David Woo/Staff Photographer

Updated: 03 July 2015 11:55 PM

Marilyn Pond says the sun seems to be shining a little brighter these days at the crime-plagued corner of St. Augustine Drive and Bruton Road in Pleasant Grove, where she and her husband, Vince, have run Black Jack Pizza for 20 years.

Police come around more often to chase away the dope dealers. Some officers are even walking in and asking her and Vince how they’re doing — something they never did before.

And now, the construction of new low-income apartments is coming along across the street. The orderly, symmetrical wooden frames and honest work contrast sharply with the blight, drug dealing, shootings, gangs and chaos at a convenience store and the carwash next door. Pond said she “can’t wait” for the new homes to be finished.

“It seems like it’s going to be so nice for the neighborhood,” she said. “I hope they treat them just like they treat the upper-class apartments. That’s all we need over there, are some rules. You put some rules over there and don’t bend them, it’s going to be very nice.”

Police and city officials say they are making slow progress in bringing law and order to the area, and residents and business owners say they’ve felt safer there in the last few months. But they say they still have a long way to go, and some neighborhood advocates worry that the city has cursed the long-neglected area to a continuous cycle of crime, drugs and poverty.

“We think they should build decent housing — just build it in decent neighborhoods. That’s not a decent neighborhood right now,” said Mike Daniel, an attorney for a fair housing nonprofit called the Inclusive Communities Project. “Or, if you’re going to do it, clean up the damn neighborhood.”

Daniel argued in an April 22 letter to city officials that the high crime rates and other problems near the new apartments, paid for by city and federal tax credits, will help perpetuate racial segregation.

The letter cited several Dallas Morning News stories about residents’ concerns and crime reports, as well as Dallas police crime statistics that contradicted the city’s claim that the area wasn’t a big spot for gangs, violence and drugs.

After receiving the letter, the city of Dallas Housing Finance Corp.’s board members held a closed-door meeting to discuss it with their attorney. The board’s general counsel, Joe Nathan Wright, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Daniel said he knows it’s too late to halt the complex. But he wants to put up a fight to force the city to focus on the area.

Pleasant Grove resident and community organizer Bonnie Mathias likewise said she worries that the new apartment complex will make sustaining any progress more difficult. She said it’s more likely that it will only feed into a “crazy endless cycle of poverty.”

“It’s really a poor, poor place to put that — we’ve already got an over-glut of apartments in that area that I would say are probably where the majority of the problems are coming from,” she said. “What do we want our police officers to do when we keep putting huge stumbling blocks in their path?”

Crime is down

Police statistics do show improvement so far this year. Through June 28, police say that major crime is down in the neighborhood by more than 13 percent vs. the same time last year.

In April, police raided the Adams Food Mart and 50-cent carwash, which police say are hubs for of marijuana-dealing, fistfights and gang-related shootings. They made 18 arrests, mostly for drug possession, and saw much fanfare on social media among frustrated residents.

Maj. Paul Stokes of the southeast patrol division said after the raid that the crackdown is only the beginning of the policing strategies in the area, which hasn’t seen a turnaround yet.

“The activity has not stopped,” Stokes said. “We continue to see some of the same-type behavior.”

Shootings still happen there, too. And weeks after the raid, an 18-year-old man reported to police that he had been beaten by about 10 people while he was picking up a woman who had been attacked there.

Mathias said police need to keep their feet on the gas pedal.

“It has to be a consistent, sustained effort for it to make a difference,” she said. “People have to understand that behavior is no longer going to be tolerated in this area.”

But others in the area say they believe things are better now, at least when the sun is out.

Omar Captain, 32, stopped by and thanked a police officer last month who was sitting at the Adams Food Mart.

“Now I see you guys and it’s perfect,” he said to the officer.

Captain, who was an interpreter in the Iraq war and now works across the street from the Food Mart, said he has been hounded to buy drugs a few times when he stops by the store for his post-workout Gatorades. His clients have, too.

“They’ve been terrified to come to this area because either they come here and they get harassed if they’re ladies,” he said. “And if they’re men, they get asked, ‘Do you want some?’”

He also said the residents in the area are hardworking, but the gang members terrorize them.

Jessie Shaw, 69, who has lived in Pleasant Grove for 30 years, said she and her husband try to avoid falling victim to crime by staying inside at night and taking other precautions.

“We just watch our surroundings and pay attention,” she said.

Ana Galvez said she still doesn’t feel safe walking from her home nearby to her restaurant job. But the daytime hours have fewer loiterers hanging out there during the day especially.

“They’re not over there as much now,” she said in Spanish. “There used to be more gunshots and all that every day. Now it’s much less since the police came.”

Summer worries

But the residents said they don’t know what to expect during the summer with school out.

City Council member Rick Callahan said there is progress in the area. He said community members are becoming more engaged, which is difficult because many have a mentality of minding their own business. He said he wants “busybody neighbors,” and he hopes the city will crack down on code issues.

“We’re going to take our neighborhood back, one way or the other,” he said. “We’ll use any tools we have within the framework of the law to do that.”

But city community prosecutor LaShonne Watts said she still doesn’t get many code complaints from Pleasant Grove residents. Callahan preached patience.

“We’ve got a mountain to climb,” Callahan said. “About 20 to 25 years of neglect cannot be corrected in two years.”

But Pond, the restaurant owner, said she sees the area’s potential. When snow fell last year, she said, the area looked beautiful, and she wished it could look like that all the time. She has high hopes that it will.

“But the only thing that ever made hope come true is money,” she said.

thallman@dallasnews.com; nmartin@dallasnews.com