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Education

The People Living in The Path of Adamson’s Progress

By Josh Hixson |
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Much has been written about the buildings involved in DISD’s plan to build a new Adamson High School just blocks from the current one.

What’s made fewer headlines are the people who stand to lose their homes and jobs when the school district acquires their property – either by negotiating the sale of the property with the current owner or through eminent domain.

This is their side of the story: The following article appeared in today’s edition of Oak Cliff People. For the full article, which includes pictures of the people and places detailed in the story, and other news about Oak Cliff you can pick the paper up in Oak Cliff at any of the locations listed on this pdf: OC.

In The Path of Progress, An Aging Area Awaits Fate

Homes, jobs threatened by Adamson project

By Josh Hixson
Oak Cliff People Staff Writer

The slow and erratic beat of chiseling can easily be heard from outside Oak Cliff Christian Church on a bitter January afternoon.
The monotonous rhythm is produced by an asbestos abatement crew hard at work, chipping away at the church’s 104-year-old walls. It is also the sound of a drum beat that marks the beginning of the end for an aging neighborhood that has slowly resigned itself to the fate of progress.

The lot on which the church sits is to become a part of the new Adamson High School campus. Less than a block down the street is the 30-year-old Town Hall Adult Day Care Center. It’s the next piece of property, according to the center’s administrator, that the Dallas Independent School District is trying to acquire in its pursuit of creating a new Adamson just blocks away from the current building.

Residents and employees of the Concord Apartments, which are a block northwest at the intersection of Crawford and Ninth Streets, have been notified that DISD will wait at least until the end of the school year before tearing down their homes.

Concord Apartments resident Edson Williams, a 63-year-old semi-retired house plan designer, sits comfortably in his recliner, situated in the design studio/living room of the one-bedroom apartment he’s lived in for 18 years. His wife, Connie, a throat cancer survivor who wears a tracheotomy tube, sits in the bedroom, watching what sounds like a TV. Williams is also watching a small TV, but with the volume turned down low.

When asked why he wants to stay in the cramped apartment, in a neighborhood he says used to sound like a “war zone,” Williams becomes indignant.

“Heck, I’ve been here so long, I’m used to it. I’m satisfied here. Heck, we’ve had three deaths right here,” Williams said. “My dad died here, my brother died here, then her mother came over here because she was feeling really ill. She wasn’t here two or three days, and then she died.”

CRIME’S NOT THE ISSUE
While Williams said the neighborhood is improving, he still hears reports of neighbors being robbed at gunpoint or assaulted when he visits the manager’s office. But Williams seems less concerned with the crime rate than he does with the possibility of being forced out of his home.

“The last time I talked with [the manager], they said it wasn’t finalized, but it’s going to get there eventually,” Williams said. “The owner doesn’t want to sell either is what I heard. Can’t do anything about it. I said it’s just like Cowboys Stadium: bought everybody out and made them move.”

Concord Apartments manager Maria Monarrez said the threat of losing the property to eminent domain is also a real possibility.

“I heard from the owners, no matter what, even if he doesn’t want to sell, [DISD] is going to make them,” Monarrez said.

Officials with Alton Management Corp., which owns the apartments, were unavailable for comment.

School districts in North Texas usually receive favorable outcomes when it comes to cases of eminent domain, said Virginia Hammerle, president of Hammerle Finley, a law firm that specializes in right of way acquisition and condemnation.

“They usually prevail. They are very successful,” Hammerle said. She estimated the process of acquiring property through eminent domain could take as few as two to three months, not including appeals, once a condemnation action is filed.

INSIDE THE SCHOOL
Some who deal with the poor classroom conditions of the aging Adamson High School feel that nothing should stand in the way of progress.

“The people who are opposed to getting a new school need to come and sit in our classrooms, where, up until two days ago, we had no heat in my room,” Tammy McLean said just before Christmas. The Oak Cliff resident has been teaching journalism and coordinating Advanced Placement classes at Adamson for 13 years.

“Now that we do have heat, it’s going full blast. … In the journalism room, if I run the printer at the same time they run the computers, it throws the circuit [breaker].”

McLean said the reconstruction plan called for transporting Adamson’s entire student body to the Nolan Estes Plaza, just south of the Interstate 35-U.S. Highway 67 split, for two years. She called that a significant obstacle for a community where most students don’t take the bus to school.

“You are asking kids to relocate again for the sake of saving some bricks on the front of a building? Our kids don’t have access to vehicles,” McLean said. “Most of them walk here or they are dropped off.”

FAIR PRICE?
Employees at the adult day care center are beginning to worry that the $95,000 they say DISD is offering for the property will ensure it never reopens at a new location.

“$95,000 would not even buy me a lot,” said Tony Chang, the facility’s administrator. “It would cost me that much just to get a license from the state to open an adult day care.”

Chang estimates that a potential new site on 12th Street would cost $150,000 to purchase, and the cost of a new building could be anywhere from $200,000 to $300,000. Without a new building, the day care’s staff of 10 would become unemployed and the 40 to 50 clients who call it a second home would have to look elsewhere.

For Alice Davis, the day care’s activity director, it’s a 10-hour-a-day job. Davis has been planning activities and coordinating breakfast, lunch, and an evening snack at the center for 17 years. Many of their clients suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, dementia, disability due to stroke, deafness, blindness, or a form of mental incapacity.

It’s when a mentally handicapped giant of a man smiles at her and tells her he’s “clocking out” for the day before he gets on a DART shuttle that it becomes painfully clear she considers these clients part of her family.

“It’s just a place where they can feel safe and secure. Now they are coming in and want to uproot us,” Davis said. “We have our jobs, and we may lose our jobs. It’s just not easy. … We’ll all lose out if we can’t relocate.”

Espirandle Scott, an elderly Katrina transplant, seems resigned to the fact that the day care center is already gone.

“I guess there’s nothing we can do about it. … I will miss it,” Scott said.

Others aren’t so gloomy about the thought of the building being torn down.

“I will just go to another place. No, I won’t be upset. If they have to demolish it, demolish it. Just as long as we go somewhere else better,” said Mildred Tucker, a 75-year-old resident of Pleasant Grove who comes to the center three days a week.

SILENT TREATMENT
Many of those we spoke to believe DISD’s demolition of these buildings is inevitable. And the neighborhood appears to be in desperate need of rehabilitation. It’s the stonewall approach the district is taking that makes the process harder to bear, said Michael Amonett, president of the Old Oak Cliff Conservation League.

In an effort to convince the school board that Oak Cliff Christian Church’s edifice is worth preserving, Amonnet said, he has written to the school board and left a message on board president Adam Medrano’s cell phone. Officials did not respond to either.

“They are going on with what they are doing, and they are hiding,” Amonett said. “It is a really indefensible, insensitive act – to take not only one century-old building, but to proceed to take two. It’s outrageous to me. It defies common sense.”

When reached by phone, Medrano’s assistant said he was unavailable for comment.

At this point in the process, the open communication that Amonett and others are asking for is bad for business, from DISD’s perspective.

“Whenever we are negotiating for property, we are obviously trying to get the best price possible,” DISD spokesman Jon Dahlander said. “So, in that instance, it makes it challenging from that standpoint of not being able to explain to everyone which pieces of property are of interest. Because with that knowledge, that will drive the price up.”

Dahlander declined to comment about the district’s use of eminent domain during the negotiations.

DISD once planned to rebuild Adamson on the high school’s current site, while incorporating some of the original facade. Dahlander said the decision to build a new campus just blocks away was forced when the Adamson Alumni Association began seeking historic landmark status for the existing building.

“It looked like that could have really slowed down that reconstruction,” Dahlander said. “That was when the decision was made to go ahead and build the replacement school.”

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