Editor’s note: Take a look back in The Dallas Morning News Archives.
This year’s Community Health Needs Assessment, published last month by the Parkland Health and Hospital System and Dallas County Health and Human Services, detailed a slew of health issues that continue to plague South Dallas. Residents living in that area’s ZIP codes suffer from high mortality rates and a lack of access to sufficient health care, according to the Parkland report.
It’s not the first time the city has documented health problems in South Dallas.
Unhealthy history
On Oct. 23, 1994, The News ran a front-page story by staff writers Craig Flournoy and Randy Lee Loftis on the city’s plans to address elevated lead levels discovered in children.
The CHNA showed that South Dallas areas with two ZIP codes — 75215 and 75210 — had the lowest life expectancy in the county. Back in 1994, a state-sponsored test reported that 25% of children living within those same ZIP codes had elevated levels of lead in their blood — nearly twice as high as any other neighborhood. The main focus of the Flournoy and Loftis story, however, was how the city had excluded those neighborhoods from its plan to address the problem.
The city’s plan, outlined in a grant application to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, asked for $6 million to fund anti-lead efforts in “a few selected neighborhoods of East and South Dallas and Oak Cliff,” a set of neighborhoods previously designated for another federally funded renovation project, the Neighborhood Renaissance Program.
The city’s argument for focusing on these neighborhoods was the presence of old housing that was sure to contain lead paint. The city also relied on data from tests that reached a total of 62 children. By comparison, the state-sponsored tests — conducted through Texas’ Medicaid program — reached somewhere around 15,000.
When approached by The News for a comment, Don Ryan, executive director of the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, expressed skepticism about the accuracy of the city’s study. “That doesn’t sound like a study — it sounds more like dabbling.”
Even the city planner who prepared the application, Dr. Douglas Frederick, acknowledged the limitations of Dallas’ data. “This is not a strong statistical argument that it needs to be done in these (target) neighborhoods, but it’s the best we have,” Frederick said.
HUD officials declined to elaborate on what they thought of the city’s application. But nine days after Flournoy and Loftis’ article was published, HUD announced the names of 36 cities and state governments that would receive a share of $140 million to fund anti-lead efforts. Dallas was not among them.
On March 23, 1995, the city was awarded $25 million to fund renovation projects in the Renaissance neighborhoods. The issue of elevated lead levels in the 75210 and 75215 ZIP codes has yet to reappear in Dallas Morning News reporting.
There are more stories about the city’s troubled history with South Dallas waiting in our archives. Gain access by becoming a Plus subscriber at archives.dallasnews.com.
