Dallas Neighbors for Housing Blog

Allow me to indulge a personal story for a minute. When I was in high school, my mom really wanted me to apply to a school with a good geography program. Even though I loved looking at maps and such, I thought that she was wrong because 16 year old boys always think their mom's are wrong. Well, fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, and I was trying like crazy to find a website I could use to get demographic info at a neighborhood level. I couldn't navigate the Census website accurately, and I almost lost hope until I found PolicyMap.com. The website is an absolute treasure trove of accessible data.  We are using it to detail how wealthy neighborhoods have not built any new housing in their neighborhoods, causing the cost of housing citywide to increase and creating displacement for poorer residents. For the first two neighborhoods that we have looked at, the number of housing units in both went DOWN in the last 20 years. Even I was surprised by that fact. You can read the full...

As the snow falls in its heaviest amounts, I am keeping fingers crossed that we will avoid the widespread and long power outages of last year. Of course, it seems backwards that Republican leadership will be able to claim success for their "reforms" even though they didn't do anything to strengthen the grid. I've been thinking about how bad weather events reveal the weaknesses of Dallas and car-centric cities.  The first and biggest way that having more people living in Dallas will help is that it's way more efficient to have people living close together than sprawled in the suburbs . This is because single family homes consume way more energy. All of that energy needed to heat homes is the primary strain on the grid during a winter storm or intense heat during the summer.  The second way is that a more dense city is a more walkable one. The days leading up to the storm saw people rushing to the grocery store in order to get food for a few days. They knew that th...