On one of the most dangerous blocks in Dallas, the 103-degree heat of a Tuesday afternoon in August didn’t subdue the brisk sale of drugs and sex. Young men in this far southwest Oak Cliff neighborhood migrated back and forth between the Happy Mart convenience store and a nearby low-budget motel. Every few minutes, cars pulled into the store’s parking lot for hasty exchanges of cash and small plastic bags.
Young women in skintight neon dresses strolled closer to the street. Hearing a vehicle approach, each paused to strike a pose. One whose purple wig matched her miniskirt leaned far into a driver’s window for several minutes then walked purposely toward a motel, the car trailing behind her.
Two blocks away, women clad in T-shirts and sun-defying wide-brimmed hats scanned oncoming traffic for a different reason. Finally, the school buses carrying their children rolled up. After quick hugs, the mothers hurried their kids toward home, walking past a boarded-up furniture store, lots strewn with Colt 45 cans and diapers, and one of the neighborhood’s homeless encampments. Dodging the occasional illegal sidewalk transaction, the families never slowed before disappearing behind the locked gates of apartments and extended-stay motels.
“What’s most heartbreaking to me is that literally all day every day the kids in this neighborhood have to walk past the prostitutes and drug dealers,” says James Traylor, an owner of the Preferred Place Apartments, a sprawling complex in the heart of the community. “Those kids that, you know, deserve to have a healthy, safe, and clean place to call home are right in the middle of these problems.”
This is the daily reality for residents in the small neighborhood of Independence Triangle, nestled between West Camp Wisdom Road and Interstate 20 about a mile west of The Shops at RedBird. The roughly 800 people who live in its three apartment complexes include teachers, small-business owners, and nonprofit and service industry staffers. Several hundred more can’t afford anything more than one of the cut-rate motels, where rooms rent for as little as $40 a night.
“There are a lot of good people in this neighborhood,” says Isaac Burren, senior director of programs and operations at the community nonprofit affiliated with nearby Concord Church. “Unfortunately, regardless of circumstance, all these people have had good reasons not to feel seen or safe here.”
Police statistics back up Burren’s words. Two days before Christmas, an argument outside the Happy Mart led to one man fatally shooting another. In the first six months of 2026, violent crime increased significantly in the square mile that includes the convenience store and four motels, one of which is vacant and owned by the city. Between January and June, 29 violent crimes — 19 aggravated assaults and 10 robberies — were reported in the area. That is almost double the 15 violent crimes during the same period in 2025.
Independence Triangle isn’t an anomaly, but one of many neighborhoods throughout Dallas where violence and blight threaten residents who are unable to afford housing elsewhere. These are communities neglected for so long that people involved in illegal activities are confident their lawbreaking will go unnoticed. Over time, violence proliferates.
But today Independence Triangle has a fighting chance to be a safer, cleaner community — thanks to a coalition of community champions whose efforts could have a powerful payoff for all of the Red Bird area.
Substantial new security measures kicked off this month to supplement Dallas police efforts in Independence Triangle and adjacent neighborhoods. Cleanup and beautification teams have also arrived. Both initiatives are courtesy of the Red Bird Public Improvement District, or PID, which won City Council approval last year.
The Red Bird PID runs a little over a mile west from U.S. Highway 67 to Cockrell Hill Road and reaches just north of Camp Wisdom and south to Interstate 20. Property owners within a PID contribute money through a special tax assessment, and those funds are reinvested into projects intended to improve the district. But because a new PID doesn’t begin generating revenue for a year or two, City Council member Zarin Gracey jumpstarted its “safe and clean” priority by contributing $200,000 from District 3’s remaining federal pandemic-recovery funds.
“I wanted to get this work rolling as fast as we could so people can begin feeling safe over there,” Gracey says.
Soon after Gracey was elected in 2023, Traylor called him to plead for help in protecting Preferred Place residents from growing violent crime. Gracey held a National Night Out event in the neighborhood, the first of many listening sessions with neighbors, police, businesses, and nonprofits that ended with the council member asking, “How do we restore that area back to a thriving community?”
“People see the crime, the blight, the homelessness, but it’s easy to overlook people trying to survive in the motels or apartments,” Gracey says. “Those families are what motivate me to make this area better.”
Gracey hopes to stamp out the problems emanating from the motels through an affordable housing deal making its way through City Hall. In July, the Dallas Housing Finance Corporation board approved the first of several decisions on the financing to purchase three of the four motels along Independence Drive. Dallas-based Titanium Housing Partners wants to raze the structures and build an apartment development with more than 250 units and office space for social services. Gracey expects the deal to come to the City Council this fall.
The proposal includes a motel, vacant since 2022, that the city of Dallas bought to house homeless individuals, a plan abandoned due to deterioration and infrastructure problems.
“The source of a lot of the drug use and prostitution are those motels,” Gracey says. “The PID putting more security in place to supplement police means the motels and convenience stores are now being watched closely.”
Council member Lorie Blair, whose adjacent District 8 includes The Shops at RedBird, partnered with Gracey to push the PID forward. “This district makes us one entity, like a city within a city to accomplish something big together,” she says. “The PID gives us the opportunity to do the things we need to do, things that one entity can’t do by itself.”
Gracey and Blair both credit Peter Brodsky, CEO of The Shops at RedBird, as the catalyst for improving the area’s retail and economic outlook. In 2015, Brodsky bought the property, where the once vibrant Red Bird Mall had dissolved into a ghost town, and created a mixed-use development with amenities previously lacking in this part of the city. Today, UT Southwestern and Parkland Health both have multi-service clinics in the complex, and a Children’s Health facility is under construction. A Dallas College workforce training hub and the Dallas Entrepreneurial Center also are located at RedBird.
Because Brodsky’s development accounts for about 45% of commercial property within the district, his backing was crucial to winning sufficient support from business owners to create the PID. While The Shops at RedBird already has 24-7 security and beautification projects on its 100-acre development, Brodsky says, the PID goals align with his longtime vision. “The whole purpose of this development is that we want the whole area to thrive,” he says. “They’re very focused on Independence, where there’s a lot of crime, and we’re willing to pay our fair share of that.”
For more than a decade, Brodsky has watched as properties owned by out-of-state landlords to the north and west of his development became increasingly rundown. “They don’t invest in beautification, landscaping, lighting, or security,” he says. “This PID forces them to pay to get the work done or eventually sell.”
Terrence Maiden, co-developer of The Shops at RedBird and board chair of the PID, and Preferred Place ownership did the heavy lifting to set up the special district. Even with the support of Brodsky, whose development makes up much of the property value and land area in the PID, more support was required from among the 141 properties within its proposed boundaries. “We were pounding the pavement, knocking on doors, explaining what we’re trying to accomplish,” Maiden says. “It took a lot of work.”
Traylor and Paul Brady, one of his business partners, chased down ownership groups from coast to coast through phone calls and letters. They didn’t expect such a research project when they acquired the apartment complex in 2019, Traylor says, “But we knew if we can get crime under control and deter it, we can create a better overall living standard for people in the area by Red Bird.”
In addition to reducing crime and blight, the PID’s focus eventually will include business growth as well as events and the creation of community spaces. But nothing is more important than first making Independence Triangle safe and inviting, says Maiden, whose Russell Glen development firm is named for the street he grew up on, just three miles northeast of the struggling neighborhood.
“Bad is an understatement in describing the Independence area,” he says. “It’s been sort of like no holds barred. It’s tough to police because the drug dealing and prostitution happens all throughout the day and night.”
Key to the PID’s public safety initiative is the Dallas Police Department’s RedBird Outreach Center, the ROC, led by Sgt. Karlon Bedford. ROC operations encompass a five-mile radius from its headquarters in The Shops at RedBird.
He and his team of eight officers scour daily crime reports, stay in contact with business and apartment owners, and work with senior citizen centers and schools. Even though they aren’t patrol officers, they always keep one ear tuned to the police scanner.
“We wear two hats,” Bedford says. “We have a pretty high responsibility to answer the calls in the area. Being on scene is what gives us our marching orders for what needs to be done.”
Everyone who has a hand in the community building in Independence Triangle credits Bedford and the ROC for responding to public safety concerns and matching public and private resources with residents’ needs.
As a founding ROC member in 2016, Bedford has seen the transformation of the old mall and surrounding area. “Those businesses — the medical facilities, the Starbucks, the new McDonald’s that’s coming. They wouldn’t be coming if they felt they couldn’t succeed.”
But improving public safety in Independence Triangle has been much more difficult, he says. “There’s a rooted criminal element in the motels. We can go in and enforce, but once they leave, the next group comes in.”
Bedford hopes the newly formed PID’s efforts will not only reduce violence and blight but combat the long-held belief by many residents and business owners that the area’s quality of life will never improve. “The No. 1 problem is apathy,” he says. “That this is the way Camp Wisdom and Westmoreland are and will always be. All of us are pushing a shared community standard that things can change.”
Bedford pointed to Red Bird Landing, an outdoor gathering place that provides play areas and social services, as an example of how small transformations can add up in troubled neighborhoods. “The beautification there, the basketball court and soccer space. It may sound simple, but it really makes a difference,” he says.
Patrick Averhart, who led Red Bird Landing’s creation in June 2025 as the Child Poverty Action Lab’s senior director of neighborhood insights, says the project aligns with the new PID’s “clean and safe” mantra. In addition to providing a much-needed recreation area for young people, he says, the services offered by partner organizations at the site can help heal the community. “The hope is by putting resources into the community, that will help those who commit crime out of need.”
(The Lab Report is a local journalism project published by the Child Poverty Action Lab. Our newsroom operates with editorial independence.)
The theme voiced by everyone involved in the Independence Triangle work is that it requires law enforcement, businesses, elected leaders, city staff, churches and nonprofits showing up at the same table and pushing relentlessly in the same direction. That may sound like Community Building 101, but too often working in silos remains the norm. PID chair Maiden hopes the new Red Bird District “can be the thread that more tightly knits the various helpers and their resources together.”
Vana Hammond, a board member with Concord Church’s Harmony Community Development Corporation, has long known of Independence Triangle’s challenges. As a community prosecutor 15 years ago, she dealt regularly with its problematic motels. “All the layers of helpers are absolutely necessary because you need the hammer and the carrot,” she says. “You have to have the institutions people trust, the enforcement partners, the businesses. Everybody has a job to do.”
Harmony has poured resources into Independence Triangle, from rental assistance to free hygiene kits. Burren, its senior director, says Harmony’s partnership with the PID is critical because “you can’t talk about economic development and public safety without talking about stabilizing individuals’ lives.”
Many of the residents, especially those in the motels, are “barrier heavy,” Burren says. “They are victims of poor education and few opportunities. They have perhaps been incarcerated, down a road that’s hard to walk back.” That’s where Harmony can help, Burren says, because it has programs to break through the barriers.
Averhart says what’s happening in Independence Triangle and adjacent neighborhoods is unlike anything he’s seen in his six years of community-building efforts in Dallas. “The area organizations, the councilman’s office, the city itself, developers — everybody’s in the same accord in terms of what needs to happen,” he says.
True change will take time, Averhart says, but he and the others working to improve Independence Triangle are anything but discouraged, especially with the new PID and a solution for the crime-ridden motels in the works. “Very rarely do you have everybody aligned when it comes to this type of stuff in the same part of town,“ he says. “We all want to get this right.”
Sharon Grigsby is the co-founder and senior staff writer of The Lab Report. sharon@labreportdallas.com.
