Although you are already well aware, either because you are one of the 66 percent of Dallasites who rent your home or because you’ve wondered at the bewildering number of luxury apartments sprouting up around the city’s core, the point bears repeating: The rent is too damn high. This is true…
Please welcome back for a return engagement, Joe Pappalardo, who takes over as the Observer’s editor on December 7. Longtime readers with good memories — we’re pretty sure they exist — will remember Joe from his time as a staff writer here 15 years ago. He recalled us fondly, as…
The easy argument to make is that people shouldn’t move to neighborhoods known for the nightlife and then complain about the nightlife. But have any of you intelligent, classy Observer readers partied in Uptown recently? Who among us really wants to go on the record defending Kung Fu Saloon, the Uptown…
Based on what we know, calling University of North Texas journalism dean Dorothy Bland a race-card-playing, self-aggrandizing, lying, cop-hating bigot is entirely unfair. Not that some people care. Trolls, mainly. Still, some serious humans are upset with Bland too. She’s the target of an online petition demanding her firing for…
Christina Casas has lived on Rusk Avenue all her life. She remembers sitting on the front porch early one afternoon in about 1973 as her family bustled past her, lugging furniture and boxes into their new home, a small, wood-frame workman’s bungalow at the corner of Rusk and Carroll Avenue…
We have a confession to make. Two weeks ago, we published a piece in this space purporting to identify Dallas’ 10 HOTTEST Apartment Complexes. While this might seem to imply that we used some sort of objective methodology for determining HOTNESS — or, for that matter, had any knowledge at all about…
To get a flavor of the opposition to “Plano Tomorrow,” the northern suburb’s newly adopted comprehensive plan, you don’t need to listen to the dozens of residents who spoke against it at a marathon City Council meeting this week. Skimming this column by a leader of the opposition group Plano Future will…
Do you ever get Houston envy? It’s terrible. For me it always starts with a scratchy throat, then a splitting headache. What could be worse? Really. What could be worse than being jealous of Houston? I sometimes get Fort Worth and San Antonio envies. They’re not quite as bad as…
Yeah, we know: Dallas is all about big houses with green lawns and a couple of cars in the garage — WRONG! Maybe that was true when your grandma was alive, but this is the 21st century. Apartment living is where it’s at, and in case you’ve been living under…
In one narrative, a Dallas developer hoping to capitalize on Bishop Arts has decided to listen to citizens and do what is right. Alamo Manhattan, the company that once promised to make Oak Cliff cool with giant apartment structures over existing homes and businesses, in a project that was to…
Wait a minute. Dallas Morning News Metro columnist Steve Blow is gone? You’re kidding me. Why was I not told? You say he retired? How can he just retire? This means no more Steve Blow alerts. What am I supposed to do with my wind-up Steve Blow alarm? I’ll tell…
The most stubbornly entrenched meme in local white culture — that “South Dallas” is a scary awful place — is the one most certain to flip in years just ahead. It will turn around 180 degrees. People of the green ethnicity, meaning the ones with money, will start scouring southern…
Last week the city of Austin took the unusual step of suing the Travis Central Appraisal District, the body that sets property values on which local governments and school districts assess taxes. According to Austin officials, commercial properties were widely and consistently undervalued, handicapping the city’s ability to provide services and…
Zad Roumaya says people are willing to pay $880 a month to live in a complex of 320 square foot shipping containers he plans to outfit and install in The Cedars. That’s $2.75 a square foot, right in line with luxury units across the city of Dallas. The units will…
Months ago, Dallas school board member Miguel Solis shipped me a copy of a 1999 book called Show Me a Hero by former New York Times writer (now senior columnist at Huffington Post) Lisa Belkin, about a late 1980s affordable housing/desegregation fight in Yonkers, an inner-rim suburb of New York…
You, my fellow citizen, can do a study of the development potential associated with a single DART light rail line through downtown. I’m serious. You can do this. All you have to do is walk east to west through downtown on Bryan Street and Pacific Avenue along the existing DART…
A fight centered in what seems to be one of the most contentious blocks of downtown Dallas continued last week with developer Tim Headington asserting that Texas law doesn’t guarantee apartment dwellers the right to access “air, light or a view.” He was talking about tenants in the Wilson Building…
Downtown Dallas has tons of parking — 69,000 spaces, according to Downtown Dallas Inc. It will have ton of parking for the foreseeable future. Despite that, city planners are calling for even more parking downtown, in part to help the those who might someday want to call downtown home. But…
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…
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…
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…
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…
