A Housekeeping Note

If you read CityWalkTalk regularly, then you may have noticed that over the last week or so a few blogs have begun to appear under the by-lines of Lori Beth Lemmon and Naquanna Comeaux. There are a couple of reasons why you’ll start seeing more blogs here that are written by someone other than me.

First, both Lori Beth and Naquanna write well and have something to say. I think you’ll enjoy their pieces. Lori Beth is our Marketing Director and Naquanna is our Community Outreach Representative here at Central Dallas CDC. It was never my intent to write this blog by myself every day. I think reading diverse opinions is interesting, and once CityWalk is open I hope that we’ll have entries from a whole variety of sources—from the people living and working in the building, from our neighbors and from other people interested in urban living, ending homelessness and the variety of other topics that need discussing when you build a “vertical village” (as good friend Larry James has begun calling it) in the middle of Downtown Dallas. I am much more interested in being part of a community than I am in promoting my own thoughts.

CityWalk isn’t complete yet (although it’s very close) so we haven’t had a community to engage. For that reason, my writing almost the entire blog has been more a necessity than a choice. It’s my way of updating people who are interested in our work and, when I can’t think of anything about our work to write about, at least trying to say something a few people will find interesting or thought provoking.

Second, and more practically, although I enjoy writing CityWalkTalk, the time it takes to write these blogs each day can become a burden. It almost always takes me at least an hour to write a blog entry, and sometimes much longer. I can’t let keeping the blog up to date interfere with my real work of trying to house the homeless and help redevelop the parts of our fair city that need redevelopment. So expect several times each week, at least, to see someone else writing CityWalkTalk.

Just to be clear, when someone else writes the blog then the entry will appear under their name. When there is no by-line, then it’s me again. And, no matter what, I remain responsible for the content of CityWalkTalk, so if you have a complaint, then contact me.

Finally, for those of you (both of you!) who enjoy my random ruminations on life, food and canoeing (as if I saw any difference between them), please don’t worry because those essays will still appear pretty often. For the most part, however, I’m going to try to restrict entries that aren’t about our work in one way or another to the weekends, when we all should take a little break from the workaday world.