More than 20 years ago, Marsha Jackson bought a home in southern Dallas with enough land that her daughters could stable horses and practice roping and barrel racing. Then, early last year, the shingles started piling up next door. They grew into a mountain that became infamous, even as a recycling company attempted to grind up the discarded roofing material, belching black dust that got into her vents. When she coughs, she says, the phlegm is black.

The 60-foot-tall asphalt mountain is an absurdist monument to slapdash city zoning, inadequate state oversight, and the plans of men eager to make a buck. Shingle Mountain wants to be seen. And you can see it if you drive north on Interstate 45 near Hutchins and look out your passenger window. You have plenty of time. Despite the city shutting down the recycling operation in March, it will stand there for at least another year. The company, Blue Star Recycling, has run out of money. Jackson, meanwhile, is trapped in a Kafkaesque limbo, attending court hearings only to hear that there isn’t much Blue Star can do with its empty bank account. The judge didn’t seem eager in June to hold the company’s manager in contempt for not complying with a city order to clean up the mess in 90 days. “[W]e don’t have debtor’s prison,” is how Judge Gena Slaughter put it.

Since late last year, Shingle Mountain has appeared regularly in the Dallas Morning News’ Metro section and on nightly TV news. It is a flashpoint in environmental justice in this city, an ugly monument to City Hall’s apathy toward the people who live in southern Dallas. It took the head of a scrappy environmental nonprofit and a News Metro columnist to get the city’s attention. But by then, it was too late. The pile was taller than the trees.

So who is responsible for this mess? In the stories published so far, the name Chris Ganter invariably pops up. He is the CEO of Blue Star—or was, until his recent ouster or retirement. His transition out of the company has never been explained, just as his background remains a mystery. I found that he lives in Collin County, and in the late 2000s, he and his twin brother, Ben, starred in a real estate reality TV show called PayDirt, which aired only on local television.

After I sent a few emails to lawyers I’d found in court documents, I heard from Ganter. Apparently word had found its way to him that I was asking questions. He emailed me late on a Saturday night, writing that he wanted to meet for some “windshield time.”

I’m worried about the crime in Deep Ellum, but my concerns have nothing to do with public safety. Rather, I’m worried that Dallas is falling into an old habit that views crowds as threats, pedestrians as unruly, and vibrancy as something that needs to be managed, cleaned up, and tamped down.

Yesterday, Shawn and Matt reported on a community meeting held in response to a perceived spike in crime in Deep Ellum. Cops described a need to “deploy more drastic strategies to ensure public safety.” They are worried about a wave of “crimes of opportunity, robberies and assaults” in the entertainment district. There’s talk of using the controversial curfew law—which has been shown to disproportionately target people of color—to crackdown on the neighborhood’s crowds.

To me this all sounds like it has been pretty busy in Deep Ellum lately and that has people freaked out. There are stories of dealers drugging innocent partiers and robbing them. A police helicopter was dispatched to help break up crowds. Philip Honoré, the Deep Ellum Foundation’s public safety manager, reported rumors that some of the surge in the crowd this past weekend came as a result of the closing of Jim’s Car Wash, a South Dallas institution whose saga Jim Schutze has written about for years. Let me briefly translate what that means: there were black people hanging out in Deep Ellum parking lots this past weekend, and it scared people.

Geez. Can we tap the brakes on the fear mongering, take a breath, and try to look at the situation with a little bit of perspective?

We are all familiar with the ubiquitous internet fodder known as the news list. Every week our inboxes and social media accounts are bombarded with business marketing that masquerades as trend reports, and companies are getting better at slipping in promotions under the guise of breaking news. One particularly effective attention grabber is the city ranking. You know the formula: Moneytips’ “Best Cities for Early Retirement,” WalletHub’s “Best Places to Raise a Family,” Magnify Money’s “Best Cities for Working Women.”

A new “report” that was released last week announced some watershed news for Dallas. SmartAsset, a personal finance website, crunched Census data and found that Dallas was the city “Where Millennials Are Moving”. Eat your heart out Seattle, Portland, New York, and Denver. When it comes to that oh-so-alluring demographic of upwardly mobile young professionals, Dallas is the place they most want to be.

Wait. It is?

The SmartAsset report sent the Dallas Regional Chamber and the Dallas Morning News into giddy fits of boosterism. Any cub reporter at a daily paper in a major city should have raised a cynical eyebrow as soon as they saw that the rigorous research institute behind the new findings also authored previous reports like  “Best Cities for Living the American Dream,” which proclaimed that Aurora, Illinois is the best American city for “living a full and fulfilling life, surrounded by a community of people doing the same.” But that’s not what happened. Instead, the inertia of optimism took over.

The Dallas Morning News dubbed Dallas a “millennial magnet” and reminded us that “millennials are the largest generation in the country’s workforce, and their preferences are increasingly influencing where companies locate and how workspaces are designed.” The Dallas Regional Chamber issued a press release in which DRC President and CEO Dale Petroskey proclaimed SmartAsset’s findings as “yet another sign that the Dallas Region offers the perfect mix of affordability, job opportunities, and premier quality-of-life amenities. More and more young adults are understanding that Dallas is a place where you can have a great life, and a great future.”

Wow—that’s quite a conclusion to draw from a report that, when you look at the data and methodology, ultimately boils down to a tabulation of year-over-year Census population estimates of the net gain of city residents aged 20-34. It is a clickable marketing meme masquerading as research. In fact, the age range SmartAsset analyzed doesn’t even follow the established definition of the “millennial” generation, which the Pew Research Center pegs as ranging from age 23-39. The flimsiness of the study isn’t a slam on SmartAsset. The company shrewdly found some easy-to-crunch data and paired it with a search engine-optimized term. It worked. Now we’re talking about them.

What I found particularly shameful was the way the DMN, the DRC, and other news outlets ran hard with the findings. Their trumpeting of Dallas’ supposed millennial appeal amplified the blur between real data and opportunistic marketing. It projects a false impression about just how successful Dallas is at attracting the next generation of workers.

In April 2018, the City Council finally approved developer Mark Masinter’s plan for a sprawling mixed-use development on a barren stretch of funky Henderson Avenue from Glencoe Street to McMillan Avenue. It was a long, hard battle—the “New Hampshire primary,” is how he describes it.

The 156,500-square-foot project has about 12,000 square feet earmarked for restaurants. The rest is an even split between office and retail. You’ll likely recognize the location as the empty field that has featured varied small pieces of public art over the years.

Masinter said after the Council’s approval that construction could begin as early as the end of 2018, but making that happen has proved no small task. Masinter says the reason for the delay is the design work, which has taken longer than expected. His firm, Open Realty, now hopes to start construction during the fourth quarter of 2019, about a year after those initial plans. That would set things for completion during the second half of 2021.

“I want to get it right,” he says. “There are certain buildings where we’ve gone, ‘We want it to be like this,’ and all of a sudden we go, ‘No, no, no, no, no, that’s not good enough.’ The problem is, even though it looks like we’re doing simple construction, and we are, once you start you can’t stop.

“If it’s off, it’s not off by much,” he says. “I’d rather get it right.”

It took a few weeks, but after I’d missed him for my recent story about the city’s efforts to boost walkability along Henderson Avenue, Masinter sat down with me inside his Uptown office.

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I’d like to direct you to this story in our sister publication Park Cities People, about a major construction project that abuts busy Knox Street at Travis Street. In 2021, there will be a 12 story mixed use building at what used to be the old Weir’s Furniture. The People story explores what some planning ahead of these projects can look like in the future, after the city passed an ordinance mandating that contractors provide a safe walkway for pedestrians near their projects.

Here’s the writer, Timothy Glaze:

The sidewalks along Knox and Travis will be heavily enforced with scaffolding and other “thru-ways” that pedestrians can walk under. It’s not aesthetically pleasing, but it’s the city’s requirement to protect walkers from objects and other debris that could fall during construction.

…

An entire traffic lane on Travis and Knox will be off-limits during construction, as the safety zone set up for pedestrians will spill out onto the road.

A long-awaited pedestrian and cycling connection from Victory Park to the Design District appears to be moving forward. The plan’s brushstrokes date back at least to 2016, when a nonprofit called the Circuit Trail Conservancy unveiled a 50-mile cycling loop that would extend from just west of White Rock Lake south to the Great Trinity Forest. From there, it would take you to the Design District via the Trinity Strand Trail along the levee and back up through Oak Lawn along the Katy Trail, eventually meeting at the trailhead near White Rock.

We’ve written about many angles of the Loop, from the 17-mile Trinity Forest Spine Trail, the $20 million voters approved during the 2017 bond, and the questions the City Council had about funding for the whole project.

But one of the trickiest connections in the entire system is also one of its smallest. What’s known as the Hi Line Connector is just a one-mile stretch between booming Victory Park and the Design District, which are split apart by Interstate 35E and an elevated rail line.

Despite being a smidgen of the total Loop, it will require more interaction with public right of way than any of the other planned 49 miles, according to Philip Hiatt Haigh, the Conservancy’s executive director. That includes some difficult, major pieces of infrastructure: the roads beneath both Interstate 35E and the elevated DART/TRE rail line as well as the enormous, busy intersection at Oak Lawn and Hi Line in the Design District.