Urban Midlife Crisis Throws a Curve at Dallas : Metropolis: City was once a model of peace and efficiency. Business busts, changing demographics and racial unrest have put it in turmoil.

The government is in turmoil, racial tension is heightened, the police department is on its third chief in as many years and even the roads are torn up.

Dallas, once proclaimed nationally as “The City That Works,” is having a midlife crisis.

In the last few years, the city has suffered through devastating recession and painful change. Once a giddy adolescent growing with the Sun Belt boom, Big D today is an uncertain adult trying to get back on track.

“Dallas is finally a big city in the worst sense of the word, as well as the best,” said local historian A. C. Greene. “We are finally picking up problems we thought we weren’t subject to 10 years ago.”

For years, Dallas has been managed efficiently and peacefully by the influence of the business community. Now, through a combination of business busts, changing demographics and unrest built on years of frustration at the lack of minority participation in government, the city finds itself in flux, trying to heal political wounds and find new leaders at the same time.

One large neighborhood representing as much as one-third of the city has taken steps to secede. The economic downturn has forced the city to ponder a third straight annual tax increase, and a federal judge has stepped into the City Hall mess and forced a mayoral and City Council election May 4.

A new rail system is years behind schedule and City Hall says one-third of all streets are in poor condition. The remaking of the central north-south artery incongruously found itself 12 months behind after only five months of construction. The problems were not lost on a local radio station, which aired a Central Expressway song:

“So bye, bye, Highway 75,

“Hope they get you ready while we’re all still alive....”

The giant Texas banks, which provided much of the civic and financial leadership in the past, now are all owned by out-of-state corporations. Bloomingdale’s packed up and left town. Even Southfork Ranch, now a tourist attraction, has gone bankrupt.

For the image-conscious city once hailed by Time magazine and others as a model of urban management and business bliss, the problems are unwelcome blemishes.

“We have lost our standing nationally,” said Adelfa Callejo, an attorney and Latino leader. “Dallas has lost its can-do ability.”

At the heart of the turmoil is unrest in the minority community. According to 1990 census figures, Dallas now is a city where minorities are the majority--almost 30% of the population is black and 21% is Latino. Yet only two blacks, and no Latinos, serve on the 11-member Dallas City Council.

Federal Judge Jerry Buchmeyer has ordered that a new council be elected with 14 members from neighborhoods and one citywide elected mayor under a plan to boost minority representation. Voters twice had rejected that plan.

For Dallas, the judge’s order struck at the core of the city’s government, which for years has been dominated by the white, affluent neighborhoods and business community.

“Unfortunately, we are at another crossroads here in 1991,” said black City Councilman Al Lipscomb. “We must admit these wrongs and do some healing.”

Blacks have been at odds with city government recently over economic development in the southern part of town and the makeup of the City Council and the Police Department.

The department found itself in a storm of controversy after a series of fatal shootings of blacks and Latinos, the most recent a black florist killed by a rookie officer responding to a burglary call at the florist’s shop.

One chief resigned in 1988 shortly after trying to blame the fatal shooting of an officer on police critics in the minority community. His replacement, an outsider brought in to reform a department labeled a “good-old boy system” by a consultant, was fired last year after being charged with misdemeanor perjury, a charge of which he later was acquitted.

Former Los Angeles deputy chief William Rathburn, credited with being a community relations whiz, took over the reigns of the troubled department in early March.

All the changes, according to Royce Hanson, an urban affairs expert at the University of Texas at Dallas, are similar to battles fought years ago in other cities, but only now taking root in Dallas.

“Dallas is simultaneously in the midst of a great transition and stuck in time,” Hanson said. “Institutions are trying to catch up with the changing population.”

And “The City That Works,” Hanson added, “has gotten more like other cities--it works part of the time.”

As unthinkable as it may have seemed only a few years ago, a past president of the Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce stood up in early February to announce his mayoral candidacy and found himself comparing Dallas to, well, Philadelphia.

“We have social unrest. We have racial unrest. We have economic problems. We are overrun by crime and discouragement,” lawyer Forrest Smith said. “This is the path that leads you down the road to Philadelphia and frankly, Philadelphia is a city that is flat broke.”

The incumbent mayor, Annette Strauss, decided against seeking a third term. She says she remains optimistic about Dallas, that the city is coping well with its changes. And Dallas is a long way from the economic morass of Philadelphia, she said.

“Change is always difficult,” Strauss said. “We’re making progress and Dallas will be a better city for it.”

The effort by the Oak Cliff neighborhood to secede from the city appears to be dead. Work on potholes and expressways eventually will be completed, she said, and Dallas will have a new government, whether by choice or by judge’s order.

To Greene, the historian from the University of North Texas, Dallas’ difficulty in rebounding from the economic slump brought on by the oil crash and savings and loan crisis showed how different the city is now.

“We’ve lost our elasticity,” Greene said. “We’re like a rubber band that’s been left out in the sun too long. We haven’t popped all together, but we’ve lost our stretch.”

Strauss insists that the city has kept moving forward through the economic woes. Dallas has maintained its AAA bond rating with Wall Street--the only major city in the country with the highest financial rating. And J. C. Penney and Exxon both moved corporate headquarters from New York to Dallas suburbs, she noted.

“There were inequities in Dallas and we are trying to improve opportunities here,” she said. “We are solving the problems.”

Dallas, Hanson said, “is still young enough and still rich enough to solve many of the problems that have confounded other cities.”

Callejo, who fought City Hall with the federal redistricting lawsuit that led to the federal judge’s ruling, agrees the future still is bright.

“I think it’s going to be a different Dallas,” she said. “Virtually because of the fact that minorities have suffered so long, we will institute a policy of inclusion. It’s going to be a fairer city, a more open city.”