News

The Whole City Needs to Be Paying Attention to What Is Happening In West Dallas

Posted on

The real issue in the West Dallas eviction crisis — the reason why it is  a crisis, and not merely a controversy — isn’t that hundreds of people are set to lose their homes at the end of a year-long battle between the mayor and a low income landlord. That’s terrible, of course. The long, complicated story of why the Khraish family is moving forward with the evictions is not a simple good guy-verses-bad guy affair, but rather a battle in the grey zone of property rights, gentrification, poverty, politics, history, and race. It’s one of the uglier episodes in recent Dallas memory. But the real issue in West Dallas is that the evicted tenants have no place to go. That’s because, in a city with staggering rates of poverty — the highest in the country of any big city, up 42 percent in 15 years — Dallas has an abyssal shortage in low-income housing.”

« Back to News