The New Houses On The Block

THE PAINT MAY PEEL on the homes of the best-managed families. The porch might even sag for a year or so. But over time and in general, a house comes to reflect the people who live in it. The house at the end of our block was a physical expression of anger, feuding, midnight rides on squealing tires and many a beery blow.

It had been empty for several years-ugly but mercifully quiet. the roof open and the walls leaning drunkenly against each other, broken shoulder to shoulder, all of it sinking slowly into the black folds of the weedy lot around it. It was the neglected headstone of an entire family.

Everyone on the block was still uncomfortable with the place, but at least it no longer could spawn automobile accidents, fires or disturbing scenes in the wee hours.

When the news of the community receivership program flew up and down the block, it was like the scene in Wait Until Dark, when the bad guy, who is supposed to be dead, makes one last horrifying leap across the room at his victim: The city, we learned, was midway through a process by which it intended to turn over the abandoned house at the end of our block to a man who was running a recovery program for alcohol- and drug-abusing street people.

Just what we needed, in a beleaguered inner-city neighborhood. More drug addicts.

Neighbors gathered on lawns; there was brave talk; we counted the lawyers among us; there was even an amount of derision, as we contemplated a City Hall that did not realize we were a legitimate single-family residential neighborhood.

In the weeks ahead, we learned who were the fools, and it was we. Busy with life, children, jobs and the business of survival in the 1990s, we had failed to notice a sea change in the laws governing our neighborhood in particular and neighborhoods in general, in the city, the state and the nation. All of our most cherished notions of zoning and the nature of neighborhoods were obsolete.

We may or may not have been guilty of a socially irresponsible view, perhaps even an immoral view of those other human beings described by social workers as “special needs populations.” But the legal fact was that we could do little to keep them out of our midst.

Basically, when they told us they might give the house at the end of the street to the man with the substance-abuse program, we were getting the same wake-up call that already had come to the McShann Road homeowners and the people on Inwood Road, to people all over Oak Cliff and Oak Lawn, to most of the inner-city neighborhoods of Dallas and now was just beginning to come to the outer-city . . . and soon, sooner than you would think, will come to the suburbs.

They are on the way. The group homes, the halfway houses, the substance-abuse treatment centers, the single-room occupancy hotels. Coming to your neighborhood, soon. Count on it.

If there is not one somewhere near you now, there will be, within the next five years. It’s a done deal. And even the most savvy political champions of neighborhoods will tell you: Your choice is not whether to accept them, but which kind you’re going to take.



THE MORE WE EXAMINED the situation at the end of our own block, the more it looked like a social smart bomb. The arrangement under which the house was to be turned over to the substance-abuse program is called the community receivership program. Designed to preserve aging housing stock, the receivership program is a last gasp of the 1960s and ’70s anti-gen-trification school of thought, which saw tens of thousands of ruthless Yuppies turning the deserving poor out of their homes. It grows out of the same period when people used to stand up in public with straight faces and worry about the “Manhattanization of Inner-City Dallas”-a bitter irony to those of us who now see Detroitification as a much more proximate threat.

The idea of the program is that troubled residential properties-those with absentee owners or clouded titles-may be turned over to non-profit groups for rehabilitation. The non-profits can be non-profit anything-non-profit substance abuse treatment, non-profit housing-as long as they are non-profit.

Once a house has been turned over to them, they can fix it up and then rent it out, using the rent money to pay themselves back for the cost of rehabilitation. After two years, if the real owner has failed to make a convincing case for getting the property back, a court can transfer title to the property to the non-profit.

So who is the non-profit operator who wants the house on our block, and what are his plans for it? According to city records, his name is Harold Pate, and he is the director of something called “El Rancho Enterprises” in Garland.

He answers the phone himself. Before I have much of a chance to explain who I am or what I want, he says, “Well, I’m here and the coffee’s on, so come on out.”

I find his headquarters in a rambling one-story commercial building with a low, boxy 7-Eleven-style mansard roof, in the middle of a pitied but neatly swept parking lot, sandwiched between some places that look like used car brokerages and the like.

He ushers me through a maze of narrow corridors into a huge room in the back with one window on a tiny courtyard. Sitting at a desk just inside the door is Maurice Dixon, a white-haired retired naval officer with a ready smile and an amiable manner. Most of the doors in the building are closed, and I have the distinct feeling we three are the only people present.

Pate himself is a big man, in late middle age, dressed in cowboy boots and an open shirt. He seats me at one end of his own large desk, surrounded by an array of office machinery-computer, fax, copying machine, answering machine-some of which looks new and some of which looks decidedly used.

He unfolds an architectural drawing of what seems to be, at first glance, the Prado museum.

“Our main facility is going to be a 400-bed facility in East Texas,” he says. “We had this drawn up four years ago. It has a Santa Fe look. If a guy has to say, ’Well, I live out at Joe’s Halfway House,’ that has a negative connotation. But if he tells them, ’I live at El Rancho,’ they’re not gonna know what that is.”

The rest of what unfolds, in a long amiable morning of talk and coffee, is a grand design by which Pate intends to build an entire empire devoted to helping street drunks and addicts stay clean, mainly by living and working in the various industries he carries in his bundle of plans and dreams.

He is ferocious in his commitment and frank about why: This plan is his own strategy for staying sober. “I tried to quit drinking for 11 years,” he says. “I’ve been through detox four times. I’ve been in treatment five times. I’ve been through Raleigh Hills twice.”

It is a basic precept of most of the “12-step” sobriety programs, based on the original Alcoholics Anonymous program: If you can’t help yourself stay sober, help someone else.

EI Rancho Enterprises has not yet, in its four years of existence, provided treatment for anyone. “All we are doing is generating funds,” he says.

He describes several fund-generating strategies-a bingo license, some cleanup work for the Resolution Trust Corporation. a wood-products manufacturing operation. But for now, the closest thing to a real “profit center” for his non-profit operation seems to be the city’s community receivership program and similar programs offered by the federal government’s RTC.

By acquiring properties for free from the city or the RTC, then using free labor and cheap or donated materials and some money from the city’s various housing programs to fix them up, Harold Pate hopes to come up with the first bricks of his empire. Down the road, he sees himself collecting rental income and even building an equity base in old houses all over the city.



A WEEK LATER. AROUND A SOVIET-sized square of tables in one of the big, blank, square rooms that city staff members use for meetings in Dallas City Hall, I meet with Althea Gulley, assistant director of the code enforcement division of Housing and Neighborhood Services for Dallas, and Aquila Allen, board administrator of the city’s Urban Rehabilitation Standards Board.

Both women are protective of the receivership program.

“The point is to save some of this housing stock,” Ms. Gulley tells me, “before it gets to the deteriorated stage where the only option is demolition.”

I express my own personal opinion- that fixing up old wrecks is the most expensive, least efficient possible way to provide decent cheap housing and that Yuppies only fix these places up because they’re nuts.

“Well,” Allen says, looking me up and down, “you’re probably thinking of a lot of expense that’s mainly cosmetic.”

The non-profits that want to get their lands on properties through the receiver-ship program have to submit a proposal to the Department of Housing and Neighborhood Services. If the proposal contains an intention to rent the property to low-income persons, Allen tells me, the proposal looks better and is more likely to receive the go-ahead.

During the next week, I meet and talk with a number of people who are in this same general arena of effort-“accessing” public funds and government programs like the receivership program, in order to help various populations of needy.

The Rev. Leonard Brannon of Care Center Ministries, operating out of an office in his home, has been granted 20 dwellings in an East Dallas neighborhood by the RTC. Unlike Harold Pate, Brannon has never been a drunk, an addict or a homeless person.

A successful North Dallas business-person, Brannon experienced a powerful religious calling in 1986, sold his home and everything else he had and has since devoted his life to an intense one-on-one “disci-pling” ministry to the poor.

He’s smart, and it’s hard to argue with any of his convictions: “No good will be accomplished en masse,” he says. “All change mus! take place one person at a time. I am a called man, and my primary goal is the discipling of people.”

But, in spite of the good intentions, don’t these kinds of programs wind up amounting to institutional uses in residential neighborhoods? The properties are turned over to institutions. The rehab funding comes from government and institutional sources. A lot of the labor is going to be performed by institutional clients, and it’s clear from what the proprietors of these programs say that the people who wind up living in the properties will be people under their care and guidance. So isn’t that an institutional use in a residential neighborhood?

The answer to the question is buried in complex and recent changes in state and federal law and in the city ordinances. But the short version is no.

As long as no care or counseling is provided on-site-at die properties-then the properties are considered single-family residences, even if as many as five unrelated people live in one house. If there is no counseling or treatment in the home, the operator needs no special zoning or permission at all to operate.

On another day, in another big, blank, square room in Dallas City Hall, around another huge square of tables, I meet with officials of the City Attorney’s office and of the city’s Planning and Development Department and Department of Health and Human Services.

I ask them if what the neighborhood groups have been telling me is true: that the people at City Hall have been telling the non-profits how to skate out of any zoning problems by withholding counseling and treatment in their residential properties?

“I am not aware of anyone on staff volunteering that advice,” says James Kin-caide, assistant director of the planning department.

But, as we pass the question around the table, a consensus emerges: If somebody comes to City Hall and is smart enough to ask the right questions, then City Hall has to tell that person the facts: You don’t need zoning for a group home if you withhold treatment and counseling at the home itself. (Presumably, you would provide treatment at a center, somewhere else.)

Is all of this mainly a problem for the older inner-city neighborhoods’? Yes. For now. Various groups and advocates have put together lists and maps of the existing “social service1’ facilities in the city, and they all show dense concentrations in East Dallas. Oak Lawn, Oak Cliff and South Dallas.

But you can count on that to change.

One morning in The Melrose Hotel, at a breakfast meeting of a private business and community-planning group, zoning attorney Susan Mead is at the podium, laying down the law while fhose in the audience sip coffee and brush cranberry muffin crumbs from their thumbs.

“If the suburbs do not agree to take their fair share,” she says, “the courts can order them to.”

And why would that have to happen? Are there not already enough or almost enough of these facilities, both public and private, in the inner city? Not by a long shot. In fact what we see now, poking in through the flap of the tent, is probably only the horse’s nose-the leading edge of an immense social sea change just ahead.



AT THE HEART OF IT IS A SINGLE, simple engine-the sheer number of people in our society who now require or soon will require institutional custodial care. The numbers are staggering.

The United Way estimates that, by the turn of the century (not all that far off), one in every 16 Texans will need long-term care, simply because of problems associated with age. And those are the people whose only sin is living a long life.

A more immediate and controversial dependent population is comprised of the physically ill, the mentally ill. the addicted and the criminal. I hate to throw AIDS into the same phrase with drug addiction and crime, because, unlike the other two, AIDS claims so many utterly innocent victims, but all three have one thing in common as modern epidemics: They already are bursting the seams of the traditional care-giving and custodial institutional establishment. The hospitals and the jails cannot hold them.

Even now, as AIDS moves from the white, gay population into the African-American and Hispanic populations, it begins to claim victims even less able financially to provide for their own care than were the early victims.

And our society definitely will do something to help these victims. It will not shut the door. It is not possible to contemplate an American society that would withhold care from what is now one of the fastest growing group of AIDS victims-newborn infants.

The tide of people spilling out of the state penal system has been growing at rates between 10 and 20 percent annually: One short decade ago, only a handful of prisoners who had not yet satisfied their sentences were released every year to Dallas County. By the middle of the decade, a couple of thousand “releasees” were headed our way every year.

Now the numbers are between four and five thousand coming to Dallas every year, and these are not nice people. All of the old bromides about releasing “non-violent offenders” and perpetrators of “victimless crimes” have become too embarrassing even for the politicians in Austin to continue uttering.

One in five releasees in recent years has been a murderer or a rapist. When you throw in assault, armed robbery and sex offenses other than rape, you have accounted for fully 45 percent of the people headed for halfway house-type programs every year from the state prisons.

The Dallas Police Department is careful about what it says about prison releasees, cautious not to offer conclusions it cannot support with proof. But the department’s own numbers can be turned into some very chilling graphs and maps: The crime rate in Dallas from 1981 to 1991 almost exactly parallels the rise and fall of the rate at which the state has been sending releasees here. The dot-map showing where the releasees go in the city looks like a mirror image of the dot-map showing where most of the crime occurs.

The people headed into the community for care, for housing, for containment. therapy and control do not come as beggars. In fact, their treatment and tending is now an enormous growth industry, operating on both public and private dollars. One Dallas company alone. Nexus, Inc., which provides inpatient treatment, residential care and outpatient support for substance abusers, draws over $1.6 million in annual support from the Texas Commission on Alcohol and Drug Abuse.

The total amount of money the state pays annually into the Dallas County substance abuse industry is now at $8.2 million and rising.

But the biggest single factor, in terms of institutional presence about to be felt in your and my neighborhoods, has nothing to do with contagious disease, crime or drug addiction. The really big presence coming our way is of the mentally ill and mentally retarded, an issue that already has set off brush fires on McShann Road, in a predominantly African-American middle-class area, and on Inwood Road, in an area that is mainly white, residential and affluent.

The issue of the mentally handicapped is simple: It is now the stated philosophy, goal, aim and commitment of the Texas Department of Mental Health and Retardation to move its clients out of the big state institutions, and in some cases out of the homes of their own families, and to put them instead in supervised group homes in normal neighborhoods.

It’s a movement that is based on solid scientific research showing that the people themselves do better and are happier out in the community than when herded together on huge institutional reservations. It is based on new law and case law, saying that you cannot tell someone where to live just because he’s mentally ill or retarded. And it’s based on years of advocacy by the families and loved ones of the mentally disabled.

McShann Road and lnwood are two places where property has been purchased and plans made to build such homes. By state law, agency policy and city ordinance, these types of homes will house a maximum of six residents and two attendants in each home. As the numbers stand today, there are 900 people who are potenfiai residents of such homes in Dallas right now. If all of their needs were to be met this year, it would require the immediate purchase or construction of 150 group homes in neighborhoods.

At present, 350 of these 900 are actively seeking placement in group homes in Dallas. Meeting their needs will require the construction, in the near future, of at least 58 homes.

The leading edge of this wave has been made up of the mentally retarded. These are generally regarded to be the least dangerous of mental patients. It surely is no accident that they are being sent forth first to pave the way.

The next wave will be much more problematic. Already in Tarrant County and beginning in Dallas County soon, there will be attempts to establish group homes for the “dually diagnosed”-that is, people who are both mentally retarded and mentally ill. It will be much more difficult for mental-health officials to argue that these people can be counted on to be non-violent. Whatever the resistance from neighborhoods has been so far, it will be 10 times more ferocious when this second tier of neighborhood-based institutions begins to arrive in force.

But the mainstreaming movement is girded for battle. It was not born yesterday, and it has not come unprepared. In state capitols and in Washington for the last 10 years, the people who wanted to make this son of thing happen have been the insiders. The people in the neighborhoods haven’t even been there.

From the late 1970s until now, there has been an inexorable progress of state and federal laws and court decisions, the basic thrust of which has been to say that no community and no neighborhood can use zoning to keep the mentally retarded or mentally ill out of its midst. The Texas Mentally Retarded Persons Act of 1977, the Texas Community Homes for Disabled Persons Act of 1985, a landmark court case in 1985 involving the City of Cleburne. the 1988 amendments to the federal Fair Housing Act, the federal Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990: It all goes one way.



AT THE END OF A BUSY DAY, IN HER office at the top of a high-rise tower in downtown Dallas, Dallas zoning and development lawyer Susan Mead, a longtime champion of neighborhood interests, says the bottom line of all this legislation and case law is simple: “If you are going to create a group home with six or fewer individuals who live in a house with two supervisors, you can go wherever you want.”

The advocates for each separate type of special-needs population tend to bristle when they think they are about to be lumped with the others.

Kevin Stuart, spokesman for The Dallas County Mental Health Mental Retardation Center, points out that mental patients are not guilty of anything, are not usually threats to the community and should not be thought of as criminals.

Al Richard, director of the Way Back House on Lemmon, points out that halfway houses that receive money from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice are the most strictly controlled, monitored and reviewed of any community group homes.

Richard, a big, former Houston cop who is well read and thoughtful in the whole area of community politics and special-needs populations, likes to bring his releasees to the La Madeleine on Lemmon Avenue. Most of them are on drug- and alcohol-free regimens, and the strong French coffee there is a treat.

Over a cup, he tells me he thinks opposition to halfway houses and group homes is one of the few ways in which neighborhoods can overcome their otherwise chronic sense of powerlessness.

“When neighborhoods have opportunities to come together, they get monomaniacal,” he says. “It takes on all the trappings of a moral crusade. But there are so few other ways in which they can exercise control over their own fate.”

What is so bad, anyway, about having any of these things near you? For several weeks I canvassed the areas around alcohol treatment centers, halfway houses, group homes, asking neighbors for their worst stories. I even stuffed mailboxes with letters asking people to call me.

There have been a few legitimate horror stories in recent years. But, with great difficulty and at significant cost to the neighborhood, neighborhoods have been able to run off the really bad operators.

In general, what people say is what the lady said, with much stammering and anger, when she called in answer to one of my letters. “They all just…”

“Yes?”

’They just…”

“They what?”

“They just stand on the porch!”

Well, I know. I don’t like it either, when I see it in my part of town. But, at last reading, the Constitution still allowed that.

Is it fair to want to shut these people out of a neighborhood simply because we have a culture in which we dislike looking at people who are poor and disabled?

On the other hand, given the size of the overall phenomenon and certain elements of it like the criminal releasee problem, is it fair or reasonable to expect all neighborhoods to lay themselves prostrate before all comers?

One of the most interesting voices in this whole area of politics and morality in Dallas in recent years has been Dallas City Council member Lori Palmer. Ms. Palmer is herself trained and steeped in the mentality and cause of social work. For many years, she was the primary champion and water carrier of the social agencies at City Hall.

But in recent years, faced with the huge growth ahead in the number of neighborhood-based care providers, council member Palmer has come to a more complex view of the issue. She still thinks certain kinds of facilities need to be allowed to cluster around logical nerve centers, in order to serve people who don11 have cars and who do have multiple needs.

But she also sees that not all care providers are equal, not all are equally well managed or overseen, and some may be more corrosive in their effect on neighborhoods than others. Given the onslaught ahead, and given the real-life options, Lori Palmer comes up with the same argument that we came to eventually on our own block: Our best bet may be to embrace the good care providers, as a way of seizing a moral and political ground from which to do battle with the scarier ones.

Mainly on political rather than legal grounds, there is some basis for believing a neighborhood that already has a care provider in its midst will have better luck warding off the next one than a neighborhood that has not taken a hit yet at all. When it’s all said and done, the best choice neighborhoods may have in the years just ahead will be a choice of providers, and forget about barring the door.

On the telephone in the late evening (I picture her eating her dinner standing up in the kitchen, talking to me and making notes about what to do tomorrow), Lori Palmer says, “A community needs to be very smart about the way it deals with this issue. It needs to inventory the uses within its boundaries and then evaluate the perception of each agency. Most mainstream agencies have a very good sense of accountability.

“But where the agency is insensitive, then the neighborhood needs to play hardball, If a facility becomes a nuisance, then I don’t think even bleeding-heart liberals have to feel guilty about saying that a use is incompatible.”

I can’t see anything in Harold Pate and his dream of El Rancho Enterprises but sincerity and courage. It pains me to admit that, when I think of him bringing substance-abusing street people to the block where my own family lives, my own courage fails me.

In the end, and in the nick of time, a Houston bank showed up, told the city it held the note on the house at the end of our block and said it did not want the house given away.

We held our breath. The urban rehab board is mad at the banks these days: We were told the board might give the house to Harold Pate, anyway, as punishment for letting it get run-down. But at the last moment, the board voted to allow the bank to keep its property.

We were lucky. For a while we looked at the tumbledown house at the end of our own block-still empty, still a mess, still a threat-and daydreamed about how lucky we would be to get a nice little MHMR group home for retarded adults on the block some day. Then the family living next door to the old wreck bought it, as a means of self-protection.

Harold Pate? The man to whom our fine tax-paid staff at City Hall was so eager to give this little gem? Last time 1 checked he was off the charts-phones disconnected, no way to reach him.

City Hall had more or less accused us of being nit-pickers and dilettantes for wondering if Harold was really up to the task of restoring this monster: The minute the guy next door acquired the house, the same city officials were slapping him with 90-day deadlines to bring the place back up to spit-and-polish. Our friends downtown.

Somewhere in all of this pushing and pulling and jostling, we will discover that we have joined hands around a solution. But whatever that solution may be, I bet we have to discover it right here on the block, Wait for City Hall to do it, and we’ll all be living on armed farms, 50 miles out.