‘That's Just the Way It Is' No Longer an Excuse for Blight That Plagues Southern Dallas

I was taking pictures of a pile of trash — tires and couches, mostly, tossed into an overgrown South Dallas lot — when a man in a blue van pulled up next to me. "Mr. Cruz?" he asked, and I told him, no, sorry. He shook his head, pulled over and got out. The man, who would identify himself only as Bill and gave his age as "older than dirt," said he thought I was Mr. Cruz with Code Compliance and had come to clean up this mess, one of many in this part of town.No, sorry. Just here to write about it.When I ran into Bill on Monday, I'd just come from a City Council committee meeting about a code blitz coming to this part of South Dallas, near Oakland Cemetery and Lincoln High School, and two other neighborhoods a few miles away in and around Fruitdale, which was planted a century ago as a farming community and is still more rural than urban.  Continue reading...