Get off the red line at the Tyler/Vernon DART stop and you’ll find the newly repurposed Tyler Station a few steps from the tracks, standing out from the rest of its residential Elmwood neighborhood. What at first looks like one giant brick warehouse is actually a collection of entrepreneurs, craftsmen, artists, wellness professionals, political leaders, and community members all jammed into one collaborative space. The idea at its core is simple: serve the betterment of the community and, in the process, set a new standard for how to work.

The anchor for it all is at the front of the building in the co-working Wax Space. Inside you’ll also find Rose Garden ReMake, a thrift store that funds the reintegration of women into the community following incarceration, and a progressive Baptist Church that hosts vegan-friendly potlucks most Wednesday nights. You can even quench your thirst with a cold craft brew at Oak Cliff Brewing Company, which ferments its beers here and partners with local nonprofits.

Tomorrow, there is a neat thing happening in South Oak Cliff. The Trust for Public Land, the nonprofit that helps create parks and analyze parkland throughout the city, is teaming with the Better Block to open a pop-up park near South Oak Cliff High School.

The Trust for Public Land is buying this parcel to help turn it into a permanent community park. “Tomorrow’s pop-up park is the first step in that process,” says Robert Kent, the nonprofit’s director.

You should know Better Block by now. The Oak Cliff nonprofit takes empty spaces and fills them with things for people to engage with. In December, we wrote about how they’re 3-D printing bus stops that face away from the street, keeping particulate matter away from the people waiting for them. They’ll be making things like picnic tables and benches and maybe even a little stage. The photo above this post is what the two groups are trying to bring there.

As for the future of the space: Kent says this was an “overgrown eyesore.” The principal of South Oak Cliff High approached his organization and asked them to turn it into something.

Nick Dean and his wife found their house in Oak Cliff’s Winnetka Heights neighborhood by driving south on Sylvan Avenue until the real estate became affordable. After they found their home, it didn’t take long to recognize what made their little corner of Winnetka Heights economically accessible. In 1967, a four-lane divided boulevard was constructed through six neighborhood blocks between Jefferson Boulevard and 12th Street, cutting like a Nike swoosh through the neighborhood, demolishing dozens of homes, deflating value, and disrupting the quaint, early-20th-century grid of shady streets.

The road is a relic of a time when city traffic planners believed the highest virtue of urban design was enabling cars from the suburbs to speed through Dallas neighborhoods into downtown. Now the road inundated Dean’s neighborhood with dangerous traffic. It was clearly outdated. So Dean wondered: why couldn’t the city simply remove it?

As it turns out, Winnetka Heights residents had long dreamed of removing the so-called Jefferson-Twelfth Connector. But efforts over the years had fallen on deaf ears. Removing streets in Dallas isn’t as easy as it sounds. In fact, it had never been done. In 2017, Councilman Scott Griggs—who lives on Jefferson just a few blocks from the connector—helped get money into a bond package for the project, but that didn’t guarantee its removal.

For years, Dallas’ right of way policy has existed in a state of chaos. If a contractor wanted to close a street or a sidewalk, sure, it had to tell the city and get permission. But it didn’t have to say anything about where the traffic or the pedestrians would go. Where are the detours? Are any nearby sidewalks closed? You putting up scaffolding? Previously, the city didn’t require the contractors to provide those details. And it certainly didn’t send anyone to check.

You just dealt with the construction—especially in downtown and Uptown—like stepping over a child’s toys left out in the living room. Last week, the City Council quietly approved a new ordinance that will require contractors to explain how they’re going to accommodate pedestrian traffic and drivers when their project bleeds into the right of way. They’ll have to put up more signage announcing such things and tell every business within 500 feet of the affected area. If they’re putting metal plates in the street, they’ll have to make sure they are bound to the concrete and slope so that they do not create noise when a car drives over them. Get ready for more scaffolding and increased coordination; the city seems amped to not allow two contractors to work on opposite sidewalks at the same time. And now, staffers will be checking and writing tickets. When the city began issuing citations, they racked up 314 in five months. That generated over $100,000 in revenue.

“We actually had those rules on the books, we just never enforced them,” says Robert Perez, Dallas’ head of public works. “Now, (violators) have to pay those or go to court for them, so we’ve used that as an enforcement tool to actually and try and get compliance with our rules that are out there.”

Yesterday, tucked into the City Council’s mass-approval of items on its consent agenda, there was a solution to a problem that we’ve been badgering Dallas staffers about since February of 2018.

The Council voted to bolster its right-of-way policy so that it favors pedestrians over construction. The new ordinance mandates that anyone who’s working in or near a sidewalk that you should be able to traverse—both city contractors and private companies—must ensure that pedestrians can do their thing while the work is happening. (So long as there is not a safety risk.) So get your scaffolding ready, contractors.

You may recognize the gist of this. We’ve been documenting these mistakes in our Dallas Hates Pedestrians series for 15 months. We’re up to 26 entries and we could probably make it to 100 if we put our minds and feet to it. The city has long ceded priority to anyone who was doing work in the right of way. Construction companies have been allowed to fence off entire sidewalks, toss “closed” signs like they’re shooting dice, and commandeer lanes to hold equipment. There are plenty of times that some scaffolding would solve this problem, but it’s easier and cheaper for the companies to block the sidewalk. Now they’ll need to get in gear or they’ll be fined. Here is the verbiage from the ordinance:

The Trust for Public Land’s annual report on urban parks drops today, and while Dallas has slipped in its ranking compared with the country’s largest 100 cities, it has made big strides expanding access to parks.

The ParkScore metric, which ranks cities based on access to parks, park acreage, park investment, and park amenities, listed Dallas 52^nd in the nation, a slip from its 49^th place rank in 2018. But Dallas has increased the number of residents living within a 10-minute walk from a park. Robert Kent, North Texas Area Director for the Trust for Public Lands, says this is a result of a concerted effort between the Dallas Park and Recreation Department and Dallas and Richardson ISDs to convert 32 public school campuses into joint-use playgrounds after hours.

“In 2017, Mayor Rawlings was one of the first mayors to join TPL’s national “10-Minute Walk to a Park” campaign,” Kent says. “Since then, Dallas’s 10-minute walk figure has gone up from 60 percent in 2017 to 69 percent in 2019, which translates to over 145,000 people gaining park access. This was the 4th largest improvement in the country.”

Kent adds that over the next two years there are plans to unveil even more parks and trails funded by the most recent city bond issue, and so access to parks in Dallas will continue to improve.

Dallas Park Board President Bobby Abtahi remembers the mayor being initially reluctant to sign onto the pledge during that 2017 meeting without knowing that city could follow through. The concerted effort over the past two years to expand park access is a credit to the way the city and the school districts were able to work together to keep their word, he says.

“It is something we promised we would do,” Abtahi says.

Where the city’s park system lost points is for amenities, with the report citing a lack of dog parks and restrooms. The city scores well with regards to park size. Dallas’s median park size of 7.7 acres outstrips the national median of 5 acres, though that average is probably bolstered by counting the entirety of the Trinity River floodway. But Dallas parks are average with regard to investment.