The End of Fall

As a transplanted northerner, I have mixed feelings about winter here in Texas. Many times, the weather is glorious but I miss the snow—or at least the idea of snow—and cold. This year November has been more beautiful than I can ever remember, with clear pleasant days and crisp evenings. It is as if we are being rewarded for suffering through the wettest October in memory. Only the shortness of the days reminds me that we are indeed approaching the winter equinox.

I feel as though I have cheated somehow. By now I should be suffering in the cold and shoveling snow off the driveway. For a Midwesterner, it seems more than I deserve, which makes me feel almost guilty about enjoying the weather. Only the fact that the squirrels ate my winter garden makes me feel that I’m not cheating nature too badly.

We do pay in part for the nice weather in the loss of fall color. Texas fall scenery is pleasant, but lacks the brilliancy of the leaves turning in the north.

The oaks, especially, don’t turn bright red but instead some mixture of red and green that I would call mahogany and the color remains for many weeks.

Bradford pears, an ornamental that don’t produce fruit, for most of the year are an unassuming tree with little to recommend them, but twice each year, in the spring and in the fall, they are transformed, first by flowers and then by color.

The yellow of cedar elms contrasts well with the predominant reds and browns of Texas fall foliage. I only wish we had the aspens of the mountain west, which are brighter yet.

Finally, hackberries, usually regarded as a trash tree around Dallas, have leaves that turn yellow brown and contrast well with their distinctive mottled gray bark.

As November ends and December begins, we will lose the last of our fall color even here in Dallas and it’s likely that we will have enough cold so that I can feel at least a touch of the Midwestern virtue in surviving it. In little more than three weeks, however, the days will start to grow longer and by February it will be time to start gardening.

The shortness of the winter is all to the good, in my opinion, although the length of the gardening season is too long for me. At least a couple of weeks of cold and snow—fresh snow makes even the yard of the worst garden look perfect—would make a nice break from sunny days and my yard would be the equal of any here in town, if only for a day.

There’s No Place Like Home

BY LORI BETH LEMMON

OK, well, I haven’t been to Oz during Thanksgiving break, only to East Texas, but really, there is no place like home. I love to visit my hometown of Tyler, and more especially, I love for my kids to have time with their grandparents. We got to enjoy so many things with my parents – a huge Thanksgiving feast, some Christmas shopping, playing miniature golf, taking the kids skating for the first time, and celebrating my father’s 74th birthday.

But, somehow, I can never wait to get home. There is just something about the familiarity of my neighborhood, the smell of my house, and the comfort of my own bed! It is impossible for me to imagine what it would be like to be without a home. Tonight, I say a special prayer for all who are homeless, because there is no place like home.

Who Is Left Out?

Tenant interviews for CityWalk have been underway for some time now, and our management company, Pinnacle, is now taking and reviewing lease applications. I’ve been a little surprised at some of the people who are barred by the rules on past criminal acts that we adopted.

First, let me explain how we arrived at those rules. Almost 18 months ago we put together an advisory council of our downtown neighbors. The advisory council included representatives of the YMCA, Fountain Place, First Baptist, and Star Parking, among others. All of those entities are located within two blocks of CityWalk, and we wanted them to be comfortable with our residents. The advisory committee spent several months putting together detailed rules on who would be prohibited from living at CityWalk. The committee took its work seriously and when I reviewed the final draft of the rules, the rules seemed both fair and wise to me.

I’m not going to set all the rules about past criminal problems out here (the rules are somewhat long and legalistic), but in short the rules prohibit anyone from living in the building if:

1. The person has a conviction for sexual crimes or crimes of violence at any time in the past;

2. The person has a felony conviction of any type within the last 10 years; or

3. The person has a continuing pattern of criminal activity, either felonies or misdemeanors.

The idea was to keep out people with really bad criminal histories (sexual or violent), serious recent crimes (felonies in the last 10 years), and people whose problems looked like they were still ongoing. On the other hand, we wanted to make it possible for people who looked like they have turned their life around and wouldn’t be likely to cause a problem to live at CityWalk.

I think the rules are working for the first part of our plan, but maybe not for the second part of it. Two recent applications that we denied (and had to under the rules) make me wonder.

First, we denied the application to lease of someone who had a very serious crime of violence in their past—38 years ago! I don’t know whether this person would have been a good tenant or not, but they didn’t have any further criminal issues for the past 38 years and I’m not aware of any other problems that would have disqualified them from a lease.

I take the safety of our tenants and neighbors very seriously (after all, I will be a neighbor), but 38 years is a long time. It makes me wonder whether there shouldn’t be some length of time after which good behavior outweighs a past misdeed, even a serious misdeed.

The second case was an application with several less serious felonies, all more than a decade old, none of which on first look seemed to be crimes of violence—and certainly weren’t sexual crimes of any sort. Unfortunately, when you looked at the definition of a crime of violence that we were using, one of the decade old felonies qualified as a crime of violence, even though nobody was hurt in its commission.

I talked to this person long enough to be convinced that they would have been a very fine tenant. I would be not just content, but pleased to live in the same building with them. Under the rules under which we are operating, however, the application to lease was denied.

We want to be careful at CityWalk. To some extent the approval of future permanent supportive housing developments will rest on its success. As I know from my time practicing law, it’s very hard to apply objective rules to human behavior and end up with results that seem fair. That’s the problem we’re running into. I still think the rules we worked out with the advisory committee are as good as we could do. I just wish, sometimes, that I didn’t have to enforce them.

Medicine Cabinets

Details obsess us. When we first started building CityWalk, we didn’t have enough money in the budget to put in a nice medicine cabinet over the bathroom sink. That left us with two choices: a mirror (a decent mirror is very cheap); or a substandard medicine cabinet. I didn’t like either choice. So we pulled the entire item out of the construction budget and left it as an owner-supplied item.

Medicine cabinets became one more item that we had to raise money for, which we did successfully. The picture is of a nice, well-built medicine cabinet installed in one of our units. Anyway, this past weekend, we installed the first of the 211 medicine cabinets that we need for the building. We had hoped to install 39 medicine cabinets, all that we could buy locally, but two were broken and will have to be replaced, so only 37 went in Saturday.

A shipment is coming in from out-of-town this Wednesday, so on this coming weekend we can start on the rest of the medicine cabinets.

A medicine cabinet is a small item, but it’s important. I’m glad we didn’t settle for a mirror or a poorly built medicine cabinet. Every detail is important.

I Am Thankful Not to be Homeless

I have much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, my family, my wife, friends and worthwhile work to do, but especially I am thankful not to be homeless.

I am thankful not to be pushing all my worldly goods down a Dallas street in a baby buggy, worried about cold and rain, theft and robbery.

I am thankful to have a warm, safe and sheltered place to sleep tonight and enough food to eat, not just today, because it’s Thanksgiving, but tomorrow and the following days as well.

I have never been homeless (Read this story from last year from someone that has been homeless, if you’d like to know better how it feels: http://homelessness.change.org/blog/view/on_shopping_carts_thanksgiving_and_homelessness), but I’ve been close enough to those that are homeless so that I think often about how homelessness must feel. Close enough to homelessness to know that I am so very, very thankful not to be without a home.

If you have a home, be thankful for it as well.

Giving Thanks

BY LORI BETH LEMMON

Today, we have so many things to be thankful for here at Central Dallas CDC.

First of all, the guy showed up from the company that owns our copier/printer/scanner/fax machine that has been on the blink since late last week. Believe you me, we are so thankful that he showed up today.

We are thankful for our new team members, Naquanna and Kevin – they are our community outreach specialists for the citywalk@akard development. Speaking of which, we are very thankful for the lovely team of folks from Pinnacle, our property management company, that has been in our offices for the past several weeks working through the application process with the future tenants of citywalk@akard.

And lastly, we are incredibly thankful that the citywalk@akard project has come to fruition and will be ready for occupancy any day now. It has been a long, hard, road – we put the building under contract in December of 2005 –and the completion of this project is truly something to celebrate. We are thankful for this opportunity to build a new community in the heart of our city, and we are thankful that we will be able to office there in the building alongside many of our community partners and the residents of the building.

I really could go on and on for a long time because non-profit work and community development work brings so many situations and people our way – we are never short on things to be thankful for.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Central Dallas CDC Staff

The Hoist Comes Down

Today, after more than a year of operation, the hoist on the outside of CityWalk finally came down. Once again, we had an enormous crane on site, as you can see from the pictures.

This is a big sign of progress. It means the elevators are running and we no longer need to ride up the hoist on the outside of the building to get to the upper stories, a ride I’ve made dozens of times. I’m not scared of heights, so it’s never bothered me, but some of the people visiting the building were frightened half to death. One big donor even decided they didn’t want to tour CityWalk until they could ride up on the inside of the building.

Taking the hoist down is necessary so we can close up CityWalk. Until today we’ve been entering and exiting the building through an opening that will shortly be windows. Now we’ll install the windows so the building can be made weather tight.

Still, I’ll miss riding up the outside of the building with Brian Jordan, the Key employee who’s been running the hoist since August 2008. You get a great view of the city—it was the best amusement ride this side of Six Flags.

Design Team Selected for Re:Vision Dallas

One perk of having our own blog is that we can release any news we make here first. So here’s the early version of our press release on the latest progress on the Re:Vision Dallas project (it may change before it’s released on Monday, November 23, 2009—which is also my 26th Anniversary—Happy Anniversary, Rebecca!). Still, if you are reading this early in the morning, then you will be one of the first to get the news, because we’ve got this scoop!

November 23, 2009

For Immediate Release
Central Dallas Community Development Corporation
Re:Vision Dallas

Central Dallas Community Development Corporation (Central Dallas CDC) announced today that it has selected the architectural firms MOOV and Atelier Data as the design architects for the Re:Vision Dallas project, which will turn a parking lot immediately south of Dallas City Hall into the first truly sustainable city block in the world. MOOV and Atelier Data, both located in Lisbon, Portugal, jointly submitted the Forwarding Dallas proposal that was named one of the three winners of the Re:Vision Dallas international design competition last May.

The initial planning for the competition took place between September and December 2008. The design charrette that was sponsored by The City of Dallas and funded by Enterprise, was held December 5, 2008. The design competition opened January 26, 2009 and closed May 6, 2009.

In May, representatives from Central Dallas CDC and bcWORKSHOP met with a jury of panelists who selected 3 winners and awarded 3 honorable mentions. During the months since, we have worked with a cadre of pro-bono executives provided by The Real Estate Council Foundation who have done extensive work on the proposed designs, including site analysis, creation of trial pro formas, engineering and architectural reviews, and estimates of construction costs for all three of the winning designs. During the first two weeks of November, we hosted each of the 3 winning firms here in Dallas for additional discussion.

John Greenan, Executive Director for Central Dallas CDC said, “All three of the design teams impressed us, both with the quality of their designs and in the interviews. Dallas would be a richer city to have the work of any of these architects represented, but as we went further into our review, we began to see the deep logic of the MOOV-Atelier Data design, Forwarding Dallas. Forwarding Dallas seemed to us to do the best job of incorporating concepts of sustainability into the foundation of the design. When we met Antonio Louro and Filipe Vogt, the principals of MOOV and Atelier Data, their passion for quality design and sustainable principles was unmistakable. Any concerns we had about working with architects based in Lisbon, Portugal were satisfied by Antonio’s and Filipe’s clear desire to work in a collaborative manner in bringing the project to completion. In the end, the choice was difficult only because of the quality of the winners of the Re:Vision Dallas competition.”

When asked about the overall impact of the project, John Greenan, Executive Director for Central Dallas CDC said, “The greatest economic impact will come from rebuilding a long neglected part of downtown. There are probably an additional half dozen underutilized blocks in the area of the project, and once we prove up the viability of rebuilding the south central part of Downtown Dallas, I think all those blocks will also be revitalized. What I would love to see is an entire section of downtown notable for innovative, sustainable design–an attraction in the southern part of downtown balancing the Arts District in the northern part of downtown. There are already some interesting, green projects in The Cedars immediately to the south of downtown. A sustainable district that extends from downtown all the way into The Cedars neighborhood is a very reasonable possibility.”

The Re:Vision Dallas neighborhood is remarkable, primarily for the absence of nongovernmental entities in the immediate neighborhood. The property immediately north and west of the proposed site (1502 Canton) belongs to the City of Dallas (City Hall and the Convention Center, respectively).

Central Dallas CDC has also directly contacted most of the owners of the few occupied properties within 1,000 feet of the redevelopment site, and two of the major land owners, Dan Millett (Millett Printing) and Larry and Ted Hamilton (owners of the Plaza Hotel) are enthusiastic supporters. Leaders and members of the DOWNTOWNDallas organization also attended the charette for the project and are supporters. Central Dallas CDC has also discussed this project with the Downtown Dallas Residents Association, and we believe that the Downtown Dallas Residents Association will support the project. Finally, most of the surrounding area is vacant, and discussions with owners and brokers suggest that the potential increase in land values will attract the support of the owners of those properties.

Meetings

Once you reach a certain position, and it doesn’t have to be very high, suddenly you are in enormous demand to go to meetings. As far as I can tell, the goal is to take anybody who achieves something worthwhile and immediately fill every minute of his or her day with meetings so that that person can no longer do anything useful.

Larry James, CEO/President of Central Dallas Ministries, is one of the worst afflicted people I know—his days are entirely filled with meetings. Now part of that is his fault. He is generous to a fault and will meet with just about anybody about just about anything, and he is so warm and generous that everyone wants to meet with him.

My wife, who is also warm and generous, has the same problem. Both Larry and my wife try to compensate for the time they lose in meetings by working longer and longer hours, but it’s a losing game. Meetings are infinite in number while there are only 24 hours in a day (except for the change from daylight savings to standard time when you get an extra hour).

Until recently I’ve managed to avoid the worst of the plague of meetings. I’m the highest executive officer of Central Dallas CDC, so I don’t really have a boss who can call meetings, and I don’t call any for my staff. After all, we all work in one big room and listen to everything anybody else says. Why would we need to meet and what would we need to talk about?

I’ve developed other protective practices. One is a highly cultivated reputation for disliking meetings. It discourages the timid. I avoid joining trade and professional organizations—most of them are too inclined to hold meetings. I keep a handwritten calendar. There’s no way to schedule me for a meeting without my knowledge.

But in spite of all these efforts (and some other, secret methods that I can’t reveal even to the readers of this blog), I’m losing the battle. I’m currently averaging almost five meetings per day. At an hour each, and if you allow half an hour between meetings for travel, that means I’m spending almost seven out of eight hours of each day doing meetings. By the time you’ve checked your email and voicemail, eight hours have passed and you haven’t got to your real work. Earlier this week someone suggested that I should hire an assistant, because it was getting too hard to schedule meetings with me—I had to resist telling them that was all to the good!

One of my heroes is Lieutenant General William Pagonis.

He was the director of logistics for the Gulf War, and was known for his efficiency. He was famous for removing all the chairs in the room, except his, before holding meetings. With everyone else standing up, the meetings were short and to the point. No time was wasted. Now that’s a real War Hero!

The problem with meetings isn’t that they’re useless. In fact they are necessary much of the time. The problem is that they crowd out all other work. You schedule meetings. You prepare for meetings. You travel to meetings. You attend meetings, and then you write minutes so you can remember what was said in the meeting. And the day is done and all you have done is meetings.

There is no time to think, study, write or research-let alone address any of the action items your meetings have undoubtedly produced. There is only time to talk. I think that’s why so many organizations and so many people do one piece of significant work and nothing else important—their life has been sucked away in meetings.

If we could just reduce the number of meetings then I’m convinced we could fix the economy, find a cure for cancer, eliminate poverty and finally invent the flying cars I’ve been waiting for all my life (ever since I saw them in an old issue of Popular Mechanics). Right now, at this very instant, I’m sure some brilliant doctor is NOT inventing a cure for the swine flu because, instead, he is in a staff meeting.

I am convinced that when the sun is a burnt-out black cylinder and the human race has long vanished that only two things will survive: Meetings and cockroaches. It’s a chilling vision.

Karate Kid

BY LORI BETH LEMMON

It was bound to happen – if I am going to blog very often, you are surely going to hear about my kids. Having two small children (ages 6 and 4), it’s hard not to talk, or blog, about them – they consume so much of my time and energy. My oldest child, Jacob, has been asking, no, begging, to take karate lessons for two years. During that time, he has been active in other sports – baseball, golf, and soccer. And did I mention that he is pretty much active all the time, even when he is doing nothing –typical 6-year old boy, right?

Well, fall baseball season ended recently, and my husband and I decided that Jacob was probably ready for karate. ONE LESSON, and my little guy is hooked! He did such a great job listening, paying attention, cooperating, and doing exactly as he was asked – not typical 6-year old boy fashion, at least not typical for my boy at any age. It was really amazing to watch.

When we got ready to leave he said, “Mommy, can you believe it? My very first lesson and I already earned my white belt!” Now I don’t know much about karate, but I think all he had to do was show up and participate to earn the white belt. SHHHHHH, don’t tell Jacob. So none of this is really very interesting – I am sure millions of other parents have had similar experiences. Of course, for me, it was crazy special to see him so happy and doing so well in this new sport. But the other interesting thing about it is that the fundamentals of karate, and other martial arts, I’m guessing, are the notions of self-control, discipline, and respect for others.

These are things that we have been working to teach Jacob since he started walking, and believe me, it has not been easy, and we have not been terribly successful. Maturity has definitely helped, but Jacob is one of those kids that professionals call “spirited”. In other words, he is extremely energetic with an energy supply that seems to be limitless, he is very impulsive, and not always particularly aware of how his actions affect others. Don’t get me wrong, he is an incredibly sensitive and loving child, but just a little over the top with energy and very short on patience.

But, “Karate ,” he says, “is the best thing in the whole world. I love it more than anything else, Mommy, even more than baseball and golf.” Only time will tell if this enthusiasm will hold up as more and more discipline and hard work are required to advance his karate skills, but for right now, I have my very own karate kid.

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