Taking a toll on south Dallas

I want to challenge the stance that the trinity tollroad is good for South Dallas because it’s the most important issue in the entire debate and seems to be the focus of the mayor and a few of the council men and women from that area. As it should be. Dallas is the #1 city for child poverty in the country for big cities…that is horrific, pathetic and embarrassing. This is a massively serious issue and one worth discussing in the context of the road. Their stance seems to make a lot of sense in a vacuum…lots of jobs in NW Dallas, and people in SE Dallas need to be able to get to those jobs. So let’s build a road between the two. Mayor Rawlings spoke with the editorial board in December and recently reiterated his comments in a piece for the Dallas Morning News.This quote is a pretty good summary of the thought process.
The reality is, the trinity tollroad only contributes to poverty in South Dallas by leading to more sprawl, more car dependence which affects lower income people more, more population loss in the city, jobs pushing further North away from South Dallas, lower tax base and further economic segregation, lowering prospects for those growing up in concentrated poverty of climbing the social & economic ladder.
The city is hollowing out relative to the region
This map shows population growth from 1970 to 2010 in our region. Red means these census tracts have lost people in that span, black is the lowest quartile of growth up to the brightest green for the highest growth.

People are not choosing to live the city, leaving those in poverty behind feeding a vicicous cycle — the middle class leaves, the perception of the school district is lowered thus more people start to move out. We’ve been seeing this for years, and it HAS to stop. The tollroad keeps it going…Patrick Kennedy points to research that building an inner city highway is correlated with an 18% population loss in the core of the city. If we don’t stop growing north and emptying out the city ‘Grow South’ is going to take on a different meaning…the one it has in Detroit.
Jobs are going with them, and they’re going north, further and further from South Dallas
This is % job growth in the counties of the metroplex from 2000–2012.

If the economy is all about jobs, then we are failing miserably. Dallas County lost 187,912 in those 12 years. We should be doing ANYTHING possible to get jobs back into the city. Slapping a gigantic concrete monolith right on top of the most valuable potential asset in the center of the city does not bring jobs to this area. It does nothing to give us a competitive advantage over McKinney, Plano, Grapevine, Allen, Frisco or Southlake to get jobs back here.
Klyde Warren Park has generated $1 Billion of economic development within a quarter mile radius since it’s inception and attracted over 1 million people in its first year. That’s attraction and density and people and jobs. Close to South Dallas. We need to keep momentum in the Cedars and in Trinity Groves moving South. We’re willing to forgoe many multiples of that along with the opportunity cost of doing something to really help South Dallas, like re-routing I-30 just to ‘maybe’ get 4,000 to work 3 minutes faster? If we don’t do anything to attract jobs and people back into Dallas, we’ll continue to lose jobs and tax base. And those losses hit hardest in South Dallas.
When jobs leave, poor are affected more greatly
The size of our job market has decreased 13% as a county and again, when that happens, those in South Dallas are affected most. The poverty task force presented their findings to the city council and found that during the SAME span….2000–2012, the median income for the single moms that the mayor wants to help (as said in the editorial) dropped 30% while they only dropped 17% for married couples with kids. When we lose jobs as a whole, they are the very ones affected most! They also found that the poor population of the city grew 41% in the same span, while the actual population only grew 5%.Since 2000 unemployment in South Dallas has risen more sharply than it has in North Dallas, meaning people in North Dallas are taking a greater remaining share of those jobs left. — Again, we must attract people and jobs or South Dallas hurts.
Tollroad contributes to these trends by contributing to sprawl
Sprawl is an enemy of poverty. How does the road contribute to sprawl? For one, it makes the city more car dependent than it already is. Patrick Kennedy has pointed to research at the University of Toronto that found a 1 to 1 relationship between mile of highway built and mile driven. You add 10% of highway to a city, and 10% more cars take up the roads. By making the city a place where you need a car, you’re actually hurts those who can’t afford a car the most, the majority of which live in Southeast Dallas. Not to mention the large number of those who will be priced out by the tolls. (I wonder if we used Robbie Good’s idea and connected 175 to riverfront what % of people would just take that instead of shelling out ~80 a week for tolls — And look how parallel that currently underutilized 6 lane road is to the proposed tollroad). So you’re hurting a greater % of people a greater % of their discretionary income that they have to spend on cars, gas and tolls. Commute times for single moms in South Dallas will always be higher on average than the rest of Dallas unless we commit to bringing jobs to that area.
According to more data from Brookings, the number of jobs near the average resident in high-poverty neighborhoods in DFW went down 14.8% in our familiar span, 2000–2012. And the distance of the typical DFW commute ranked 2nd longest (12.2 miles) out of 96 metro areas. How does a tollroad lower our commute distance?
Sprawl leads to concentrated poverty and economic segregation
Furthermore, and perhaps most importantly, as the city has lost population and jobs to the north, rich and poor people are growing further apart economically as they are increasingly living geographically isolated from each other.…or as the Pew Research center puts it,
“the gap between rich and poor has grown as the degree to which they live in seperate communities.”
The measure for economic segregation is called the neighborhood sorting index, “higher values of the NSI indicate that family incomes vary more between neighborhoods, reflecting a greater degree of concentrated wealth & concentrated poverty.” DFW is 6th worst on that list, even worse than areas like Detroit, Philadelphia, Memphis, Chicago and even Atlanta. Isolating poor communities in South Dallas away from everyone else leads to more concentrated poverty. And concentrated poverty is bad. Very bad.
When you live isolated, far from any kind of wealth, the nearest grocery store is probably very far away. That’s called a food desert. KERA’s Think did a report on this in the context of Dallas in Jubilee Park (near Fair Park directly south of I-30) — Listen to that — it’s only 1:39, and Peter Simek did as well in a post about the similarities between Dallas and another city distressed by food deserts, Atlanta.
Economic segregation also hurts kids in school….research out of Maryland has shown that poor students do better when mixed economically with middle class children.
When poor people and rich people live completely geographically isolated from each other, bad things happen.
economic segregation leads to lower social and economic mobility
Neighborhood economic segregation is linked with low economic mobility (the chance that someone that grows up in the bottom fifth can reach the top fifth). Research out of Harvard studies the degree of economic mobility in certain cities….Atlanta is the poster child of low economic mobility. And let’s ask ourselves, does a tollroad through heart of our city make Dallas look more or less like Atlanta? The worst city on the list is Memphis, also the city with the highest percent of children living in poverty, right ahead of…..Dallas. (and this is from a study of kids starting in 1980-if it started now, given we’re #1 in child poverty I’m guessing we’d be at the bottom of the list) So how do we promote the equality of opportunity and be a city where a child can grow up poor and make it to the top? And who can do it? According to Vox, reporting on research by Brookings, concludes:
We also know what sorts of strategies actually promote economic mobility. One of them is reducing economic segregation — that is, when poor people live cut off from wealthier people. This is not a problem that Jeb or Hillary can directly address, but it is one your mayor can alleviate.
And how can we lower economic segregation? According to the same research:
Policies that restrict sprawl have also been shown to promote economic integration
Finally, we get to another quote from Rawlings’ visit with the editoral board:
I’m sorry, but it smacks of segregation. It smacks of you guys have your community down there and we’ll have our community up here. And I think the whole essence of what we’ve all been working for is to bring this city together, not separate it. And when you start to separate it economically, that’s bad
He’s right, it is bad to separate the city economically. But he’s wrong that a tollroad fixes that. It actively encourages it, and has for the past 60 years. Sprawl encourages this kind of isolation.
Instead, let’s kill the trinity tollroad and start to reverse the process and realize the potential of the greatest natural unused asset in the center of any city in the country, the Trinity River. Let’s give our city a competitive advantage, attract and retain more middle class, and raise the perception of the school district. Let’s create the density needed to make way for a D2 line to drastically lower a bottleneck that leads to longer commute times for those who can’t afford a car. Let’s get jobs and grocery stores closer to single moms so they can feed their children with options other than what’s at the corner store, and come home and have time to read to their children. Let’s really help South Dallas, let’s use the money to bury or re-route I-30, (which the mayor has acknowledged would be a huge win), stitch the city back together and let jobs and opportunities seep south while also making the center city a more livable place — and really bridge a divide.
If we use $1.5 billion for the tollroad and it contributes to the negative effects for those in poverty I’ve outlined, while at the same time taking money away from an opportunity to remove the artifical barrier of I-30 to knit South and North Dallas along with eliminating the chance for a potentially transformative park that would bring jobs and people together out of isolation, the results of this decision will be catastrophic. The decisions we’ve been making have put a large percentage of our children into deep poverty, more so than anywhere else in the country. Let’s not keep making them.

