r:
and not just a weekend celebra- tion?
How do you ensure a Better Block project is sustainable
Roberts: The folks who get it are the ones who really try to change the infrastructure and get the businesses started that could thrive in the area. We found it’s best to keep programming the blocks. Go back to the same area and do something else, like a bike-in movie, or follow through on the next step of getting a business off the ground. In most areas, it’s a restaurant that turns the area around. Even if you bring out guest chefs with a temporary pop- up restaurant, it will at least get people rethinking the area. Ninety percent of the issues I’ve found with blighted areas are perception. Once you change the percep- tion, people will think of the block as a destination and that’s when things start happening.
r:
project in their community, how should they start?
If our readers are interested in doing a Better Block
Roberts: First, don’t be afraid of failure. I’ve probably had hundreds of ideas, and some of them didn’t work. The thing is people will see that you’re trying and that’s what’s going to rally the community. Oftentimes we work in blighted parts
of town because it will have a major ripple effect on the area. Just removing graffiti is powerful. Make sure you document what you’re doing, so people can see it. We use social media to show us scrubbing off graf- fiti with neighbors and friends. You want to inspire the community to say, “Oh, we’re all fixing things together.” Then they will start thinking about what they can do to make the neighborhood better. It starts with the little things. You do those enough times and you realize you can do more of these things. There’s chaos involved, but you have to embrace the chaos. We always say in our projects: Something better will happen even if you don’t know what that is.
View a video of Jason Roberts speaking about The Better
Block program on
www.retrofi tmagazine .com or
betterblock.org.
24 RETROFIT // November-December 2012
The Power of One Person
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, art- ists 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 The-
W
atre 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 enthu- siasts 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 Reinvest- ment 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 com- mercial 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.”
ith 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
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