SITE THREE :: ESCAPE TO DALLAS

VICKERY MEADOW

Vickery Meadow is unfortunately more notorious than it is famous. It made national news in 2014 as the neighborhood where Ebola came to the United States. It is known for poverty and crime and over crowding. But it is also known for its people. Their diversity. Their friendliness. Their familial living. It is an incredible neighborhood with a great need for friendship and ministry.

Vickery Meadow is known for its huge refugee population.

A refugee is a person forced to flee their country because of violence or persecution.

“Only one half of 1 percent of the world’s refugee population gets resettled.

Why they get resettled in Vickery Meadow—why so many families from other countries wind up in the area, refugee or otherwise—is not a mystery. There are lots of apartments, rent is cheap, public transportation is nearby, and, as much as anything else, other immigrants live here. It’s a beachhead. But it wasn’t supposed to be.

Vickery Meadow was born as a sort of twin to The Village, a product of Dallas’ building boom in the 1970s. Bordered, more or less, by Northwest Highway, Royal Lane, Skillman Street, Abrams Road, and Central Expressway, it was built—overbuilt, really—as a community for young people living young lives. No kids, not many married couples. But things changed. An amendment to the Fair Housing Act in 1988 meant families with kids could no longer be discriminated against, and a depressed rental market meant the property owners no longer cared to.

Within a few years, the demographics of the area had completely flipped. It became, and remains, a jumble of races and cultures. There were immigrants from Mexico, and then came refugees from every war-torn country on the planet—mostly African at first, now mostly Burmese and Bhutanese. Apartments built for one or two people were packed with four or five or more. More families than not had kids. The 100 or so complexes in the neighborhood were not designed for this. Families were crammed into small apartments, which were crammed too close to one another. They were built parking lot to parking lot, with almost no green space to speak of, let alone playgrounds. That’s how it was, and that’s how it is.

Over the course of a couple of decades, the neighborhood has changed to meet the needs of the residents it never expected. There are more schools in Vickery Meadow now, for instance. But it is still largely a hand-me-down neighborhood, ill-fitting and fraying at the seams. It should be depressing for an outsider, and it can be. But that’s the environment, the apartments, the situation. It’s not the people. Even though some have lived lives most of us can’t imagine, through torture and camps and more, you wouldn’t know it. There is a joy there that can’t be taken. They are alive and they are together, and that is enough.”

https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2011/may/how-vickery-meadow-became-dallas-own-united-nations/