Last week, Fort Worth fired its man in charge of handling funds for inner-city housing – mostly money from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Housing Director Jerome Walker was canned, in part, because the city couldn’t tell HUD where $11 million a year was being spent, why the department had processed only six loans out of 200 inquiries, and why the contractors hired by the city had been allowed to do substandard work.
Virtually that same picture was laid out in 2007 in two cover stories by Fort Worth Weekly‘s Betty Brink (“Broken Homes,” May 9, and “Shaky Foundation,” June 27, the latter with then-intern Jesseca Bagherpour). The stories quoted numerous residents and attorneys who said they had brought the issue to Mayor Mike Moncrief to no avail. In 2008, the city merged the Housing Department with its Economic Development Department. Until last week, that was the only visible response to the profound problems described in those stories.
What intrigued Static was Mayor Mike’s response to Walker’s firing. “I have to ask myself, had these departments not been merged, would we have ever known what is going on here?” the mayor told city council. “This is embarrassing.”
Perhaps the mayor should follow his own advice. He is sponsoring “Mayor Mike’s Summer Reading Challenge” with the Fort Worth library. Maybe he should read the Weekly to see what is going on at city hall. Or at least listen to the common folks when they bring him their city-caused problems.
Luring the Hipsters
Speaking of the Weekly‘s role as prognosticator, the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce is bringing in noted urban theorist and author Richard Florida to speak at its annual meeting on June 9 about the importance of creative young people as the city’s economic engine. The Weekly raised that issue in a cover story by Dan McGraw (“Creative Class Struggle,” July 14, 2005), which detailed how Tarrant County was losing young people while other urban counties in the state were adding thousands of these hipsters. The reasons for Fort Worth’s creative drain? A lack of a younger people’s art scene or entertainment districts appealing to that crowd and little in the way of high-tech job growth.
Since that story ran, Tarrant has made some progress in keeping the young folks around. All the big-city Texas counties saw declines in the 20-34 age group because of birth rates, but Tarrant went down the least (about 1 percent), compared to about 3 percent for Travis, Harris, and Dallas counties. The bad news is that Tarrant still has fewer of the 20- to 34-year-olds as a percentage of its population than those three.
Florida advocates the notion that lots of gays and rock bands and skateboarders are good for local economies. Static is curious about how the chamber of commerce will respond to that. We can already see the blank looks forming on a lot of business-elite faces as they hear that message.
