2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

236 Strengthening Communities with Neighborhood Data
patterns of disadvantage in the city and the urgency of addressing the
gaps. As one strategy to accomplish this, the mayor instituted the Mayor’s
Southern Dallas Task Force, 17 which divided Southern Dallas into
10 neighborhoods and brought citizens and business leaders together
over two years to suggest plans for improvement in each neighborhood.
Strategies ranged from smaller steps, like neighborhood branding campaigns
and new security cameras in business areas, to larger ones, like
reopening a hospital or bringing more retail to the neighborhoods.
Despite raised expectations, the task force recommendations got
little attention from policymakers (University of Texas at Dallas 2008;
Dallas Morning News 2009). The DMN staff planned to call on the city
government to seriously consider the recommendations of the task
force, but instead of a stand-alone editorial, they decided to reinforce
their argument with a rich portrait of South Dallas. This special section
would include neighborhood conditions and advocate for policies
and programs to improve conditions for residents there. The DMN staff
approached the authors of the Wholeness Index to assemble and analyze
many sources of data to illustrate the disparities between northern and
southern Dallas. (The Williams Institute had recently been renamed the
Institute of Urban Policy and Research and moved to the University of
Texas at Dallas.) The researchers worked closely with DMN staff to identify
five focus neighborhoods in South Dallas and provided information
for each neighborhood that described their demographics, health conditions,
crime, and education outcomes.
The Institute of Urban Policy and Research team saw the limitations
of the secondary data and also conducted a two-month windshield survey.
The institute trained members of its Community Research Team,
who were residents of South Dallas communities, to systematically collect
information about land use, housing conditions, walkability, and other
quality-of-life factors. These data were then assembled into a mapping
program that allowed the exploration and summary of these physical
characteristics by neighborhood.
The institute’s work with DMN resulted in a major eight-page spread
in a Sunday paper in September 2009, complete with maps, data, and stories
about the five South Dallas neighborhoods. The collection of articles
documented current disparities, highlighted programs that were helping
to close the gap, and called for additional investments in the neighborhoods.
The impressive feature section earned the DMN editorial staff a
Pulitzer Prize in 2010 for editorial writing (Wilkins 2010).