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Walking to the parking garage yesterday I saw this message drawn in chalk on the sidewalk in front of the DMA. I thought, “Huh. Why would the cucumbers in Texas have lower self-esteem than cucumbers in any other state?” So I did some journalism-style web browsing and checked out that site. Turns out the former Central Dallas Ministries has, with some help from the folks at the Richards Group, rebranded itself. CEO Larry James explains here why the nonprofit poverty-busting outfit changed its name to CitySquare. And apparently the chalk marketing is all over downtown. I’m not the only one who has stumbled across such a message.

That’s what Kyle Ezell, a city planner in Columbus, Ohio, says, in this DMN story about Dallas’ “urban villages,” which I suppose are an actual thing, even if this is the first time I’ve heard them referred to as such. Ezell teaches a class at Ohio State wherein he requires his students to do things such as ride a bus. It sounded sort of silly the first time I read it, then I realized: he’s probably 100 percent right.

Some interesting stuff is in that piece, even if it — guh — starts with a story about someone complaining that she can’t sleep because the bar that she willingly moved next to is too loud and it keeps her up at night.

Feel free to criticize them or add your own over here.

I lived in New York in the late 80s and early 90s when everybody had given up on it. The city was as exciting and fun as ever, but it was also dirty, drug-plagued, crime-ridden, and insolvent. Nobody thought it could be fixed. It was just the way New York was. Then came two mayors, Giuliani and Bloomberg. Guiliani restored order. The crime rate collapsed, and small businesses began to prosper. Bloomberg built on that, concentrating on quality-of-life improvements that were unimaginable only a decade ago.

As a car-oriented city with spacious suburbs and leafy inner-city neighborhoods, any comparison to New York might seem silly. But Dallas can still learn two important lessons from New York’s experience. Lesson #1: Anything can be fixed. Lesson #2: City government can and must lead in improving quality of life, mostly in getting rid of old ideas, traffic patterns, and ordinances that impede its natural development. (H/t Urbanophile)