Park South YMCA reopens, DHA breaks ground on senior housing in Bonton

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In Sunny South Dallas, summer is not slowing down.

Community meetings about DART transportation cuts, zoning reform, newly approved area plans and a proposed tower are keeping neighbors plenty busy. 

Dallas Free Press’ neighborhood calendar is full and overflowing, with back-to-school events already popping up in late July and August. (Is your event listed? If not, add it here!)

And then there are all of the groundbreakings and openings and re-openings, such as the telehealth initiative that relaunched at Salem Institutional Baptist Church last weekend with a renewed emphasis on wellness. 

Also in Queen City, the Park South YMCA, which had been closed since September 2023, reopened in June after being reconstructed from the group up. The new $15 million building includes features such as a ground-level indoor pool for its medal-winning competitive swim team, and a gym with a full-size basketball court.

Down the road in Bonton, Dallas Housing Authority broke ground the same morning on a new housing project, The Culbreath, named for DHA’s current board chair, Betty Culbreath. The $96.7 million project is expected to open in summer 2027 with 364 one- and two-bedroom units specifically designed for seniors.

Lifelong neighborhood resident Sherri Mixon, who is on DHA’s Bonton Master Plan Advisory Committee, hopes the project will be an antidote to the “soft gentrification” resulting from increased housing stock and escalating housing costs in the neighborhood, and give residents who want to grow old in South Dallas the opportunity to stay.

“This property alone can make this community whole, because it holds such a large parcel in our community,” says Mixon, who also is the president and CEO of TR Hoover Community Development Corporation. “So it’s our hope that with this property, we will extend a door opening for community residents who are low-income, who are median-income, and those who love this neighborhood to come back because of the diversity of housing offered here.”

Another member of DHA’s Bonton Master Plan Advisory Committee, Clifton Reese, is hopeful about the promise of “not only restoration but transformation” that the new project might bring to his neighborhood.

“I grew up on this property. I watched a lot of lives literally grow and develop here,” says Reese, the founder of Bonton United, who lived there as a child in the Rhoads Terrace public housing. DHA demolished the projects in 2009, and the land has sat vacant for the last 16 years. 

“If there’s no economic engine that comes through here, I think it’s just going to be a lot of affordable housing, and our community is going to suffer continually,” Reese says. “But if, you know, we start thinking outside the box, not just affordable housing, I love that.”