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THE CITY INNER CITY MOVES

Housing activists join forces for Common Ground
By Kathy LaTour |

CONRAD MARTIN clearly remembers the day he stopped being a part of the problem and decided to become part of the solution. Martin, a Dallas real estate broker, was handling some apartment complexes in Oak Cliff a few years ago when he was faced with the reality of low-income housing.

“I was showing an apartment house to a couple of investors from California,” Martin says. “In one apartment there was a Mexican family. There were feces in the bathtub because the toilet didn’t work. The tenants were afraid to tell their landlord because there were too many of them living in the apartment. They were afraid that he would evict them, and they had nowhere else to go.”

Martin didn’t complete the sale, although he had sold a similar apartment building to another group of investors the month before.

“There was one elderly man in very bad health in one of the apartments,” Martin says. “But when we got outside, the one man said to his partner, ’Get those people out of here.’ I just couldn’t do that to people anymore.”

Martin is now chairman of the housing committee of Block Partnership, a community group sponsored by the Greater Dallas Community of Churches, which pairs churches with low-income neighborhoods. Block Partnership is also one of the 12 organizations that comprise Common Ground, the non-profit corporation chartered in April 1982 that is dedicated to preserving and expanding low-income housing in Dallas.

Common Ground represents a merging of a variety of community groups, including the Wheatley Place Neighbors, the Lower Peaks Branch Corp., the Bois d’Arc Patriots, the West Dallas Involvement Committee and the South Dallas Improvement League. Some of the groups are familiar to those who have followed the neighborhood struggles in East, South and West Dallas during the last decade. “There has been a pattern of displacement in the inner city,” says John Full-inwider, coordinator of Common Ground. “We were losing whole neighborhoods. Confronting an inner-citywide pattern of displacement is what made us come together as a coalition.”

According to a 1983 study on low-income housing commissioned by the Meadows Foundation for the city of Dallas, 126,326 people in Dallas live on less than $7,400 a year, 35,600 low-income families pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing, and an estimated 13,000 Dallasites are homeless (with an estimated 3,000 of those living on the streets).

In addition, the study says that there are some 70,000 substandard housing units in the city. “Thus, the supply of decent, affordable housing for the poor is clearly inadequate. The quantity of such housing is being reduced. The number of poor households is increasing, and the federal assistance upon which we have come to depend is virtually eliminated.”

Common Ground has garnered considerable support from local and national organizations whose conclusions are the same as those reached by the study: Low-income housing is inadequate, and new solutions must be found. The group has received financial support from the Meadows Foundation, ARCO and the City of Dallas Community Development Funds. Nationally, funding has come from the Local Initiatives Support Corp., a New York-based organization that channels contributions from national corporations such as Bank of America, Standard Oil of Ohio, Levi Strauss Corp. and Atlantic Richfield Foundation to community groups for neighborhood development. Last year, Common Ground also attracted the attention of the Enterprise Foundation. The foundation, which was established by urban designer James Rouse, conducted the Meadows Foundation study. During its research on solutions to the housing problem, the Enterprise staff saw the work being done by Common Ground, and, although Dallas had not yet been targeted by the Enterprise board, they decided to commit themselves to helping the group.

The Enterprise Foundation, which funds about 30 projects in cities across the country, was founded on the belief that the most effective means for addressing the needs of the poor is through neighborhood efforts, a “from the bottom up” effort that integrally involves community residents.

Ed Quinn, president of the Enterprise Foundation, says, “We were impressed with the very grass-roots nature of the group and the desire and dedication of the people involved. With very little money, they were rehabilitating houses and involving neighborhood people [in the process].”

But the most impressive support for Common Ground has come from the Dallas corporate sector, in the form of material and human resources.

Last fall, Common Ground received a call from Southland Corp. Vice President Hugh Robinson. Robinson is the president of Southland’s Cityplace project, a 130-acre development that will span Central Expressway and will cover a triangle of land formed by the MKT railroad tracks near Turtle Creek with Lemmon and Haskell avenues on the other two sides. A number of blocks of low-income housing are included in the first tract, and Robinson asked if Common Ground wanted the 100 or so houses that were movable.

There was an uneasy acceptance from the Common Ground board of directors, most of whom were more accustomed to fighting the city establishment than having it come to them with such a generous offer.

“The easy way for us would have been to go in and level those homes with a bulldozer,” Robinson says. “But to not keep those houses would be irresponsible. You just can’t knock down low-income houses with the shortage there is in Dallas. We know that the [development] process would be criticized if we didn’t somehow preserve low-income housing.” Southland also made a $75,000 cash contribution to help move the houses.

Thus began what national observers are calling a model of cooperation. Says Fullin-wider: “In the past, they [Southland] would have cleared the land, with perhaps a few protests, and that would have been the end of it. By choosing to do this, they save houses, and they have made a breakthrough in the attitudes of corporate Dallas.”

Indeed. In April, Dallas-based Austin Industries, one of the largest construction companies in the country, announced that it was “donating” project manager Joe Beaudette to Common Ground for one year. Beaudette is supervising the construction efforts of relocating and refurbishing the Southland houses.

Says Southland’s Robinson, “It’s a great merging of common interests; the neighborhood groups and the corporate sector and the city are all working together to make it work.”

Common Ground currently has 15 houses occupied and another 15 in various stages of completion. Some of the lots were purchased by Common Ground; others were donated. Common Ground hires people from the neighborhood to work on the houses, thus providing employment and an emotional investment on the part of the existing residents.

Although the group owns property in each of the targeted low-income areas of the city, the majority of their work is taking place in the Caldwell-Harris neighborhood near Fair Park. According to the 1980 census, the Caldwell-Harris neighborhood lost 35 percent of its population during the Seventies. Today, there are more than 3,000 residents, most of them black. In the neighborhood, there are 361 owner-occupied households (34 percent) and 700 rented households. Women head four out of 10 households, and the median annual income for the area is $9,176. Common Ground saw the neighborhood as a likely victim of speculation and the usual “disinvestment redevelopment” cycle because of the neighborhood’s close proximity to the fairgrounds and in light of the upcoming Texas Sesquicentennial.

One day in March, Martin and the Rev. Leroy Haynes, director of Block Partnership, arrived at a house at 1560 Harris Court to welcome a Block Partnership team from Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church.

The house, which was donated to Common Ground, had already been put on a foundation. Common Ground usually contracts out most of the moving, foundation work, wiring and plumbing to local minority contractors, but in this instance, the usual neighborhood construction crew had been replaced by an architect, an attorney, a contractor and two salesmen from Preston Hollow Presbyterian.

By the time the small two-bedroom house was ready for a family, more than 25 people from the church had been involved in the rehabilitation effort. They put up sheet-rock, weatherstripping, painted and hooked up all the wiring and plumbing.

There are other signs of Common Ground in the Caldwell-Harris area. A duplex has been moved down the street and awaits the final work before a family moves in. Two neat brown-and-yellow houses across the street from 1560 Harris Court have been improved by Common Ground for their elderly residents.

Common Ground has 18 houses in the neighborhood; of those, 15 were scheduled to be demolished when Common Ground interceded-either buying the houses directly or asking that they be donated. The cost of rehabilitation averages $8,000 to $10,000 per unit; the total redevelopment cost, including the land and moving, is around $25,000, Fullinwider says. Eventually, Common Ground will begin helping low-income families buy the homes on subsidized mortgages. Dallas Federal Savings has committed to providing permanent mortgage financing for Common Ground.

Currently, Common Ground is renting mostly to people in “emergency” situations in the neighborhood. A number of elderly residents who were lacking essential utilities have been assisted, as well as two families who lost their homes to fire and others suffering financial crises.

Linda Thomas, a 36-year-old mother of three teen-agers, currently lives in the Common Ground emergency house. Fullinwider points to Thomas as a good example of what happens when a low-income family is faced with a financial crisis due to illness.

Thomas, a pastry chef, was injured in a fall last November at work. While waiting for the necessary paperwork for insurance compensation, she fell behind in her gas bill. The gas company cut off the gas in December, and because of the lack of heat, the pipes froze and burst. The landlord fixed the pipes and then raised the rent, saying that it was Thomas’ fault they froze. Thomas, who had lived in the house for six years, was living on $149 a week in insurance compensation and was unable to pay the increased rent and the deposit needed to have the gas reinstated. “I lived in the projects once,” Thomas says. “I got out, and I didn’t want to go back on welfare. But I had to move. I had lost hope and was trying to figure out somewhere to put my boys when I found out about Common Ground.”

Albert Hartfield lost five of his grandchildren to fire when the family’s apartment burned in February. This month, he moved his family into a house on Harris Court. The house, which sits today on a tree-shaded lot, originally stood in the shadow of downtown near the new Arts District.

“If we had been here a few months earlier, we could have saved the house that was already on the lot,” says Fullinwider. Other lots with cement steps that go nowhere are numerous on the block-the houses were victims of “code enforcement violations.”

Code enforcement violation demolitions have reached epidemic proportions in low-income areas. According to the Enterprise Foundation study, from June 1982 to June 1983, the Urban Rehabilitations Standards Board demolished 420 units in the city-a 10 percent increase over the previous year.

Worrying about this relatively small number of units in a city that’s in the middle of a building boom may seem strange, but while moderate- and upper-income units are plentiful-even overbuilt-no one is building low-income housing. Dr. Sydney Reagan, professor emeritus of real estate at SMU and a member of the Mayor’s Task Force on Public Housing, says the city must look to the future.

“The majority of the low-income housing that is going to be in the city of Dallas in the year 2000 is already here. These units need to be preserved and protected and not allowed to get to the point where they need to be demolished. Besides, it’s more economical to preserve and protect the houses than it is to tear them down.”

President Reagan is a strong proponent of the neighborhood ownership plan proposed by Common Ground because of the stability that a neighborhood offers those with very low incomes. “Public housing segregates people in a very unfavorable way,” he says. “The very poor are put together and deprived of the support of neighborhoods. In existing neighborhoods, you have social structure: churches, community centers-a variety of people, not just the very poor.”

For those families buying or leasing homes from Common Ground, Fullinwider says, the group provides ongoing support to ensure that the family can handle the financial responsibilities. Mortgages for home owners, for example, include a monthly payment into a maintenance escrow account for future repairs.

Eventually, Common Ground wants to create a neighborhood construction company specifically to develop housing that is affordable for low-income families. “Somebody has to do it,” Fullinwider says.

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