The Power of One Person
With an urge to make his neighborhood a better place to live, Jason Roberts, an IT consultant living in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas, began executing simple ideas that generated unprecedented interest in revitalizing his neighborhood’s buildings and transportation modes. Today, his ideas have created The Better Block, a national program designed to help blighted neighborhoods again become functioning urban areas.
Roberts’ first project was Oak Cliff’s Texas Theatre, which opened in 1931 and is famous for being the location where Lee Harvey Oswald was apprehended in 1963. The theater was closed in 1989 and sat in disrepair despite the efforts of a long-standing nonprofit.
To generate more interest in the theater, Roberts simply organized a group of friends, artists and musicians for a one-night art show. “We knew it was a historic place so we heavily used social media to tell people we were going to open it up. The theater is in a bad part of town and people weren’t really apt to go to this area,” Roberts says. “However, it was one of those places I’d always wanted to see, and I figured others would, too. We were happily surprised when 700 people attended the art show.”
After the art show, Roberts was appointed president of the theater. Today, the Texas Theatre shows independent films, as well as hosts an annual film festival. It has become a driving force of a block that again is evolving into a destination point.
With a surge of momentum, Roberts focused on the streetcars that had run through Oak Cliff between the 1880s and = 1950s. Roberts used his IT skills to launch a website for the Oak Cliff Transit Authority, an organization he simply created with a few clicks of a mouse. The local newspaper reported about the OCTA and, before Roberts knew it, local citizens, streetcar enthusiasts and engineers were contacting him to learn how they could help bring back the streetcars.
Figuring he had nothing to lose, Roberts applied for an American Recovery and Reinvestment Act grant to re-establish the streetcar line in Oak Cliff. “People were saying ‘yeah, whatever Oak Cliff; go ahead and apply for those grants,’” he remembers. “But we won a $23 million grant to bring the streetcars back. All I did was create a website!”
Next, Roberts was interested in adding bike lanes to Oak Cliff’s streets, so on a whim he created Bike Friendly Oak Cliff. After using social media to hold an organized event to promote biking and bike lanes, he discovered 150 other Oak Cliff citizens who showed up to the event were passionate about biking, too. Today, Oak Cliff hosts an annual biking event, and bike-friendly groups have been established across the region that are offshoots of Bike Friendly Oak Cliff.
As his other ideas developed, Roberts realized buildings were the obvious next step. He explains: “Oak Cliff’s old streetcar neighborhoods are a beautiful hybrid of homes and commercial tucked in together. Once I started studying these areas in my city, it really made me start falling in love with my city again. I realized what makes Dallas great or Chicago great is not the downtown; it’s the little neighborhood-level commercial strips.”
That was the beginning of The Better Block program. Although not a 501(c)3, The Better Block currently is organizing to become a nonprofit with a goal of “patching communities back together,” according to Roberts. “If you’re passionate about something you’re probably going to be a leader. People will want to get behind you, so take that charge and run with it.”
Online Buzz:
View a video of Jason Roberts speaking about The Better Block program on the right or at betterblock.org.
Photos: JASON ROBERTS