In one of the biggest housing displacement projects ever, Wal-Mart has proposed tearing down 1,100 apartments, mostly occupied by low-income and working class families, just so the company can build another superstore in the already congested Dallas, Texas market. Local residents sent the following distress signal to Sprawl- Busters today: “We have seen your website and are hoping that you can help us with our fight. We live in the North Dallas, Vickery Meadow section of Dallas, Texas. We live in an apartment complex, Timber Creek Apartments. The complex is a moderate priced complex where there are over 1,100 apartments occupied by working people, made up mostly of recent immigrants. We are fighting a large company, Trammell Crow who is trying to tear down our apartments and build a Wal-Mart. They are meeting in front of the City Council on April 26th. The people that own the apartments have been telling us nothing but lies. They have told individual tenants “your apartment will remain.” They have also told other residents that they are building apartment towers to replace their homes. When they went before the planning board they had no replacement apartments in their plan. They noted that there are 1,100 vacant apartments in the “general vicinity”. What they do not say is that those apartments are double and sometimes triple the rent. We have also learned that Trammell Crow and its employees, the largest developer in Dallas, has given
the District City Councilor who is now running for Mayor, Gary Griffith, $14,000 in the last election. We need help in fighting this. Could you please ask your readers to call the Dallas City Council especially Councilor Gary Griffith. His City Hall phone number is 214-670-4069.
Attention Sprawl-Busters! Please pick up the phone and call Councilor Griffith and tell him that 1,100 residents of North Dallas are worth more than another Wal-Mart supercenter. The landowner stands to make a bundle, and moving these families is just the high cost of doing business with Wal-Mart. It’s hard to believe that Wal-Mart, in its drive to build supercenters every five miles, has to displace hundreds of people from their homes in order to capture more sales in North Dallas. Texas, by the way, leads the nation in abandoned Wal-Mart stores. For years Texas has been #1 on Sprawl-Busters’ “Dark Stores” survey. This land in North Dallas is clearly not zoned correctly, because it holds hundreds of apartment. Maybe this is what Wal-Mart means when they promised to build 50 stores in economically distressed areas. First they have to move the economically distressed people out from under their footprint.
