{"id":145,"date":"2017-04-22T15:16:15","date_gmt":"2017-04-22T15:16:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/?p=145"},"modified":"2017-06-15T17:09:23","modified_gmt":"2017-06-15T17:09:23","slug":"west-dallas-has-been-on-the-financial-edge-for-generations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/2017\/04\/22\/west-dallas-has-been-on-the-financial-edge-for-generations\/","title":{"rendered":"West Dallas Has Been On The Financial Edge For Generations"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>KERA\u2019s\u00a0ongoing <a href=\"http:\/\/stories.kera.org\/oca\/\">One Crisis Away project<\/a> looks at life on the financial edge. In this latest\u00a0series &#8220;No Place To Go,&#8221; we&#8217;re exploring a neighborhood that\u2019s been on the financial edge for more than a century.\u00a0It\u2019s West Dallas, across the Trinity River from downtown. It&#8217;s rapidly transforming. Fine dining\u00a0and luxury apartments are starting to crowd out bleak warehouses and weathered rent houses. For many\u00a0families who have lived there for generations, the changes mean they suddenly have found they have no place to go.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u2022 The latest:<\/strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/2017\/05\/24\/west-dallas-landlord-to-sell-homes-to-residents-judge-delays-eviction\/\" target=\"_blank\">Landlord offers to sell rental homes to longtime residents; judge extends move-out deadline<\/a>.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h5>Renters paying $300 a\u00a0month<\/h5>\n<p>When Dallas strengthened its housing code policy back in September, old rental houses were in the spotlight. <a href=\"http:\/\/keranews.org\/post\/i-was-intending-stay-here-305-west-dallas-families-unsure-their-housing-future\">A chunk of 305 homes<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 primarily in West Dallas and owned by HMK\u00a0Ltd. \u2014 no longer meet code. The company&#8217;s owner says it would be impossible to bring these 1940s-era dwellings up to standard, so he&#8217;s closing his rental business.<\/p>\n<p>Tenants must move out by June 3. Because many of these renters are paying between $300 and $500 a month and West Dallas has gotten so expensive, they have no plan for move-out day.\u00a0Learn more about the HMK Ltd. situation in the timeline below.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.knightlab.com\/libs\/timeline3\/latest\/embed\/index.html?source=1cjhhXzeufGDS61rSjqhfrNLsBDVzQ6G135q_aJinamQ&amp;font=PT&amp;lang=en&amp;initial_zoom=2&amp;height=750\" width=\"100%\" height=\"750\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<h5>Praying for a\u00a0miracle<\/h5>\n<p>Some residents have moved into spare rooms with relatives, some have moved to South Dallas, and some have moved out of the city. Some don&#8217;t know where to go and are still in their houses, praying for a miracle. Joe Garcia is one of them. He survives on a small disability check and lives with his 84-year-old mother.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOur money situation is always a stretch,&#8221; Garcia says. &#8220;It\u2019s always a stretch for it. This, West Dallas is mostly right now, like older people live here. And they don\u2019t know where to go.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Garcia says he\u2019s applied for Section 8 housing and was told he didn\u2019t qualify. He also hasn\u2019t had any luck getting a mortgage to buy his house, which he\u2019d like to do.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h6>Graphic: West Dallas Households That Can&#8217;t Afford Rent<\/h6>\n<p>Unaffordable housing requires an occupant to spend more than 30 percent of his\/her income, according to the National Low Income\u00a0Housing Coalition.<\/p>\n<p>West Dallas is made up of seven census tracts. The graphic below shows the percentage of the population in each tract that <i>cannot<\/i> afford rent based on the coalition&#8217;s definition.<\/p>\n<p><script id=\"infogram_0_housing_affordability_in_west_dallas_from_2010_2014\" title=\"Housing Affordability in West Dallas from 2010-2014\" src=\"\/\/e.infogr.am\/js\/dist\/embed.js?1BP\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script><\/p>\n<div style=\"padding: 8px 0; font-family: Arial!important; font-size: 13px!important; line-height: 15px!important; text-align: center; border-top: 1px solid #dadada; margin: 0 30px;\"><a style=\"color: #989898!important; text-decoration: none!important;\" href=\"https:\/\/infogr.am\/housing_affordability_in_west_dallas_from_2010_2014\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Housing Affordability in West Dallas from 2010-2014<\/a><br \/>\n<a style=\"color: #989898!important; text-decoration: none!important;\" href=\"https:\/\/infogr.am\/create\/line-chart?utm_source=embed_bottom&amp;utm_medium=seo&amp;utm_campaign=line_chart\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Create line charts<\/a><\/div>\n<hr \/>\n<h5>Change that came on fast<\/h5>\n<p>All the development in West Dallas happened quickly \u2014 in the five years since the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge opened. Santiago Calatrava designed those soaring white cables to link downtown to West Dallas. Back in 2012, some people used to sneeringly refer to that bridge as the \u201cbridge to nowhere,\u201d which was pretty offensive to the thousands of people who live there.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_31\" style=\"max-width:100%;  width: 900px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-31 size-large\" src=\"http:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2017\/03\/020117WESTdallas0036-1024x683.jpg\" alt=\"Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, near West Dallas\" width=\"900\" height=\"600\" srcset=\"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2017\/03\/020117WESTdallas0036-1024x683.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2017\/03\/020117WESTdallas0036-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2017\/03\/020117WESTdallas0036-768x512.jpg 768w, https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2017\/03\/020117WESTdallas0036-1360x907.jpg 1360w, https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2017\/03\/020117WESTdallas0036-800x533.jpg 800w, https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/18\/2017\/03\/020117WESTdallas0036-450x300.jpg 450w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 900px) 100vw, 900px\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\"style=\"max-width:100%;  width: 900px\" >A view of the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, designed by Santiago Calatrava, from a West Dallas neighborhood. Photo\/Allison V. Smith<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>Doug Swanson is an author and former reporter with The Dallas Morning News who spent a lot of time in West Dallas in the 1980s.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI mean you could obviously see the change coming, and then the apartments started going up, and I thought, \u2018well I\u2019m really an old-timer now\u2019 because I never would have thought that you would see any development like that in West Dallas,&#8221; Swanson says. &#8220;And I also thought: &#8216;What\u2019s going to happen to the people who have been living here?&#8217;\u201d<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h6>More\u00a0In &#8216;No Place To Go&#8217;<\/h6>\n<p><em>A century ago, West Dallas\u00a0was a poor, mostly white, unincorporated home for folks on the edge of society. As industry came, black families moved in \u2014 then Latinos, who put down roots that still run deep today. The one thread that connects all those people? Poverty. <a href=\"http:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/2017\/04\/23\/the-story-of-the-place-on-the-other-side-of-the-trinity\/\" target=\"_blank\">And that\u2019s just now starting to change<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" style=\"border: none; overflow: hidden;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/plugins\/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fkeratx%2Fvideos%2F10155205958186445%2F&amp;show_text=0&amp;width=560\" width=\"660\" height=\"415\" frameborder=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>KERA\u2019s\u00a0ongoing One Crisis Away project looks at life on the&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":17,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"audio","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[11,12,9,10,8],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-audio","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-one-crisis-away-no-place-to-go","tag-affordable-housing","tag-hmk-ltd","tag-one-crisis-away","tag-poverty","tag-west-dallas","post_format-post-format-audio","byline-courtney-collins"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":622,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions\/622"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stories.kera.org\/no-place\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}