Clamping down on crime-prone apartment complexes in Dallas has been a longtime source of City Council frustration. Many Texas cities have ventured down this path, only to encounter stiff resistance from apartment owners who fear they'll be turned into law enforcers over their tenants.

Mapping the worst of the worst (pdf)

In some cases, we've concurred, such as when a recent crime-reduction law in Irving required apartment complexes to reject tenant applicants with certain criminal backgrounds. We also took exception to a Farmers Branch law, later overturned in court, that forced landlords to reject illegal immigrants as tenants.

But a Dallas City Council ordinance passed Jan. 14 hits closer to the bull's-eye. It forms the basis of a smarter approach to fighting crime and improving the quality of life in the city's biggest trouble spots, particularly in southern Dallas.

Built on a successful model

Both apartment-owners associations and police have praised the measure; a nearly identical ordinance boasts proven crime-reduction in Houston's vulnerable complexes.

Using official crime statistics from Dallas' 3,200 apartment complexes, police will isolate the ones with exceedingly high crime rates. Those owners will be notified of the steps they must take to abate crime, including conducting criminal background checks on tenant applicants, holding monthly crime-watch meetings, removing payphones, securing common areas and allowing police to enforce trespassing laws on the premises.

If crime persists despite these measures, the city can seek state intervention to close apartment complexes as persistent public nuisances.

Police Chief David Kunkle says landlords are not required to reject tenant applicants with criminal histories. But the background check helps them be more attentive to their tenant mix and question whether certain applicants belong in an already high-crime environment.

The City Council passed this law one week after the Jan. 7 shooting death of Senior Cpl. Norman Smith at the Oakwood Place apartments in southern Dallas, where crime rates are high.

Would the new ordinance have prevented Smith's death? Maybe not. But Oakwood's management should have been put on notice long ago that those apartments served as a hub of criminal activity.

Areas already vulnerable to crime

Using official data, the Inclusive Communities Project in Dallas has compiled a database of crimes on the grounds or within a quarter-mile radius of major apartment complexes. Sure enough, Oakwood is high on the list. Police made arrests at or around Oakwood at a rate of once every 15 hours in July 2006, the most recent month in which statistics were available.

The complex, then called Wadsworth, had a rate of 63.06 crimes per 1,000 population. The citywide rate was only 7.53. Oakwood's owner, Alex Stolarski, did only the minimum necessary to keep his apartments up to code yet escaped pressure to clean up his act.

The new ordinance will help fix that.

The next step is to take action against the criminal environment often found on the streets outside these high-crime complexes. Oakwood's neighborhood is just like other problem areas, particularly in southern Dallas, where crime, drug dealing and gang activity are high.

Just down the street is a self-serve car wash, where, curiously, few cars are being washed but plenty of men loiter about carrying anonymous-looking bags. Also nearby is a derelict strip shopping center, followed by a pawn shop and plenty of vacant storefronts and lots.

Police authority to arrest loiterers should not be limited to the grounds of apartment complexes. It should extend to where illicit drug deals typically take place: at the car washes and shoddy shopping centers.

Consider that a few blocks from Oakwood, the Rosemont of Oak Hollow apartments had an abysmal rate of 184.67 crimes per 1,000 population in July 2006; the nearby Oasis II apartments' rate was 181.18.

There's the same mix of low-quality businesses, suspect car washes and bag-carrying loiterers near the Southern Oaks apartments in Oak Cliff, which carried a 99.6 crime rate, or Eban Village apartments in South Dallas, at 85.94.

Landlords can't do it alone

Without the local business community's cooperation – including that of apartment owners like Alex Stolarski – these high-crime, slumlike conditions won't change anytime soon.

Apartment landlords can't do it alone. The owners of car washes, convenience stores and sagging shopping centers must understand that their investment climate diminishes, land values drop and profits decline when they let their property become a hangout for gang bangers and drug dealers. Law-abiding customers will go elsewhere.

The apartment ordinance won't provide the magic answer to the vast developmental gaps dividing northern and southern Dallas. But it's definitely an approach worth building upon.