How Dallas Free Press is covering the proposed Sunny South Dallas PID

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The land in question encompasses roughly 1,375 parcels in South Dallas, totaling 7 million square feet and $375.95 million in property value.

That’s according to Scottie Smith II, a community developer and the lead proponent of a Sunny South Dallas Public Improvement District, or PID, who is trying to convince enough of his neighbors to pay Dallas County extra fees, based on their property values, to generate an estimated $9 million over the next decade.

That’s money that can be spent on increased police patrols, landscaping, sidewalks and drainage, Smith argues. And as development escalates in South Dallas, he believes those new property owners will be responsible for the bulk of the PID payments, while a community-led board of directors, managed by Forest Forward, will decide where and how the money flows.

“We’re at a really, really interesting point in South Dallas,” Smith says, “and knowing the amount of development coming over here that I have wind of, coming up and down the MLK corridor, I’m afraid there’s not going to be a way for the community to benefit from that, for real.”

Not everyone agrees with Smith. We at Dallas Free Press are hearing from plenty of neighbors with questions and concerns. So here’s how we’re following the proposed improvement district:

• We’ve already reported about the last failed PID in South Dallas, with a dollars and cents rundown in 2020, then answers to questions raised by property owners, some of whom didn’t know they were paying an annual fee to the City on top of their property taxes.
• We followed up when the Pointe South Revitalization Committee led a successful protest against renewing the South Dallas Fair Park PID.
• In a recent Dallas Documenters newsletter, we introduced Smith’s proposed “Sunny South Dallas” PID and action steps to participate in the process.
• All community information sessions are on our South Dallas event calendar, (such as the one today at 11 a.m.). We’re also sharing them in our weekly text messages, and attending several, including the PID forum at next Monday’s Pointe South Business Group meeting
• The tallest opposition to the PID may not be a South Dallas resident or business owner, but the neighborhood’s last go-round a decade ago. That one, too, involved promises made by grassroots efforts to build an improvement district accountable to the community, before it abruptly failed when hundreds of thousands of dollars property owners contributed the first two years disappeared, unaccounted for.We’ve asked veteran local reporter Christina Hughes Babb, who is as familiar with real estate and housing issues as she is with community journalism, to explore what really happened and whether the City’s PID structure — which currently supports 13 improvement districts across Dallas — would prevent another such catastrophe.
• Babb also will help us build a PID FAQ reflecting the questions we hear neighbors asking. (Do you have one?)

The goal of all of this is not to advocate for or against the PID, but to make sure you have whatever information you need to make a decision, and to know the action steps to make your voice heard.

And if you don’t, we invite you to let us know.