has long been one of the city’s poorest, most racially segregated neighborhoods. Old South Dallas, which extends about a mile south from Fair Park, is seeing increases of almost 100% in as little as a year. After…
Just because something is below my radar doesn’t mean it’s below yours. Maybe you knew all about this, but I was astonished, mainly because it has been right in front of my nose for so long. The part of South Dallas I’ve been writing about for years, near Jim’s Car…
Cue the weird science fiction music for “THE RETURN OF RENEE.” You want to see something really scary? Go to the Dallas Police Department Twitter page, Dallas Police Dept @DallasPD, scroll down a day or two and look at the item, “Today, Chief Hall returns to duty.” It’s a cellphone…
Look at it this way. An Italian court has ordered Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava to pay the city of Venice &85,000 just because a bridge he designed there is too slippery. The two gigantic pedestrian bridges Calatrava built for us in Dallas, completed in 2017, have never even been…
Maybe this would be funny. If it were funny. I mean, the first time the city set up a “Public Improvement District” or PID to fight crime along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in South Dallas, the PID collected property taxes in the six figures, turned all the money over…
In the new mayor’s laughably pusillanimous response to the city’s murder problem, we are seeing the first symptoms of the last election. Pulling a page, poorly, from the previous mayor, Eric Johnson this week tried to take on murder with some grandstand speechifying. It was not grand. At a scripted…
We accept the murder of children here. We allow it. We expect it. We are unwilling to make any of the serious sacrifices necessary to save these lives. Calling these deaths random or senseless is a lie. In six weeks, three children have been shot to death in two incidents…
This is a bit of a personal crisis for me, but I guess it’s gravy for you. Based on their budget hearing Tuesday, the new Dallas City Council seems to be a pretty sharp group. I’m thinking of going into the landscaping business. Even the new mayor looked good. Knock…
Well, I think I just submitted the dumbest open records request of my 100-year career as a journalist. I sent it to the city. This was a tough decision. I swore I would not do this. Then I did it. My open records request was, “Where is the police chief?”…
