There have been thousands of street blockages and trash fires reported to authorities in Dallas in 2023.
Some 4,232 street blockages were logged by the Dallas Police Department so far this year, according to the City of Dallas Open Data police response time dashboard. The Dallas Express asked DPD for more information about the street blockages but was directed to the City’s communications department.
DPD said the Department of Transportation handles street blockages. The Dallas Express reached out to the City for more information but did not receive a response by press time.
Furthermore, there have been 1,327 trash fires throughout Dallas over the 12 months, according to figures on Dallas Fire-Rescue’s (DFR) incident dashboard. The Dallas Express contacted DFR for more information, but no one was immediately available for comment.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, the City has been able to provide little information on trash fires at homeless encampments in the past.
Meanwhile, Dallas residents believe the City is doing a “poor” job at maintaining clean streets, according to a recent City satisfaction survey that logged the lowest street cleaning approval rating in several years, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, Dallas has also ranked among the top 10 dirtiest cities in the United States, with some of the problems regarding Dallas’ current state of cleanliness being linked to the city’s ongoing crisis of homelessness and vagrancy.
“It is impossible to maintain any standard of cleanliness with vagrants sleeping on every corner,” Jake Colglazier, executive director of the local activist group Keep Dallas Safe, said in a prior statement to The Dallas Express. “It’s difficult and expensive to clean up a pile of trash when there is a person inside.”
The aforementioned satisfaction survey from the City of Dallas found that 75% of residents believe homelessness is a “major” issue. Furthermore, most residents said crime, drugs, and infrastructure were also major problems, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson recently visited Haven for Hope in San Antonio to learn more about their successful approach to mitigating homelessness and vagrancy. Whether such an approach will be adopted in Dallas remains to be seen, but the “one-stop-shop” model has polled favorably among Dallas voters.
