Maybe, just maybe, Dallas has shaken its reputation as the country’s worst city for cycling. Bicycling magazine hasn’t mentioned it in a couple of years, anyway. The city has, however, earned another not-so-welcome distinction. It’s the “least outdoorsy” city in America, according to Outside magazine. We are, apparently, less outdoorsy…
How many dogs and cats are there in Dallas? It’s a hard, maybe impossible figure to nail down with any certainty, but extrapolating from the Humane Society’s U.S. pet-ownership statistics, the number is just north of 600,000. The American Veterinary Medical Association’s pet-ownership calculator gives a slightly smaller but comparable…
Editor’s note: Recently, our Eric Nicholson reported on the goat skulls and carcasses that await visitors of the new Texas Horse Park, one of Dallas City Hall’s bizarre attempts to develop southern Dallas. Together with Eric’s previous scoop about the park being entrusted to an accused horse abuser, the story…
Dallas Police Chief David Brown didn’t think his proposal to secure access to a federal database of private banking and financial information would be controversial. It sailed through the City Council’s Public Safety Committee unopposed last week. Then again, that committee didn’t have City Councilman Lee Kleinman. “‘The right of…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings wears many hats. He’s a “man’s man,” a pizza lover, a terrible actor, the titular head of a major American city. He is also, you might be surprised to learn, a distinguished journalist. So says the University of North Texas’ Mayborn School of Journalism. It has…
Remember that story a couple of weeks back about how Dallas was sitting on 25,000 municipal court warrants? And how you were probably safe ignoring your traffic citation with impunity? That was caused by a technical glitch, and technical glitches get fixed. The reprieve was temporary. The broader trend is…
The town of Hutchins doesn’t have a whole lot going for it. There’s Hutchins State Jail, the town’s second-largest employer, and new intermodal facilities centered on the Union Pacific train tracks and I-20 (this presumably explains how the population doubled between 2000 and 2010, to 5,338), but it has otherwise…
Transforming Valley View Center from a dystopian wasteland into Dallas Midtown, a mammoth, 450-acre complex of restaurants and offices and stores and apartments and retail, won’t be cheap. More than $10 billion was the figure floated when developer Scott Beck first went public with the idea last year. Most of…
You needn’t stray far from where where the Texas Horse Park’s barn and activity building are going up off Pemberton Hill Road to start finding goat skulls. A couple of feet into the mesquite trees should do; the bleached white bone is impossible to miss against the underbrush…
It used to be that, four or five times a year, Dallas would have an auction and sell its tax-foreclosed properties to the highest bidder. The last one happened on June 13, 2013, two weeks before the City Council complained that the houses were falling into the hands of slum…
Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings is still officially on the fence about tearing down I-345, the two-mile stretch of freeway between downtown and Deep Ellum. He’s spent the last several months meeting with, in his words, “local business leaders, concerned citizens and the Texas Department of Transportation.” Even after meeting Tuesday…
If the Dallas City Council thought its baby-splitting compromise on single-use shopping bags (a $.05 cent fee, not a ban) could stave off the bagpocalypse of free market prophecy, they were sorely mistaken. As Kroger rep Gary Huddleston eagerly explained to WFAA on Thursday, the consequences once the new ordinance…
The casual observer will be forgiven for overlooking Councilman Lee Kleinman’s role in Dallas’ debate over plastic-bag regulations. With Dallas City Councilman Dwaine Caraway constantly sermonizing against them on the one hand, and with Sheffie Kadane and Rick Callahan’s dismissal of any attempt to regulate them as a thinly veiled…
The bloodless but brutal Plastic Bag War of 2013-14 has finally come to a close. The final battle, waged primarily through hyperbole and terrible metaphor, came today with the Dallas City Council ultimately voting 8-6 to impose a fee on single-use carryout bags at most retail stores. Under the ordinance,…
As a general rule, it’s probably best to avoid driving through Cockrell Hill. Police in the tiny hamlet, a .6-square-mile splotch in the middle of Oak Cliff, wrote 7,890 traffic tickets last year, nearly two for each of its residents. That’s doubly true if you lack proof of insurance. Each…
Karen Cameron doesn’t spend much time in her front garden anymore. Her yard, though separated from Dallas Executive Airport by Ledbetter Drive and a winding, tree-lined front driveway, is made unbearable, or at the very least extremely unpleasant, by the roaring engines and noxious jet fuel that waft over from…
It’s entirely possible that the Dallas City Council will show up on Wednesday, argue for an hour or two, then decide that it’s not quite ready to vote on banning plastic and other single-use carryout bags, Dwaine Caraway’s March-vote-or-bust pledge be damned. But, thanks to a draft of the ordinance…
If there’s any North Texas suburb known for having a healthy amount of pedestrian activity — Wait, is there? — it’s definitely not Frisco. Frisco is better suited for people in cars. But while the city’s sidewalks tend to be empty, it appears that the city is dealing with another,…
Ever since his failed bid to be the Republican Party’s nominee for President in 2012, Governor Rick Perry has been busy selling the rest of the country on Texas’ economic policies, particularly as they relate to job creation. Perry’s message to businesses across the country has been clear: Move your…
In case you haven’t been following one of the stupider developments of the primary election cycle — and there have been plenty to choose from — Buc-ee’s is officially an issue in the race to become Texas’ next lieutenant governor. To recap: Buc-ee’s is a chain of enormous roadside convenience…
If Klyde Warren Park has proved one thing, it’s that if you make a formerly blemished urban space sufficiently cool and attractive, people will do yoga there. Other things, too. The point is, the people will come. The folks who run Fair Park have taken note. Last year, as part…
Last weekend, John Ratcliffe kicked off his final campaign push by running — and successfully completing! — a 5K fun run in Rockwall. It was a strategic move, a chance to mingle with potential Republican primary voters while simultaneously reminding everyone that he, unlike incumbent U.S. Rep. Ralph Hall, isn’t…
