Photo of Kiest Park by Danny Fulgencio
A group of Kiest Park-area neighbors are fighting a plan to build $29 million worth of subsidized homes near their neighborhood.
The Dallas Observer has the story about Raymond Crawford and other neighbors, who are “petitioning the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to accept them as interveners in a segregation complaint brought against the city by real estate developers Curtis Lockey and Craig MacKenzie.” That lawsuit claims the city institutes housing segregation by pushing low-income housing to southern Dallas, a result of efforts at City Hall to keep subsidized housing out of northern Dallas.
The houses planned south of Kiest Park would sell for $110,00 to $185,000. Crawford argues the neighborhood doesn’t need help with middle-class housing as there already is plenty in that neighborhood, where unrenovated homes sell as high as $175,000.
From the Observer story:
Crawford says he knows already that his side’s resistance will be characterized by City Hall as not-in-my-backyard racism, a bitter irony, he says because his backyard is manifestly less racist than the mayor’s.
“They’re building 20 homes just for the mayor to cover his political ass on ‘Grow South,’” he says. “The neighborhoods over here are already a microcosm of any great American city. We have black. We have white. We have gay. We have straight. We have Hispanic. We have singles. We have couples. We have everything already.”
