Would you rather bring the family to a restaurant that offers you a few pages of menu items or a restaurant that only makes two or three dishes? Probably the former, right? Now what if the first restaurant had a terrible health department record, was panned by every dining critic in the city, and takes an hour to get the food on the table—but the second restaurant has a Michelin star?

Different story.

This is, essentially, the game Dallas Area Rapid Transit played this summer when it surveyed Dallas residents about its planned bus system overhaul. DART has long insisted that Dallas residents favored a bus system that covered as much of the city as possible. After all, whenever the agency threatened to change a bus line, riders pushed back. And when DART asked riders, non-riders, and other stakeholders in its survey whether they preferred a system with broad coverage over one that focused on increasing ridership, 55 percent said they wanted coverage.

But then DART asked the question again in a different way. Would Dallas residents prefer a short walk to a bus stop followed by a long wait for the bus, or a long walk to the bus stop followed by a short wait for the bus? The results flipped. Forty-seven percent of respondents said they preferred the long walk and the short wait, while another 29 percent said just make the whole damn hassle with the bus go as quickly as possible.

In other words, 76 percent of the respondents preferred the ridership-oriented, high-frequency bus network model. The question just had to be asked in a way that made it clear that they were choosing between quality over quantity.

Gary Thomas, the longtime head of Dallas Area Rapid Transit, announced last week that he will be taking early retirement and stepping down from the agency.

Thomas has been president and executive director of DART for nearly 20 years, and he has worked for or with the public transit agency nearly since its inception. Thomas got his start working as a consulting engineer designing DART’s park and ride facilities, and he joined the agency full time in 1998, when he became the senior vice president of project management. Under Thomas, DART has seen the expansion of its light rail network into the largest system in North America, though his departure comes as DART faces unprecedented challenges, from the pandemic-induced decrease in ridership and revenue to mounting evidence that, despite billions of dollars of public investment, DART has built one of the least-reliable and user-unfriendly transit systems in the world.

It is difficult to overstate the impact Thomas has had on shaping public transit in Dallas and the region.

If your business relies on people sharing space in any way, these are uncertain times. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic immediately affected communal spaces like theaters, restaurants, and bars. But as the virus continues to spread through the community and companies extend the amount of time their employees are working from home, what will the ripple effect be on other major sectors  of the economy, such as commercial real estate?

That was the subject of Downtown Dallas Inc.’s continuing “State of Downtown” series this morning. DDI’s President and CEO Kourtny Garrett spoke with Sara Terry, senior vice president at Stream Realty Partners, and their conversation offered a glimpse into how real estate investors are anticipating the short- and long-range impacts of the pandemic on the commercial real estate sector.

The implications for the broader city economy are tremendous. A drop in commercial real estate value, a move toward more permanent remote working environments, and the continued closure of bars and restaurants will undo decades of efforts to build up the health and vitality of Dallas’ central core. Just as the collapse of the real estate economy after the S&L crisis in the late-1980s shaped this city for a generation, a major commercial real estate recession could lead to a plummeting tax base, stagnation in urban reinvestment and revitalization, an incapacity to provide basic city services and maintenance, and an uncertain future for Dallas as an urban center.

It was fitting that the strange saga of Roddrick West’s proposal to develop soccer fields under a stretch of elevated highway downtown ended today in a confusing tangle of parliamentary procedure. The soccer development was mired in political obfuscation from the get-go.

At its Wednesday meeting, the Dallas City Council voted unanimously to deny a resolution that would have seen the city of Dallas relinquish its control over land under I-345 between the downtown Farmers Market and Deep Ellum so West could build a soccer complex. The vote, however, came only after Far North Dallas’ Councilman Lee Kleinman deconstructed the resolution so that the denial wouldn’t affect the development of Carpenter Park downtown as well as the future of land along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in South Dallas.

There was no good reason why those other projects were ever tied up with West’s soccer fields in the first place. The idea for locating a soccer complex under the highway first emerged last year when West, who has no previous development experience and is the son of State Senator Royce West, emerged with a deal already in hand. The Texas Department of Transportation would let West’s private company build fields on its land, but first the city would have to amend its Multiple Use Agreement with TxDOT to allow the state to lease the land to the state senator’s son. Dallas city staff supported the deal. The city council and Deep Ellum stakeholders, however, had some questions.

Drive around Dallas’ poorer neighborhoods, and you’ll find that there are three kinds of businesses that tend to survive amid urban decay: pawn shops, payday lenders, and dollar stores. Pawn shops and payday lenders often come under fire for the ways in which they move into challenged urban communities and exploit local residents. Dollar stores, on the other hand, often go unnoticed. But dollar stores are not merely symbols of urban blight. A new report shows how dollar stores serve as active agents of neighborhood deterioration.

An investigation by ProPublica and the New York Times finds that dollar stores are a magnet for crime, perpetuate food deserts, and depress neighborhood job markets. Since 2017, there have been more than 200 violent incidents at Family Dollar or Dollar General stores around the country:

The number of incidents can be explained in part by the stores’ ubiquity: There are now more than 16,000 Dollar Generals and nearly 8,000 Family Dollars in the United States, a 50% increase in the past decade. (By comparison, Walmart has about 4,700 stores in the U.S.) The stores are often in high-crime neighborhoods, where there simply aren’t many other businesses for criminals to target. Routine gun violence has fallen sharply in prosperous cities around the country, but it has remained stubbornly high in many of the cities and towns where these stores predominate. The glowing signs of the discount chains have become indicators of neglect, markers of a geography of the places that the country has written off.

The proliferation of dollar stores can also be linked with poor nutrition and increased rates of heart disease and obesity, and dollar stores also force local retailers out of business yet hire very few employees. And yet, if dollar stores are so bad for urban communities, can cities do anything about their spread? The answer is yes. In fact, many cities around the country, including a couple in North Texas, have already attempted to address their zoning laws and city code to slow the spread of these predatory businesses.

Before the pandemic, DART was hitting a stride. It had just hired lauded public transit consultant Jarrett Walker to help reconfigure its bus routes to operate on a grid system and offer riders more efficient service. It had secured funding for two of its three largest capital projects: extending its rail platforms and the east-west Silver Line, which will connect suburban riders to DFW Airport. It was pursuing federal grants to pay for its forthcoming downtown subway line, D2.

And then in March, like so many other public agencies, DART saw the bottom fall out. By April, ridership had plunged 70 percent. Its main sources of revenue—fares and sales tax—tanked. To save money, the agency reduced its bus and rail services to mimic the reduction in demand. As the pandemic dragged on, staff told the board that the agency will need to cut $40 million from next year’s operations budget, about 7 percent.

Budget talks are beginning anew, and DART will begin finding ways to shore up that shortfall.

“There are no sacred cows,” said trustee Michele Wong Krause during a panel last week. “We are looking at everything to find those savings.”