Photo Essay: A Historic Dallas Neighborhood Grapples With Gentrification | Photos

DALLAS – South of downtown, where the long, creeping shadows of city high-rises can’t reach, brightly-painted panaderias and thrift stores line the narrowing roads. Lowriders cruise down the boulevard with freshly waxed paint and gold rims ablaze in evening light.

When the workday draws to a close, the neighborhood stirs. A porch becomes a kitchen, playground and living room. It’s not uncommon to find families of three or four generations conversing on one doorstep.

This is Oak Cliff, a vibrant pocket of Dallas, one of many minority-majority cities in the U.S. As Texas has become more diverse in the last few decades, so has this patch of the city, in which Hispanics (63%) and non-Hispanic Black people (7%) now make up a significant portion of the population, according to 2021 Census Bureau estimates.

Like many urban areas across the country, Oak Cliff – covering a wide swath of the city about the size of Seattle – was born from a tangled history of discriminatory housing practices, socioeconomic disparities and immigration. The South Lawndale neighborhood of Chicago underwent similar demographic shifts – as did Ferguson, Missouri and Dover, New Jersey.

But there is more change coming. Sleek, trendy apartment complexes tower over homes generations in the making. According to the Dallas Morning News, almost 40% of homes sold in Dallas in 2017 were bought by house flippers, investors, developers and builders. A report from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition shows Dallas was among a list of 20 of the most intensely gentrifying cities from 2013-2017, the top three being San Francisco, Denver and Boston.

The change has forced many residents to make painful decisions about whether to stay in the only place they’ve ever called home, or to pack up and start a new life somewhere more affordable.

Giovanni Valderas, 45, an assistant professor of art at Texas Woman’s University and Oak Cliff native, remembers seeing old apartments and houses being torn down in place of newer developments around 2012. At the time, the local media narrative was one of positive change for the neighborhood, Valderas says.

“I started noticing all these huge commercial real estate signs popping up on vacant lots,” he says. “It dawned on me that they weren’t building anything for the existing community, for us.”

Upturned rocks and dirt spill out from a fenced-off construction zone, where neighborhood kids once traded their school shoes for soccer cleats and played in the grassy lot. A sign now stretches alongside the sidewalk advertising luxury apartments.

It’s a common sight in Bishop Arts, the arts district of North Oak Cliff, where most of the new development has been taking place.

In 2021, the median household income in Bishop Arts and its surrounding area was $68,000, about 17% higher than the median household income for the city of Dallas, according to census estimates. Ten years prior, in 2011, the area’s median income was less than $41,000 by the same measure, about 3% lower than that of Dallas. Rent at some of these complexes can start at $1,804 for a studio – a price most lifelong residents can’t afford.

Oak Cliff was once a majority-white, working class neighborhood, annexed by Dallas in 1903. It joined a city built on segregation, where the Ku Klux Klan amassed a substantial following, according to D Magazine.

“Texas essentially introduced a new system of segregation, like many other cities in the 1910s, that complimented the just sort of everyday use of violence to threaten Black people out of certain neighborhoods and into others,” says A. K. Sandoval-Strausz, director of the Latina/o studies program at Penn State University, and author of “Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City.”

Segregation left Black neighborhoods in Dallas massively overcrowded, overpriced and underserved, Sandoval-Strausz says. Following World War II, some Black families started trickling into the mostly-white pockets of South Dallas. But they weren’t welcomed. In the 1950s a series of racially motivated bombings took place in an attempt to stifle their upward mobility. No one was ever convicted.

“It was a neighborhood mostly intent on staying as it was,” Sandoval-Strausz says.

By 1954, the civil rights movement in Dallas was gaining momentum. As Black leaders fought for equality in education, voting rights, health care and housing, many white families decided they would rather leave altogether than integrate.

In the 1970s through the late 1990s, Dallas would see an influx of Hispanic migrants looking for affordable housing, ushering in another wave of change in Oak Cliff.

The neighborhood’s decline “was very much halted and remediated by the arrival of migrants, primarily from various parts of Mexico,” Sandoval-Strausz says. “That sort of hard work of breaking the boundaries of segregation had largely already been done, so there was much less resistance to the Mexicans who moved in.”

Pearlina Bates understands change. In her 77 years, she’s seen a lot of it.

She moved to Dallas from Louisiana in 1966, at the age of 19, in order to attend business school with her cousin. Bates was afraid when she first arrived in Dallas. Coming off the bus, Bates and her cousin walked into a diner.

“We looked around – we were the only two Blacks in there,” Bates says. “Everybody was looking at us. I told them, ‘Let’s get out of here. I don’t want to eat anything here. Ain’t no telling what they do to your food.’”

She met her husband at work, and they married two weeks later. Without money for a wedding ring, he gave her a cigar band as a placeholder. They tried three different banks in Dallas before finding one that would give them a loan to purchase a South Oak Cliff home in 1970.

At the time, they were just the third Black family to move onto that street, Bates recalls.

It was a challenging time for the neighborhood. At the height of the urban crisis in the 1970s through 1980s, drug-related violence became more frequent. The population dwindled. Businesses closed. In his book, Sandoval-Strausz says urban communities like Oak Cliff experienced this period in five parts: population loss, economic decline, fiscal crisis, rising crime and the racialization of all of the above.

As of 2019, South Oak Cliff had the highest number of incarcerated residents of any ZIP code in the state, according to an analysis from the Commit Partnership, a nonprofit that works with more than 200 partners to promote equitable economic opportunity in the Dallas region.

In a blog post, Commit Partnership CEO Todd Williams attributes this statistic to “the unequal provision of school funding and city services; discriminatory mortgage and small business lending; the inequitable distribution of effective teachers; the lack of equal access to quality affordable childcare, healthy food, recreation centers, libraries, internet, public transportation … the list goes on and on.”

Valderas, of Texas Woman’s University, says his mother couldn’t drive when she first moved to Oak Cliff in 1976. So a neighbor took him to school on his first day of kindergarten. After school, another neighbor watched over him on his front porch alongside his own grandchildren. This is the Oak Cliff Valderas remembers.

His grandparents moved to the neighborhood in the late 1960s and were among the first Latino people on their block. Though Latino migration picked up in the 1970s, in the 1990s, a new influx of Spanish speaking families – mostly Mexican immigrants – would move into homes that had otherwise been abandoned, Sandoval-Strausz says. Between 1990 and 2000, Dallas County gained 346,700 Hispanic residents, accounting for 30.1% of the county’s population in 2000. Meanwhile, the county’s population of non-Hispanic Black residents increased by nearly 23% in the same 10 years, making up about 20% of the county by 2000, according to USA Facts.

“The city divested from us and we came in, we bought houses, we put our kids in failing school systems and we created businesses,” Valderas says of his Latino neighbors.

In 2017, Valderas launched his Casita Triste art project. Handmade, brightly colored piñanatas resembling houses were placed in areas of new development. They sulked on street corners throughout Oak Cliff, seemingly having nowhere else to go.

“I thought about this idea of the community slowly eroding away, just like anything left outside that is paper-based,” Valderas says. “And so it started a conversation.”

Attached to the piñatas were postcards, on which locals were encouraged to share their story and mail them to city hall.

“It gave the viewer an opportunity to advocate for affordable housing in the city,” Valderas says.

Eventually deciding he needed a direct say in his community, Valderas ran for City Council in 2020 and 2021, placing second to current council member Chad West both times. Many people told him plainly: Mexicans don’t vote.

“You have to think about it in context: For 10 years, this Latinx community has been ignored and marginalized. So you have to double the amount of work to engage them,” Valderas says.

At a meeting deciding plans for the Wynnewood shopping center in Oak Cliff, he recalls one woman standing up and stating she did not want more “washaterias,” or laundromats. In fact, she wanted to get rid of all of them.

“Man, that was a direct attack on our community,” Valderas says.

At the edge of Northeast Oak Cliff, the Greater El Bethel Missionary Baptist Church announces the start of a new week with open doors. Church ushers make their way up the steps, Bibles held tightly to their chests. Welcoming chatter melts away the last traces of morning fatigue.

Choir director SaCarol Ford addresses the congregation, “If the Lord has done nothing for you, I want you to sit there and be quiet.” At once, every person rises and the room becomes alive with song and praise.

Situated at the heart of the Tenth Street Historic District of Oak Cliff, the church is a powerful symbol in one of the nation’s last standing freedmen’s towns, communities built by formerly enslaved people after emancipation. For the local churchgoer, its red brick walls hold more than a roof over their heads, they represent the historic struggles and triumphs of a community long underserved and overlooked.

Shaun Montgomery knows this. As part of the Sunday choir, she’s a voice of worship. She’s an outspoken member of the Tenth Street Residential Association and part of a family that’s resided here for generations. Or, in the words of community relations coordinator Charles Strain, she’s “the jewel of the jewel of the jewel of the church.”

Tenth Street was settled in the 1860s by newly freed slaves following the Civil War. The Greater El Bethel Church was founded by Noah Penn in 1886. It started as a basement church, dug out by former slaves and mule teams.

By the early 1900s, 10th Street had become a bustling, self-sufficient town with doctors, grocery stores, theaters and a primary school. The N.W. Harllee Early Childhood Center, originally the Ninth Ward School in 1893, would be the first school in Dallas named after a living person and African American.

“It was just a community full of love and life. Now a lot of the life has died out,” Montgomery says.

In 1990, the construction of I-35 drew a hard line of traffic through the area. Stretching eight lanes wide, its construction destroyed many homes and businesses in its path, pushing many out of the neighborhood in the process. The highway was originally named after Robert L. Thornton, a Dallas mayor through the 1950s and 1960s and an alleged member of the Ku Klux Klan, according to the Dallas Observer. 

“In an era in Dallas history with a huge shortage of housing for African-Americans who were unwelcome in white neighborhoods, these forced moves magnified the detrimental effects of segregation and mid-century racism,” Kathryn Holliday writes in Springboard, an online publication for the Dallas chapter of the American Institute of Architects. She’s a professor of historic preservation and American architectural history at the University of Illinois.

Now, many of the houses still standing have fallen into disrepair. Some families left to find work, others because banks were unwilling to give them home repair loans. Many passed away without writing wills.

“At one time the city was trying to demolish the houses and I can understand. But that’s not always the answer,” Montgomery says. “That’s a home for somebody.”

Bates, of South Oak Cliff, is now a widow after her husband’s death nine years ago. They were married for 46 years. Lately, she spends evenings tending to her garden, watching the last slivers of golden light dip behind the rooftops.

She knows that more change might come through her street, and only hopes it’s for the better. South Oak Cliff, which is largely Black and Hispanic, has a long record of neglect, well documented by Texas Monthly. The median income in this area is 47% lower than the median income of Dallas, and an estimated 32% of the population falls below the poverty line, according to 2021 census estimates. 

“They don’t treat everybody equal in our community,” Bates says. “They do not clean it up – [there are] papers everywhere. But you go into these other neighborhoods, everything is so nice and neat. No potholes, no nothing.”

Though she wants to see improvement for the neighborhood, she’s wary of the same gentrifying forces sweeping North Oak Cliff. Construction is in progress for a $172 million deck park across I-35, and many locals worry what that might mean for neighboring areas.

Whether or not those changes make it to her street, Bates will remain.

“Everybody asks, ‘You going to leave this house?’ and I say, ‘Nope. My husband bought this house for me and I’m going to be here until the good Lord calls me home.”