Will the Town Center ever actually start to take on the appearance of a town center, rather than that of a neighborhood recently wiped clean by an efficient tornado, with neatly paved streets and sidewalks to nowhere?

We had better hope so — for more reasons than we think. The longer it sits vacant, the more fearful I am that its future use will become something less than our highest aspirations.

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Yes, that’s right, fellow Lake Highlanders! Clearing out five apartment complexes (leaving only 9,231 more apartment complexes in our community) for that someday Town Center might end up being only a short-lived step in the direction of regaining some sense of proportion regarding the concentration of multi-family housing in Lake Highlands relative to the rest of the City of Dallas. That’s because the Dallas Housing Authority recently announced that Lake Highlands is one of only a few “lucky” communities in the city scheduled to play host to “chronically homeless” and “formerly incarcerated” individuals that DHA is trying to park somewhere.

And with whom does Lake Highlands share this dubious honor? Well, there’s the No. 1 crime location in the city — Vickery Meadow; another high crime location in far East Dallas on Ferguson Road; and a location in Plano (how did they get dragged into this?). The two apartment complexes to be used in Lake Highlands are in the Forest/Audelia area, which happens to rank as the No. 2 crime location in the city.

I’m sure that some ivory-tower thinker has this all figured out, but does anyone else wonder how dropping “chronically homeless” and “formerly incarcerated” people into the top crime locations in the city is likely to help them in their journey to rehabilitation? Are we trying to rehabilitate them, or just make them better at being bad?