A New Approach for the Most Notorious Trail in Dallas

A cold front blew in the Wednesday morning before Halloween, spewing winds so strong that a hawk appeared to jerk in the sky high above the trees that line the Cottonwood Creek Trail off Forest Lane in North Dallas. A hundred or so feet below, a pair of police cruisers blocked the concrete path that connects Cottonwood cyclists and walkers to the Northaven Trail, which features a pedestrian bridge that flies over Central Expressway, and the White Rock Creek Trail into East Dallas. A man was in handcuffs near a retaining wall while marshals, Dallas police, and DART cops milled about.

On the other side of that wall was a goat path leading 10 to 15 feet down into the woods below the elevated DART rail. The wall—large, stacked stones, really—created a buffer of sorts against 40 mile-per-hour gusts. A perfect place for an encampment: a quilt of plastic tarps adhered to the top of a large canopy tent, which contained a far smaller camping tent, a two-seater couch, a dentist’s chair, a cooler, a shovel, various pieces of luggage, and a crack pipe. Clothes hung on lines between trees. A Guy Fawkes mask, its jowls painted red, was tied to another tree. A less ambitious sleeper had laid a sleeping bag on some of the stones on the retaining wall, visible only to those who peer over the railing. 

Back up on the trail, the man and a woman were arrested on felony drug charges. A second woman was ticketed for drug paraphernalia. “There’s all kinds of different characters out here,” said Officer Dennis Spears, a bike cop who was summoned by the marshals, as he examined the encampment. “Mental health is a big aspect of it. Drug addiction. I asked one girl why she was out here. She’s like, ‘Well, we were staying with my friend’s mom ‘til she died, and then we had nowhere to go.’”

People like her have for years come to this juncture that provides access in all directions to the city’s trail system. And for just as long, the city has flooded the area by offering help and enforcing the law only for the issue to return once the staffers and police leave. 

“You have to understand what magnetizes a place to the behavior,” Kevin Oden, the city’s director of Emergency Management and Crisis Response, recently told the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee. “How can I break those magnets?”

One way to break them might be people. More people on the trail. More cyclists. More walkers. More bird watchers. More volunteers. The Cottonwood Creek Trail, particularly the half mile of its southern tip, has a reputation among Dallas’ trail users as a place to avoid, where it’s possible to turn a corner and suddenly come across 15 to 20 people loitering. Some may be in mental duress. Some may be starting fires. When the sun goes down, there are no lights on the trail, the adjacent woods dark as an ink blot. It is the perfect place for people who do not want to be seen. 

But something interesting is happening here. The city manager over the summer reorganized Dallas’ homeless response team into something called the Office of Emergency Management and Crisis Response, which has a dedicated division that cleans up encampments and connects individuals with service providers like The Bridge and Austin Street Shelter. They work in tandem with police and the marshals. 

And the city is now thinking about how the trail is used. Joining the regulars at the table are The Loop Dallas, the organization that is connecting 50 miles of trail around the city, and Better Block, another nonprofit that uses community feedback to inform the types of programming and amenities that can bring underused spaces to life.

Instead of only rotating blasts of enforcement and service providers, Cottonwood’s new approach incorporates design and involvement from nearby residents and trail users. Unlike the city’s more popular trails, Cottonwood has never had a volunteer “Friends Of” initiative to help maintain it. As conditions deteriorate, the camps crop back up and the response process begins anew.

“I think a lot of people are tired, and there’s a lot of cynicism around what can change this. People have been working hard on it since it opened 12 or so years ago,” says Krista Nightengale, Better Block’s CEO. “They just feel like, you know, we do something and then it just comes right back. How do we actually get to the core of that?”

In the past, the city has responded to quality-of-life issues by removing things. The trash cans are gone. There are no benches. There are no structures that provide shade. What was clearly intended as a small public plaza is now an empty concrete pad. Beginning November 17, Better Block will launch a pilot project that adds back temporary versions of what the city removed. It will study what gets used and what happens to it. Then The Loop will use those findings to determine permanent improvements.

A portion of the Cottonwood is elevated to avoid the constant flooding that pools on the neighboring White Rock Creek Trail. A good idea in theory, but unhoused people can walk around the retaining wall, slip into the trees and brush, and live in tents for a few days or weeks or months until they’re noticed, as was the case that Wednesday in late October. Camping in public is illegal, but it’s just a Class C misdemeanor, punished by a ticket. The city would much rather connect these people to services to address the root issues of why they’re living in the woods. 

That approach has had success in fits and starts, but the encampments seem to return once city employees leave. “If you’re involved in an activity you don’t want other people to see and there are a lot of people on the trail, you’re going to move that activity somewhere else,” says Philip Hiatt Haigh, the executive director of The Loop Dallas. “If this is designated as a public space, we need to have so many people from the public here that it discourages these other uses.” 

There aren’t as many encampments off Cottonwood as there once were, but they’re still common. Spears says new campers wait for police to clear a spot then move in the second officers leave. Cans and bottles and other spent detritus pile up along the creek, the result of the city removing trash cans that were used as fire barrels. No matter, the fires are now started directly on the concrete; that Wednesday, someone had used a dozen or so doughnuts as kindling. Look down every so often and you'll spot another “fire ring.”

The fact that these conditions return is emblematic of how difficult and entrenched quality-of-life problems are in parts of town like this one, where easy access to the creek and public transportation also attracts people with nowhere else to go. Despite being feet from busy Forest Lane and the DART light rail station, this stretch of trail feels eerily isolated from its surroundings. The most problematic portion appears to be no more than half a mile; those traveling on foot or bike have figured out a path around through a nearby neighborhood because they don’t feel safe. For The Loop, that’s bad business, considering its ultimate goal is to get more people on the city’s trail system.

“If someone has a bad experience on a trail, that makes them less willing to go on another,” Hiatt Haigh says.   

While the unsheltered population downtown has attracted attention from the business community and gobbled local headlines for much of 2025, the scene at Cottonwood is more reflective of the daily blocking and tackling required of the city’s homeless responders. 

“We touch it with law enforcement, we touch it with social services, we touch it by re-beautifying this community,” says Alonzo Grape, a project coordinator for homeless response with the city. “But it has to be a long-term commitment because we’re talking about long-term behavior, you know? We can’t hit it and say, ‘Okay, well, we addressed it. Let’s move on.’ We might need to stay there for a minute.” 

The City Council earlier this year approved $2.5 million for an initiative called “Street to Home,” which is what its name indicates. Get unsheltered individuals under their own roof and provide wraparound services. 

Here, it didn’t take. The needs were too complex. Grape noticed a significant “chemical dependency” issue that was “alarming.” Drug dealers supplied encampments with crack cocaine, methamphetamine, and fentanyl. So Grape asked for help from recovery nonprofits like Homeward Bound and Nexus Family Recovery Center. Last spring, this multidisciplinary effort morphed into what his team referred to as a monthlong “social services blitz,” and he says about 60 people agreed to get treatment.

The marshals come by once a week. Police make their rounds. But the people keep coming, even though this is a “decommissioned zone” that allows officers to clear encampments at any time.

“We addressed the area, got people housed, and we closed the area for illegal camping. … But when the real-time rapid rehousing initiative started to grow, we had other areas that we needed to close,” Grape says. “We didn’t put as much attention on it like we used to. Since then, it became problematic again.”

The Loop and Better Block believe physical changes to the surrounding trail might make it easier to maintain and enforce. On this Wednesday, Hiatt Haigh sees a few things that need addressing. For one, it’s obviously too easy for people to slip off the trail and into the woods, and too difficult for city employees to get equipment in to help maintain the area. The “trash trees” and underbrush should be cleared and replaced with native plants that don’t require much maintenance, and access points should be easier for city employees to get into the woods.

There’s a shuttered gas station across from the trail, and the fencing surrounding it wasn’t secure; a man sat against the building, drinking a tall boy. Forest Lane sails over the trail, and the underpass is visible only once you approach it. Police say the location hides drug sales and encourages loitering—it’s the only shaded portion within a few miles. The only lighting is near the DART stop, not on the trail itself. The only signage or wayfinding is to mark the split between the Northaven and White Rock Creek trails. Cottonwood’s path continues into the forest without a map or a marker, adding to that sense of isolation if you’re unfamiliar.

Better Block and The Loop are approaching this in a somewhat radical way, by admitting the trail is a public space for everyone, even the homeless. (So long as they are not camping.) That means bringing the trash cans back—they’ll be made of CMU, or concrete masonry units, that Better Block will design to make them difficult to use as a firepit. And they’ll be too heavy to walk away. Lighting is planned. The organization is putting trash grabber tools along the trail, a suggestion from one of the unsheltered folks. They expect them to disappear, but maybe they won’t. “Let’s just try it,” Nightengale says. “Let’s put some out there and let’s just see what kind of behavior that can encourage from all users of the trail.”

Nightengale hopes new shade structures near the trail’s entrance will lure some of the loiterers away from under the bridge, where the most comfortable seating is upon large stones onto which the city has welded metal strips. So they cross the creek instead. In the summer, dozens of people sit on the retaining wall opposite the trail under Forest Lane, which is clearly not its intended use. 

Still: “If we’re taking something away that people want, it needs to be replaced,” says Hiatt Haigh. Meaning, if that wall is removed, other seating should be installed in plain sight, to discourage the drug sales while providing shade. 

Better Block began its Cottonwood work with a survey. It received nearly 150 responses, from runners, cyclists, residents in the Hamilton Park neighborhood just north of the trail, Forest Lane DART riders, former trail users, and even the unsheltered. Some of those volunteered to join a core team that advises on programming and amenities. About half of the respondents said they didn’t feel safe using the trail and pointed to issues such as loitering, abandoned and neglected areas, and the isolated feeling created because of the trail’s design. Many said they would prefer the homeless issue to be solved before amenities are added back. 

That isn’t a new sentiment. In 2023, the district’s former councilman, Adam McGough, described the trail as nearly “unusable.” The city’s parks director told the Dallas Morning News about three years ago that its staffers had spent 18 months targeting the area. Now approaching 2026, the record still skips. “It’s like Groundhog Day meets Whac-a-Mole,” Spears said from outside the encampment. 

But in recent weeks, other people have started returning. About 50 have come to weekend bird watching events and a cleanup organized by Greenspace Dallas. It’s not a lot, but it’s a start. This effort is a new experiment for the city, which seems to be a realization that what it has done in the past is not enough to solve the endemic issues that attract people to the woods just beyond the pavement. What if thinking about the trail itself is what has been missing? And what could that mean for other pockets of the city that mirror these problems? 

In the meantime, officers like Spears will again be traipsing through the trees, no doubt thinking about the next time they’ll be called back. 

Matt Goodman is the co-founder and editor of The Lab Report. [email protected].

We’ll send a new story to your inbox every Wednesday. Have a friend who would appreciate it? We’d love for you to forward this email to them.

The Lab Report Dallas is a local journalism project published by the Child Poverty Action Lab (CPAL). Its newsroom operates with editorial independence.

© 2025 Child Poverty Action Lab. All rights reserved.