Since the feds embedded into notorious Five Points in northeast Dallas 18 months ago, they’ve jailed dozens of bad guys who long considered Vickery Meadow their personal playground.
Crime in this neighborhood, one of the most violent in the city, has dropped more than 12 percent from the same period in 2018, according to Dallas police reports.
But the brutality persists: The area’s 187 violent crimes so far this year include five murders, 46 aggravated assaults, eight sexual assaults, 19 robberies of businesses and 72 robberies of individuals.
The Five Points intersection, just east of North Central Expressway and the Shops at Park Lane, is a treacherous gateway into a neighborhood of immigrants, refugees and a staggering number of children who live in one sprawling apartment complex after another.
When U.S. Attorney Erin Nealy Cox’s office launched Project Safe Neighborhood -- aimed at driving crime out of Vickery Meadow and several other northeast hot spots — the feds and their partners in the Dallas Police Department knew they couldn’t arrest their way to success.
Cleaning up this mess would require nontraditional crime-fighting strategies.
The latest of the feds’ experiments, to be officially unveiled this weekend at Five Points, is a community facelift. Armed with a $120,000 federal grant, Nealy Cox’s team enlisted the help of Oak Cliff-based Better Block, a nonprofit with an impressive reputation for rapid and creative neighborhood transformations.
The theory behind the work is crime prevention through environmental design, or CPTED, and Better Block founding director Jason Roberts says the Five Points effort seems to be the largest project of its kind ever attempted.
“Usually CPTED projects target just a couple of buildings or a segment of one side of a street,” Roberts told me this week. “We’re taking on a five-pointed intersection and all the adjoining area.”
When the feds showed up in Vickery Meadow in 2018, formerly brazen criminals melted into the shadows. The Better Block project now aims to rid the neighborhood of those dark places and elevate the quality of life for law-abiding folks.
In just a few days, workers have installed brightly colored crosswalks, put fresh paint on surrounding buildings and installed better lighting. Most striking are the two new public plazas, playground equipment and seating, plus a retrofitted shipping container that provides space for popup restaurants and other activities.
The plaza space was created, in part, by closing two small pieces of roadway that added to the dangerous traffic patterns.
For those naysayers whose first reaction might be, “Oh great, a nicer place for bad guys to sell their drugs,” plenty of research backs up the link between a neighborhood’s improved look and a subsequent drop in crime.
“Before the work began, the area seemed like a sea of concrete, uninhabitable, so people think they can get away with things,” Roberts said. “We are opening up this space to where residents feel it is comfortable and safe for them to come out their doors.”
Creating a great space is only a start — maintaining it and providing ongoing programming is often the biggest challenge. Thank goodness for local hero TBK Bank, which stepped in just this week to provide $65,000 to fund that work.
I’ve watched most every step Project Safe Neighborhood has taken since embedding in northeast Dallas in early 2018, and the operation deserves a lot of credit for its dogged perseverance.
For example, in the Skillman-Whitehurst area, Assistant U.S. Attorney P.J. Meitl and his team worked for months with the owner of J’s Food Mart to close and tear down that store, a magnet for violence.
But in the case of Five Points, you can’t raze a square block — nor would anyone want to because, for better or worse, this intersection is the heart of the neighborhood. The challenge is to make it into a quality epicenter, not a toxic one.
“The end goal is about creating safe, welcoming communities, where law-abiding folks can thrive," Nealy Cox told me Thursday. “We’re proud to partner with a host of neighborhood groups, including Better Block. It is our sincere hope that through these partnerships, we can create lasting change to lift up Vickery Meadow.”
Meitl and Better Block connected property and business owners, residents, city staff and elected officials to work together on a fast-paced timeline. It sounds a lot like “building the plane as you fly” but it beats the years of being stuck on nothing.
City Council member Jennifer Staubach Gates, whose district includes Vickery Meadow, sees the project as a good test for future infrastructure improvements in this part of the city.
But she cautions that the residents, businesses and nonprofits that have been at the table with Better Block must remain committed. Actually, she said, even more folks must take ownership of their neighborhood.
“For this environmental crime-fighting project to work, it can’t just be a one weekend thing or a few weeks of excitement, but continual effort,” Gates said.
Even the Five Points business owners, who are pretty beaten down after years of eking out a living in the crime-ridden neighborhood, are cautiously optimistic.
Ujwal Chaudhari, who operates the 7-11 at Five Points, told me he has seen a drastic drop in crime in the 14 months that he’s been the convenience store’s franchisee. “It no longer feels like a drug hub, but a positive vibe. Loiterers have moved out and new customers are coming in,” he said.
Among those who most understand the importance of fixing Five Points is Dallas ISD principal Audrey de la Cruz, whose Sam Tasby Middle School sits at the intersection.
The principal and her staff bird-dog Five Points to make sure students are safe as they walk to and from campus. That means not just helping out the crossing guards but making sure troubled — or troublemaking — adults don’t interact with students along the streets.
De la Cruz, who is in her fifth year as Tasby principal, said she, her students and her staff now feel much safer in the neighborhood. “Now it doesn’t get too crazy until night. At night — when we might have dances or students returning on buses from games — we are very much on guard.”
She said she believes that if momentum is sustained around the project, the new look will instill pride in students, many of whom are working alongside Better Block, as they see the area as something more than “a bunch of trash and liquor stores.”
The principal also sees the new changes at Five Points as a way to bust ugly myths. “Our kids are good kids. Yet people who don’t know better can think Five Points or our kids are bad.”
No doubt everyone involved in this pavement-to-plaza endeavor knows it’s a risk of sorts. Sketchy pockets of any city can be stubbornly resistant to improvement. Five Points’ transformation is requiring a leap of faith from a lot of people, including shop owners who balked for many months at the idea of removing the bars on their windows.
“If I take the bars off, people will break in” was their initial reaction at community meetings. But after evaluating numbers that show that bars make an area feel less safe and drive away customers, they relented.
Since the bars came off a couple of weeks ago, their property has remained secure — so far. But that doesn’t mean anyone is ready to breathe a sigh of relief.
