North Oak Cliff

North Oak Cliff: “We’ll Take a Few Homeless People if Preston Hollow Does.”

Part I

Once again another proposal to create permanent, supportive housing has run into a buzz saw of opposition from the local neighbors. Check out the comments to Roy Appleton’s blog for the Dallas Morning News here: http://oakcliffblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2010/06/homeless-housing-plan-foes-tak.html#slcgm_comments_anchor. The proposed location for permanent supportive housing this time is Cliff Manor, a property owned by the Dallas Housing Authority.




(appearing here in a photo taken for Channel 11)

Along with all the usual arguments (it’ll hurt land values; what about crime?; the children!; we’ve already done our share; etc.), a new favorite argument seems to be appearing: ”We’ll allow permanent supportive housing, but only if everyone else does as well.” It seems that no matter where someone proposes to locate a permanent supportive housing project that the neighborhood feels they are getting more than their share of projects.

I became curious whether that might not be true, there are several groups working on permanent supportive housing projects and we don’t really coordinate. Everybody develops their project independently for the most part. So I began putting together a Google Map of all the existing, proposed and abandoned permanent supportive housing projects that I knew about.

I hope to have it ready for tomorrow’s blog, and if it looks useful to other people, then perhaps it could be maintained as a tool for all of us to use.

John Greenan