Animal Planet

Jimmy and Sandy Martin live in a 4,000-square-foot McMansion off Inwood Road in Bluffview. Architecturally, it's completely unremarkable. The home they recently built in Central Texas, on the other hand, is much more interesting: It's a 75,000-pound treehouse.

The structure, perched on an isolated clump of trees on their ranch outside Waco, is the subject of tomorrow's debut episode of Animal Planet's Treehouse Masters. The show follows Pete Nelson and his "family of traveling treehouse builders" as they criss-cross the country, building ridiculously ornate treehouses.

"The energy that a tree emits is undeniable," Nelson tells the camera in a preview for the show. "It's the kind of energy where the small hairs start to stand up a little bit, and I know that trees are beings, and they've got something to give us as we have something to give them."

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Wikipedia

By most measures, the Stone Bridge at Bear Creek in Euless is a typical mid-priced suburban apartment complex. There's covered parking and a couple of swimming pools. What little green space there is is well-manicured. The building facades are done in a bland but tasteful red brick.

To spot the difference, you'll have to go to building 18, where all but one unit is leased to renters of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent. Most of the other buildings have none.

The federal government thinks this is by design. According to a lawsuit filed by the feds on Thursday and first reported by the Morning News, complex manager Nancy Quandt systemically denied housing to "curry people," as she called them.

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It's been a decade since the city of Dallas announced the development of a 10-year plan to end chronic homelessness, a quest that, as a short stroll downtown will tell you, has fallen short of its goal. There are still plenty of people without homes.

That's not to say the program, which has focused attention and money on substance abuse counseling, permanent supportive housing, prisoner reentry programs, and the like, has been a failure. According to statistics presented to City Council's Housing Committee today, chronic homelessness has decreased by 66 percent in that time frame.

That's good news, but it's not the whole story. As the city's homeless services manager, Suanne Durham, told the council, the same period has seen a sharp increase in the number of homeless families (36 percent) and children (22 percent), which is something neither the city nor nonprofits that serve the homeless are well-equipped to deal with.

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Image via.

Like this guy, except smaller, on a leash, and possibly not real.

Tyrone and Patrick Weatherall had a number of bad habits. Besides the obvious one, their fondness for selling crack, the brothers had lavish, attention-getting taste, which is probably ill-advised when you're in the drug-selling business. According to street lore, when the Weatheralls first united some Crips and Bloods to form a new gang, they got themselves a small alligator. People in the neighborhood used to watch them parade it around on a leash and remark, "There go those gator boys."

That is, apparently, how the now-infamous West Side Gator Boyz got their names. Along with the possibly mythical alligator, Tyrone Weatherall eventually admitted to using his drug money to buy "several horses, five houses and a BMW." (He also had a tiger at one point, which authorities claimed attacked one of his horses. That incensed him so much that he ordered one of his lackeys to kill the tiger. Its body was found near I-35 two days after Christmas 2007.)

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"They came by the other day and swept some of our stuff up," Michelle complained. She's a petite black woman in her mid 40s, with chin-length hair partially hidden under a black and orange knit cap. On a recent weekday morning, she was perched atop an upside down bucket, blowing on her hands to keep them warm. She was happy to talk but didn't want to give her last name.

"They say they don't want us out here," she added. "They want us all in a shelter. But the shelter is always full."

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LoopNet

The future seemed bright for the Dallas Plaza Hotel in 2006. Developer Larry Hamilton, fresh off a slew of successful downtown redevelopment projects, had just purchased the seedy, 12-story complex on Akard Street just across Interstate 30 from City Hall with plans to turn it into a boutique hotel. Construction was set to begin later that year.

Those plans fell through. A few years later, neighbors scuttled Plan B, a partnership with Central Dallas Ministries (now CitySquare) to invest $25 million to turn the building into affordable housing. That seems to have been about when Hamilton mothballed the building, posting an ad on Craigslist for caretakers who would keep vagrants out in exchange for free rent.

Now, Plan C. Slated to go before the City Council in December is an application for an $11 million U.S. Housing and Urban Development loan that will fund the purchase and environmental remediation of the property for a development that will bring an estimated 90 permanent, full-time jobs and ameliorate an eyesore near downtown -- namely, a Holiday Inn & Suites.

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Heroes House

The debate around permanent supportive housing for Dallas' homeless has become incredibly bitter in the past several years , while regulation of private housing for the mentally ill will only really begin come October. But soon one group in dire need of housing will have a few more options: veterans, who currently make up around one-fifth of the total homeless population in the United States.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there were 112,642 veterans in Dallas County in 2010. That number has likely increased substantially in the past two years, with more soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. As the City Council's housing committee heard this morning, those vets are getting younger all the time.

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