West Dallas residents fight displacement as new townhomes reshape community
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“We actually feel like the place that time has forgotten — not important. Not significant. They don’t care.”
These words from Gloria Johnson describe her West Dallas neighborhood of Gilbert-Emory. Johnson is frustrated with the almost daily calls she receives from people wanting to buy her home, and the rapid influx of new, much larger houses than those originally built in her historically Black working-class neighborhood.
The longtime neighbors of Gilbert-Emory are watching their community vanish, one half-million-dollar townhome at a time. And Dallas ISD’s sale of the land where the segregated Black Fred Douglass School one stood may have accelerated Gilbert-Emory’s gentrification. We created a timeline to illustrate that story.
These Dallas Free Press stories were part of a collaborative project with the Dallas Morning News and KERA, two of our partners in the Dallas Media Collaborative. We’re working with other local media, universities and nonprofit partners to examine potential solutions to the challenges of creating and keeping housing affordable in this city.
We know there isn’t a single or simple solution to the affordable housing crisis in Dallas. But our story touches on several efforts to stay in their homes and to benefit from generational wealth developed through the primary solution — ownership.
“You have to own land to control land,”says Heather Way, a law professor at the University of Texas in Austin who has worked with West Dallas residents on these issues. She built an anti-displacement toolkit for the State of Texas that nonprofit Builders of Hope, run by James Armstrong and several other West Dallas residents, is using to develop one specifically for Dallas.
“We know that preserving existing affordable housing is the most efficient and, oftentimes, the least costly way to assure that affordable housing remains within the community,” Armstrong says in the story. “We lose the fight every time a homeowner sells to a speculative developer.”
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Keri Mitchell has spent 20+ years as a community journalist, including 15 years dedicated to community and civic journalism at Dallas’ Advocate magazines. She launched Dallas Free Press in early 2020 with the belief that all neighborhoods deserve reporting and storytelling that values their community and holds leaders accountable.
Mitchell says she is energized by “knowing our work is making an impact — listening to people, telling their stories with strong narratives paired with compelling data that leads to change. I also love spending time in our neighborhoods and with our neighbors, learning from them and working to determine how journalism can be part of the solution to their challenges.”
Mitchell is proud to be the winner of multiple awards during her journalism career including: Finalist in Magazine Feature Reporting (2018) and Finalist in Magazine Investigative Reporting (2017) from Hugh Aynesworth Excellence in Journalism, Best Feature Story (2011) from Texas Community Newspaper Association and Best Magazine Feature (2011) from Dallas Bar Association Philbin Awards.
Areas of Expertise:
local government, education, civic issues, investigative and enterprise reporting
Location Expertise:
Dallas, Texas
Official Title:
Founder + executive director
Email Address:
keri@dallasfreepress.com
