News flash, Randolph: Dallas' suburbs were rotting LONG before DART built the (desperately needed) transit system. Why? Because of the rootless suburban mentality. The cycle runs like this:
1. Urban neighborhood becomes congested with traffic, full of low-wage service businesses, plagued by crime, neon signs, high taxes, and non-white, non- middle-class people. Upper-middle-class whites panic and begin to flee to formerly-rural suburban housing developments to escape traffic, noise, crime, and signs. Mass exodus leads to collapse of neighborhood housing prices. Neighborhood becomes a ghetto.
2. New suburbanites tire of commuting to work via two-lane counry roads, demand that the state build bigger freeways to make their commute easier. Freeways are built. New suburbanites demand big new schools to replace inadequate small-town schools. Schools are built. Traffic, taxes increase in suburb.
3. Suburbanites tire of "driving into town" for daily needs, demand convenient local access to dry cleaning, grocery stores, shops, and fried foods. Service business employing low-wage workers (immigrants, teenagers, black people) move into the suburb to supply those needs. Teenagers, immigrants, black people begin to move into suburb in order to be close to work. Traffic, crime, neon signs in suburb increase.
4. Upper middle-class whites become alarmed at increased traffic, neon, crime, and colored folks in suburb. Responding to demand, developers pave over another rural town, announce new development.
5. Former suburb becomes congested with traffic, full of low-wage service businesses, plagued by crime, neon signs, high taxes, and non-white, non- middle-class people. Upper-middle-class whites panic and begin to flee to formerly-rural suburban housing developments to escape traffic, noise, crime, and signs. Mass exodus leads to collapse of neighborhood housing prices. Former suburb (it never was a neighborhood) becomes a ghetto.
REPEAT
The problem is finding a way to live together in safe, pleasant communities. The solution is not to get rid of public transportation, immigrants, or black people, nor is it to keep moving further and further out. The solution to urban/suburban blight is to destroy the rootless, run-away post-World-War-II mindset and encourage people to stand and fight for their neighborhoods in the cities they live in. The solution is to confront and find ways to mitigate the problems of urban living (hint: mass return to Christian values) instead of paving over more and more landscape in a futile atempt to escape reality.
FYI, I'm East Dallas born and raised, and there was plenty of crime to go around before the light rail line was built. Trains and buses don't create bad neighborhoods; white flight creates bad neighborhoods. In fact, the DART system has proven to be an economic driver in the communities it serves. Why do you think so many area cities (e.g. Denton, Corinth, Lewisville, Flower Mound) are falling all over themselves to get into the DART system?
One of the key causes of the banality/rapid decay of much of the Sunbelt is NO ZONING LAWS!
Well said. I've got a standing offer in this thread to take a tour on the light rail through Dallas and let anyone see just how run down the neighborhoods around them are. I think a trip inside the leasing office of Mockingbird Station should quiet some of these myths.