Luckily, Dallas Went the Right Way.

Asuccessful downtown serves as the community’s common, its meeting place, its public square. Such a downtown is more than just the place where die city’s tail buildings and leading professional firms are located. It is also where people take out-of-town visitors to show off the city, where the city’s cultural and historical highlights are located, and where people go to have a good time. When the downtown is a draw, it brings together diverse elements of its population.

This kind of downtown is hardly something an urban resident can take for granted. In many cities, the downtown has been turned over to the down-and-out: street people, drunks, the homeless. In these cities, parents think twice about bringing children into downtown parks. Trash dumpsters are overflowing or overturned. Aggressive beggars blockade entrances to stores and buildings. Street corners are occupied by sprawled-out drunks, sleeping or oblivious.

In the grip of such problems, some cities have almost given up on their downtowns. How many of Houston’s leading hotels are downtown? See any profitable department stores in downtown Miami? In Atlanta, the Federal Reserve Bank recently announced that it was moving out of the city’s downtown, after countless complaints from its employees about being panhandled and otherwise accosted on nearby streets.

Under these conditions, avoiding downtown becomes the prevalent goal: People shop elsewhere, live elsewhere, work elsewhere, and stay at hotels outside downtown. As a result, community life in these cities exists mostly behind walled suburban enclaves, with little space or activity shared by the city as a whole,

This could have happened in Dallas. Instead, downtown Dallas is getting better, because the community was willing to take a stand four years ago when it counted the most-when a homeless encampment developed underneath Interstate 30.

The 1-30 shantytown was within a mile of downtowns gleaming towers. Visitors to the corner of Good-Latimer Expressway and Elm Street today would hardi)’ believe the conditions that existed beneath the freeway in 1993. Dozens of cardboard boxes and makeshift structures served as homes for those who avoided or declined the ample social services available in Dallas. Grass did not grow, while fires burned day and night for heating, cooking and drug preparation. Litter, broken bottles, human waste and used condoms and needles lay F underfoot. The shantytown also attracted fringe eicment from all over the area, not all of them homeless, who liked the de facto “law-free zone” that was cre-ated there. The surrounding area suffered. The streets of Deep Ellum were an obstacle course of harassing beggars and drunks.

Visitors and vendors at the Farmers Market confronted theft, begging and sanitary problems. Old City Park saw a sharp drop-off in visitors. Patrons of the downtown library competed with unbathed loiterers who soiled the bathrooms and fouled the sitting areas. Downtown pedestrians had to step over people sprawled out on the street corners, alleys and bus stops.

Those who cared about downtown recognized the problem and the potential for further deterioration. The community’s town square was threatened. Residents and small-business owners responded by tenaciously pursuing the closure of the shanrytown. The City Council agreed, voting to close the I-30 disgrace and bring those who were living there to the social services they desperately needed.

It took less than a week for the litigious naysayers from the American Civil Liberties Union to head to court, asserting that the city’s plan was unconstitutional. In court papers and the press, the ACLU argued that th.; homeless had a constitutional right to sleep in the public place of their choice. The ACLU, perhaps as an afterthought, argued that the city’s ordinances against aggressive panhandling, trashcan rummaging and sleeping in City Hall plaza were unconstitutional as well.

The community came together to fight the ACLU’s lawsuit and support the city’s plan. The Central Dallas Association, the Farmers Market, the Cedars Nrighborhood Association, the StateThomas Homeowners Association, the West End Association and the Deep Ellum Association agreed to jointly Pile a “friend or the court” brief Chances of success were bolstered enormously when Darrell Jordan of Hughes & Luce agreed to represent the coalition on a pro bono basis.

The coalition was also joined and supported by the American Alliance for Rights & Responsibilities (AARR), my nonprofit organization. The AARR promotes initiatives aimed at maintaining urban quality of life and helps communities defend such measures in court. When called upon by the Central Dallas Association and the coalition, the AARR, because of its experience in other cities such as Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Baltimore, was able to quickly provide research, documents and arguments to refute the ACLU’s legal assertions. In addition, the AARR helped the coalition resolve not to yield the moral high ground to those who want to defend anything homeless people want to do.

The dry and the coalition had an uphill fight. Before the coalition put its brief together, federal Judge Joe Kendall enjoined the city from disturbing the shantytown, wondering aloud what harm was done by a person sleeping in a downtown park. The second hearing, two weeks later, was a different story. By then the judge had read the coalition’s brief, which emphasized the importance to the city of a safe, attractive and welcoming downtown. It also argued there was no constitutional right to camp, let alone move into, urban parks.The judge also heard expert testimony from Dr. George Kelling, a Harvard sociologist, who was recruited by the AARR to help. Dr. Kelling testified about his research on the relationship between disorder and crime. That same day, Judge Kendall withdrew the injunction, permitting the city to close down the encampment. The city soon did so, and later prevailed in federal appeals court as well.

The Deep Ellum litigation was a turning point for downtown. The 1-30 shantytown problem was successfully addressed before it grew out of control, before the downtown streets were overrun, before the social-services burden became too large, and before the housing market in the nearby neighborhoods collapsed. The people of Dallas resolved to act, and saw the problem through to a successful conclusion. The city’s action showed a commitment to its downtown, and a tecog-nition that urban homeless problems can be addressed compassionately, without sacrificing standards of conduct or concern for the broader community.