I'm headed out of town for a week's vacation. Spent a good deal of yesterday thinking about the outcome in the HUD case against Dallas. As you know by now, HUD folded a couple days ago and withdrew its racial segregation allegation against the city. If you were here yesterday, I already bored you wi ... More >>
City Hall announced late yesterday that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has caved on the 4-year-old Lockey/MacKenzie racial segregation complaint against Dallas officials, vacating most of the findings of a four-year federal civil rights investigation. A settlement signed ... More >>
The Lockey/MacKenzie federal whistle-blower lawsuit accusing Dallas of deliberate racial segregation, dismissed last year because the judge said I had already blown the whistle, is back in court in all new clothes, filed Friday, this time with less of me and more of former City Council member Angel ... More >>
Oh thank you, God of Lazy Non-Recyclers, for sparing that grocery sack full of this week's copies of The Dallas Morning News, hiding it in that corner of the bedroom from the eye of The Great Recycler with whom I live, so that I was able to retrieve from it a hard copy of last Wednesday's newspaper, ... More >>
This is the week something should happen in the now 5-year-old dispute between the city of Dallas and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development over HUD's landmark segregation complaint against Dallas. HUD and the city have been jaw-boning each other for several weeks now over what Dallas ... More >>
Yesterday I said I would eat crow if Dallas Morning News editorial writer Rudy Bush turns out to be right and I turn out to be wrong about the outcome of the HUD racial discrimination complaint against the city of Dallas. Today after much more snooping around, I would offer this as my opening positi ... More >>
Oh, man, I shouldn't even tell you about this. I guess it's me and Rudy Bush, "High Noon," "OK Corral," all those old movies. One of us has got to wind up on his back in the horseshit with his toes in the air. I promise I'll let you know which one it is, if I still can. Bush is a former City Hall r ... More >>
If the editorial in The Dallas Morning News this morning has any credibility, and I am sure it does, HUD has agreed to throw the whistleblowers under the bus in the Lockey/MacKenzie racial segregation complaint against the city of Dallas. It's not a surprising outcome, because paying off the two d ... More >>
The other day, I was talking here and Rudy Bush was talking in The Dallas Morning News and Scott Griggs and Philip Kingston were talking on the city council about the $810,000 the city had to pay back to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). I just want to point out before the ... More >>
Late yesterday, just before finally answering my days-old question about it, the city manager sent a memo to the City Council characterizing $800,000 repaid to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as a kind of technical accounting error and no big deal. Most of it involves money stolen ... More >>
WOW. Looks like bigbexardaddy knows whereof he speaks. Little over a week ago bigbexardaddy commented on an item I had posted here about the Bexar Street boondoggle, giving away a lot of detail that sure sounded like it came from inside City Hall, including a claim that Dallas, even in advance of ... More >>
Always fun for me to read The Dallas Morning News on Sunday, or, as I call it, Pravda Day. That's when the big think-pieces come out in the special "Pointy Section" of the paper ... oh, 'scuse me, it's really called the "Points Section," but you get my point. It's the Sunday editorial section, and i ... More >>
Very interesting press conference Friday in the Flag Room at Dallas City Hall ... wait ... wait. Oh, no. Did I just tell you there was an interesting press conference in the Flag Room at City Hall? Tell me I did not just say that. No, what I meant to say was that there was a typically turgid Kabuki ... More >>
We should be doing what we can to keep up with news about our sister community, Westchester County in New York. It's the other local government entity in the nation, along with the city of Dallas, formally accused by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development of practicing deliberate racia ... More >>
Right after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development accused Dallas last month of massive racial segregation and housing fraud, Mayor Mike Rawlings was all for making nice. That lasted all of two weeks. Now he and the city attorney are telling HUD to go screw itself. Last month, days a ... More >>
Yesterday The Dallas Morning News carried a really tough, plain-talking editorial condemning City Hall policies that have produced deliberate racial segregation in Dallas. It was the kind of editorial that should be applauded and really doesn't deserve to be nitpicked. But when did that ever stop me ... More >>
Hey, I think I have waited about long enough for The Dallas Morning News to weigh in on the racial segregation complaint lodged against Dallas by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban development in early December. A month. Even allowing for Santa Claus and all, a month seems a bit long for the c ... More >>
It's not me. It's the two whistle-blowers suing the city.
We spoke last week about the way city staff is dealing behind the scenes with a recent accusation of racial segregation by the federal government. Maybe we should talk, too, about the way they're dealing with it in court. Late last month the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) w ... More >>
The city of Dallas went to federal court earlier this week to stop a federal judge from expressing his opinion about a recent federal investigative report accusing Dallas of practicing racial segregation (the city's brief is below). Plaintiffs in a whistle-blower lawsuit will come back today with th ... More >>
Not that you asked, but here's what it's like to be me. I'm walking my dogs, Penny and Dorothy, up and down alleys in East Dallas, and I've got my little cell phone ear-bug deal going so I can talk to people and keep my hands free for clean-ups. And this is what I hear in my ear: "... white scienti ... More >>
The city was becoming less divided. Then corruption stepped in.
As the full implications gradually become better known, the federal investigative report released late last month accusing Dallas of segregation will shine a bright national light on the city. One housing policy watcher is already calling the case "Westchester on steroids," a reference to the last ... More >>
A scathing federal report on housing policy in Dallas, unveiled this week after two City Council members demanded copies from the city attorney, has stirred local debate about federal desegregation law. But that debate begs two questions. See also: The Feds Say Dallas City Hall Has Promoted Racial ... More >>
Yesterday in its first official response to a federal investigation that found Dallas guilty of misappropriating funds and furthering segregation, Dallas City Hall said the feds were in on the whole thing themselves from the beginning: "It is important to note that HUD has given final approval of ... More >>
Elected officials and city staff in Dallas colluded over a decade to break federal housing and civil rights laws and promote and worsen racial segregation across the city, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has found, dealing City Hall a scathing, and potentially costly, blow ... More >>
Yesterday I wrote about Curtis Lockey and Craig MacKenzie, who were on my mind Tuesday night as I watched the final electoral votes for Obama click into place. Lockey and MacKenzie are real estate developers suing Dallas in federal court over what they claim is massive misuse of federal de-segregati ... More >>
Federal dough meant for affordable housing went to downtown.
The Hatcher Station, one of four light-rail stations identified as by the city as a recipient of the feds' grant announced this morningThis morning we've received several press releases from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Department of Transportation announcing ... More >>
Photos by Elliot KaiserNote from Jim: In the last week of April I asked the city to tell me how many guaranteed low-income housing units are available in downtown Dallas. There should be lots of them by now -a a couple thousand by some estimates -- because over the decades, the city has used hu ... More >>
No need to recap the sad history of Southern Skates -- our October 19 item about the beleaguered roller rink on East Ledbetter Drive should bring latecomers up to speed, while old-timers know the song by heart. With that, second verse same as the first: The council's Economic Development Committe ... More >>
The Atmos Complex, which the Hamiltons are still intending to develop behind the Statler HiltonLarry and Ted Hamilton took control of the four-building Atmos Complex, situated almost directly behind the Statler Hilton, a little more than a year ago, after Forest City got tired of paying penalties ... More >>
Southern SkatesThe first time we wrote about Southern Skates on E. Ledbetter Road was a month after Europe agreed go with the euro, a month before Saving Private Ryan opened and six months before the House impeached Bill Clinton. In other words, a million years ago. Back then, former Black Panthe ... More >>
It's probably a safe bet that former president and CEO of the Dallas Housing Authority, Alphonso Jackson, wishes he'd never given that April 2006 speech in Dallas, during which he said, "If you have a problem with the president," you won't get a contract with the U.S. Housing and Urban Development D ... More >>
Brian Harkin Larry James, president and CEO of Central Dallas Ministries In February 2005, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Alphonso Jackson stood at a homeless shelter in Los Angeles, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, and announced that HUD would be doling out $1.4 billion in g ... More >>
Harwood builds a fancy condo tower without a nickel in handouts from City Hall
Managers of a publicly subsidized apartment complex try to shut down tenant organizers
With public housing under assault from Congress, the Justice Department, and HUD, Dallas tenants' advocate Alice Basey is part of a grassroots movement fighting to keep poor families from going homeless
Hope is renewed for four downtown housing projects
HUD audit urges ouster of firm targeted in Observer story