Dallas, TX

Vacant Oak Cliff hospital building languishes amid rancor

Published

10 months ago

March 3, 2025

Vacant Oak Cliff hospital building languishes amid rancor

What was once a community asset in central Oak Cliff will likely become just another missed opportunity for Dallas.

The asset is a 12-acre tract of parking lots and dormant lawn anchored by a vacant hospital building. The city of Dallas bought the property in 2022 with $6.5 million in bond funds meant to provide housing and services to homeless people.

Three years later, it sits idle, generating mostly rancor and frustration.

It could be so much more. It’s in a convenient location. Twelve acres is nine football fields. That’s enough room for townhomes — for purchase or rent — and perhaps a modest amount of co-working or office or retail space.

There is even enough space for the empty hospital to fulfill its intended, though highly controversial, purpose as permanent supportive housing. The building’s upper floors could be repurposed into small but functional studio apartments for formerly homeless individuals. Residents would be screened before they’re offered a lease, and supervised once they move in.

With a thoughtful site plan as one safeguard, the renovated hospital could co-exist with other uses on the property. More important, it could co-exist safely and peacefully with the surrounding residential neighborhood and nearby library and Brashear Elementary school.

District 3 Dallas City Council member Zarin Gracey, who represents the area, wants to sell the property. He suggests the city could use the proceeds to renovate a vacant hotel in his district that the city also bought with homeless facility bond funds. But that wood-frame building near Interstate 20 is in worse shape than the concrete hospital, and in a much worse location. The hospital property will provide a better return on taxpayers’ investment.

In happier times, the property at Hampton Road and Perryton Drive bustled with activity.

Dallas Family Hospital, owned by a company in Pennsylvania, opened in 1985. It had 104 patient rooms, all private, eight ICU beds and a 24-hour emergency room. A Dallas ISD janitor who was struck by lightning at work was treated there, as were accident victims. Dallas high school students interested in health care careers completed short-term operating room internships at the hospital.

The campus also housed the offices of Dallas Southwest Osteopathic Physicians Inc., and its affiliated foundation, and a satellite learning center for Mountain View college. A medical building provided offices for doctors. Those buildings remain on the campus.

In the mid-2000s, Dallas ISD and the city of Dallas collaborated to build a new elementary school and branch library across Perryton Drive from the hospital. The library is closest to the hospital and connects to the school via an enclosed walkway.

Apartments for tenants over 55 were built on land behind the hospital. On the southeast corner of Hampton Road and Perryton Drive, Kiest Park sprawls south and east for 263 acres. It’s well-loved and well-used by residents of all ages.

Dallas Family Hospital changed names and changed ownership multiple times and eventually closed in 2014. The property’s ownership reverted to the osteopathic physicians’ group.

A few years later, a local developer and a nonprofit organization attempted to work with the owner on a mixed-use project that would have included affordable housing. The owners never signed off and the plan fell apart. Then the city bought the property.

To say that city leaders, both elected and professional, mishandled initial community outreach is like saying Hurricane Harvey was a bit damp: A gross understatement.

In news stories, residents said they knew nothing about the deal to buy the hospital and were angry when they learned it might be used for housing and services for homeless people. The city didn’t return calls or emails for comment for this editorial.

Two people interviewed for this editorial said an early community meeting grew so tense they were afraid it would devolve into a physical fight. Those poisonous interactions undermined the chance of developing a project that answered neighbors’ concerns and helped alleviate the city’s homeless crisis.

As challenging as it may be, we need to keep trying.

Critics have valid concerns. The vacant hospital is near an elementary school. It is not an appropriate location for a year-round homeless shelter, an inclement weather shelter, or walk-up or drop-off crisis intervention services. That said, landscaping and new construction, such as townhomes, could serve as attractive, multipurpose buffers between the hospital property and the library.

They also note that District 3 has two sites intended for homeless facilities, while a few districts have none. Small wonder some Oak Cliff residents feel their community is being asked to do more than its fair share. The city should offload District 3’s second site, the hotel near I-20, and lagging council districts need to step up.

Some District 3 residents say, as Gracey did at a recent housing committee meeting, that “right in that particular area, there isn’t a homeless problem.” That’s not what we saw.

On a recent weekday afternoon, as parents waiting to pick up their children from Brashear Elementary backed up traffic along Hampton Road, a sunburned, shirtless man pushed a grocery cart with a jumble of possessions along the sidewalk next to the school. Inside the library, another apparently homeless man sat quietly near a window, surrounded by a collection of plastic grocery bags.

Homelessness is a citywide problem.

At Gracey’s behest, the city will develop a request for information, a way to test whether there is a market for the hospital property. It’s a complicated property. Almost any redevelopment would require zoning changes, and at least one of the ancillary buildings onsite has multiple owners, according to appraisal district records.

Permanent supportive housing could succeed at the site, but only if neighbors are partners in the planning for it, and only if a different entity, perhaps a nonprofit organization, leads the process. The property has space for other uses, too. It could become a community asset again.

We welcome your thoughts in a letter to the editor. See the guidelines and submit your letter here. If you have problems with the form, you can submit via email at letters@dallasnews.com

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Dallas, TX

Packers star Micah Parsons heads to Dallas while awaiting ACL surgery

Published

3 hours ago

December 16, 2025

Press Room

Packers star Micah Parsons heads to Dallas while awaiting ACL surgery

GREEN BAY – Packers edge rusher Micah Parsons won’t be with the team as he awaits surgery on his torn left ACL.

But it’s for a good reason.

“He’s about to have another child here pretty quick,” Packers coach Matt LaFleur said Dec. 16 in his press conference.

Parsons has a home in the Dallas area and has returned there for the birth of his third child. He has not had surgery on his knee and LaFleur said he did not have a timeline on when that might occur.

Typically, doctors allow swelling to go down before they operate to repair the ligament, and so it’s possible surgery hasn’t been scheduled.

Parsons tore his ACL late in the third quarter of the Packers’ 34-26 loss to the Broncos on Dec. 14. Tests confirmed the injury Dec. 15.

LaFleur said he didn’t know if Parsons would have the surgery in Dallas.

As for the rest of the season, LaFleur said he thought Parsons would be around to support his teammates once his child is born and his medical situation is settled.

“He’ll be around, for sure,” LaFleur said.

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Dallas, TX

City Hall’s future is an opportunity for its leadership

Published

15 hours ago

December 16, 2025

Press Room

City Hall’s future is an opportunity for its leadership

Recent activities reminded me of a simple roadmap I laid out in these pages (Aug. 31, 2025, “Lessons from George W. Bush, his institution”) for effective leadership: providing safety, security, solvency and sanity.

In short, great leadership should provide physical safety for those being led and the security that they can trust the institutions to govern intelligently and with their best interests at heart, while ensuring both the financial solvency of the enterprise and the sanity to keep the place focused optimistically on the future.

Good leadership should do what it is strong at and be intellectually honest to own up to what it does not do well. Then, it should simply stop wasting time on those things outside its core competency. As my former boss was prone to pointing out — a government should do fewer things, but do them well!

As it relates to the current debate over the future of Dallas City Hall, applying these basic principles is instructive as the issue touches each of these priorities.

Our city government should exit the real estate business, since it is clearly not its core competency, especially given its record of mismanagement of City Hall over the years as well as other well-documented and costly recent real estate dalliances. It is time to own that track record and begin to be better stewards of taxpayer money. Plus, given the large vacancies in existing downtown buildings, relocating city functions as a renter will be much more economical.

The definition of insanity is to do the same thing and expect different results. Thinking that the city will be able to remediate City Hall’s issues in a permanent and economically feasible way is naïve. It is time for sanity to prevail — for the city to move on from an anachronistic building that is beyond repair, returning that land to the tax rolls while saving both tenancy costs and reducing downtown office vacancies at the same time.

I appreciate that the iconic architect’s name on the building is a city asset and demolition would toss that aside. But our neglect up to this point is evidence that it was already being tossed, just one unaddressed issue at a time. While punting is not ideal, neither is being in the predicament we are in. Leaders must constantly weigh costs and benefits as part of the job and make sound decisions going forward.

We now have an opportunity to demonstrate leadership and apply all of our energy and careful thought to execute on a dynamic plan to activate that part of downtown for the benefit of the next generation. Engaging Linda McMahon, who is CEO of the Dallas Economic Development Corporation, is heartening on this issue given her experience and leadership in real estate.

This is a commercial decision and ignoring economic realities is foolhardy. We have the chance to do something special that future citizens will look back upon and see that today’s leaders were visionary.

I’d like to see the city exercise its common sense and pursue the win-win strategy. By doing so, all Dallas citizens will be more secure knowing that its leadership is capable of making smart decisions, even if it means admitting past mistakes. The first rule when you’ve dug yourself into a hole: “Stop digging!”

It is time for our leaders to lead.

Ken Hersh is the co-founder and former CEO of NGP Energy Capital Management and former CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential Center.

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Dallas, TX

81-year-old North Texas trailblazer to graduate from UNT Dallas

Published

1 day ago

December 15, 2025

Press Room

81-year-old North Texas trailblazer to graduate from UNT Dallas

DALLAS – History will be made this week when the University of North Texas at Dallas holds its commencement. Among the graduates is an 81-year-old woman with an incredible story.

Cheryl Hurdle Wyatt’s Story

The backstory:

Cheryl Hurdle Wyatt first made history back in 1955 when, as a 10-year-old girl, she and her sister were part of a historic Dallas NAACP lawsuit to desegregate Dallas public schools.

“When my parents moved us to South Dallas from Oak Cliff, and we were five doors from the school at the end of the corner that was all white, and we were not allowed to attend,” she said. “I do remember the principal saying you can’t come to this school.”

While Wyatt never got to attend Brown Elementary School, the lawsuit opened the doors for others. Her younger brother did go to the school.

“The year we went to high school is the year they opened up John Henry Brown for Blacks,” she said.

After graduating from high school, Wyatt went to Texas Southern University. But instead of graduating, she came home to help her older sister open a beauty school.

“Velma B’s Beauty Academy in Dallas. Everybody who was in Dallas during that time knew of Velma Brooks,” she said.

Along life’s journey, Wyatt blazed her own professional path.

“At the Lancaster-Kiest shopping center, I was there for maybe 10 years then moved up to Camp Wisdom. Had a salon there and then I’ve had about maybe two or three other locations,” she said.

81-year-old College Graduate

What’s next:

On Tuesday, Wyatt will finally complete her 60-year journey to her college degree.

She credits her father as her inspiration. Although he had seven children at home, he went to night school to earn his high school diploma.

“So, that taught us that it’s never too late. You can always go back and make something that you wanted to happen, happen,” she said.

Her father’s perseverance during the desegregation lawsuit also taught her not to give up.

“Well, it taught me that we should always preserve, don’t give up. If it doesn’t happen this way, just keep on. It will happen. The only way you cannot win is if you stop,” she said.

All of Wyatt’s children and grandchildren are expected to be in the crowd cheering for her as she walks across the stage.

The Source: FOX 4’s Shaun Rabb gathered information for this story by interviewing Cheryl Hurdle Wyatt.

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