What motivated you to tackle your first block project?
Roberts: Revitalizing city blocks had been in the back of my mind for a long time. I am in a rock band and we perform around Texas—sometimes in the not-so-good parts of town. I’d always wondered why these places were kind of dilapidated and were now the bad parts of town. When I was researching my neighbor- hood, I found our dilapidated blocks were on the old streetcar line and things had been done to make the blocks less pedestrian- friendly: streets were widened, sidewalks were taken out. All the great blocks around the world have pretty much the exact same ingredients: a coffee shop, restaurant, flower shop, bakery, art gal- lery, outdoor seating and bike lanes. I decided we needed to bring those ingredients to each neglected block.
r: stood in your way?
As you began researching your first Oak Cliff block improvement, was there anything that
Roberts: One of my good friends is an urban planning buff. He and I realized it costs $1,000 to add sidewalk flowers and another $1,000 times area market value, etc., to do outdoor café seating. There were a lot of rules like this on the books since 1941. It’s dif- ficult to raise $50,000 if you’re a small entrepreneur, so imagine how much it cuts into your budget to try to add amenities that attract people and help them linger. Businesses would question them, but one business couldn’t do anything about the rules so nobody got anywhere. We decided to see how many rules we could break in one
weekend with our project. I also realized it would be really power- ful to post all the rules we were breaking for everyone to see. For example, one of Oak Cliff’s rules didn’t allow you to sell merchan- dise on the sidewalk. I created posters of great cities with photos of fruit stands and bookstalls on the sidewalk and would explain our ordinances don’t allow us to do those things. It was amazing to see people in the neighborhood read the ordinances and shake their heads. People really got it and were a little angry; anger helps motivate people to effect change. Ironically, my friend the urban-planning buff was elected to
the city council after this first project. He has been on the council now for a year and a half and has spent the entire time rolling back ordinances that impede better blocks.
r: ordinances?
How did city leaders respond to your first Better Block project and to the breaking of
Roberts: By the time we tackled this first block, I’d already been thought of around town as this person who had been doing a lot of crazy projects, like streetcars and bicycling. [To learn more about Roberts’ activism in Oak Cliff and how The Better Block was established, see “The Power of One Person,” page 24.] I had the support of a couple of my local council members. They saw the community was embracing these projects. Council members want to be on the popular side of the agenda. People get elected to city hall because they’re passionate about economic develop- ment but often get stuck in the machinations of city hall. The city leaders I had thought were the bad guys were actually the