The debate over Ursuline's soccer field jumped the shark a dozen years ago when an outcry from the school's Preston Hollow neighbors convinced the City Council to reject the school's request to install lights. The defeat sent Ursuline back to the drawing board. Last May, it unveiled a new, more modest lighting plan, the unobtrusiveness of which was backed up by detailed photometric and lighting studies, and set about wooing neighbors.

It worked. Today, City Council approved Ursuline's soccer field lights to the cheers of supporters and members of Ursuline's state champion soccer team. But that only came at the conclusion of testimony that frequently bordered on the absurd.

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It doesn't look so cute when it's spray-painted on your back fence.

The Promise of Peace Community Garden is in an awful location, shoehorned into a formerly vacant lot in a row of apartments and liquor stores just south of White Rock Lake, reachable only by a narrow sidewalk running along busy Grand Avenue. Nevertheless, the spot has served the garden's needs ever since it was established three years ago by school teacher Elizabeth Dry, who hoped that teaching the kids of East Dallas to grow their own food might help inspire a healthier future.

The location problem will soon be solved. As the Advocate reported earlier this month, Promise of Peace is in the process of relocating to a stretch of asphalt next to White Rock United Methodist Church. It's quieter there, away from the Grand Avenue traffic, and better suited for a community garden.

There's only one problem: Some of the neighbors aren't so happy.

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Burton Knight is declaring a qualified victory in his battle with City Hall over his water-friendly lawn.

"I was able to negotiate keeping the cactuses and not the boulders," Knight said. "I think that I'd rather have the biodiversity and the pleasures that cactuses bring than the rocks, even thought the rocks were an important part of the design."

The Landmark Commission approved the compromise yesterday, a month-and-a-half after requiring Knight to replace his meticulously xeriscaped yard with grass, which they deemed more appropriate to the Junius Heights Historic District.

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City of Dallas

Burton Knight didn't set out trying to pick a fight with the city of Dallas. He just wanted a xeriscaped lawn, so he pulled up the green turf in front of his Abrams Road home and put in drought-tolerant cactus, mesquite, yucca, agave and dotted the landscape with large, roughly hewed boulders. Knight, who has a horticulture degree from Texas A&M, was pleased. So, he says, were his neighbors.

"We can't stand out in the front yard without somebody walking up to visit the yard," he says. "Everyone loves it. People will honk, people will applaud me from across the street. ... I have no lack of people gushing about it."

But then the city's Landmark Commission ruled that Knight's lawn was not historically appropriate for the century-old Junius Heights neighborhood, which is one of the city's 20 historic districts. Houses back then would have had grass, city staffers argued, not rocks and cacti.

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On Monday afternoon, two homeowners in the Lower Greenville West Neighborhood Association grew alarmed when they spotted a team of a half dozen or so guys who were snapping pictures and trespassing on private property. The homeowners were suspicious and called 911. Later, they sent out an email blast to neighbors, urging them to keep an eye out for the men.

They claimed to be from Google, produced one tattered business card that did not reach a business line, and claimed they were on public property. In fact, we caught them redhanded in [a resident's] back yard, inside the fence ... all over his yard. We kept them there asking questions and getting information in order to allow the DPD element time to arrive. By this time, two of them had gotten nervous and bolted.

They told the DPD officers a somewhat different story after the officers arrived.

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An urbanist's dream.

The Dallas Morning News, you may have noticed but probably didn't, is in the middle of a mammoth, months-long effort to pick the best neighborhoods. First came the safest neighborhoods, then the best schools, then those best suited for empty nesters. It's all leading up to the June 16 reveal, when the paper will anoint the area's Best Neighborhood.

The News has gone to great lengths to point out that this is not another throwaway Most-Important-Cats-of-2012 list. They've combed through reams of police reports, property records, school ratings and Census figures and crunched the data to come up with a completely, 100-percent objective method for ranking what might at first glance seem unrankable.

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katyicehouse.com

When the Katy Trail Ice House opened two years ago, it was an immediate hit with the young professionals and SMU students who populate the Uptown area. Every Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night, they come for the basketball-sized beers and stay for the decidedly frat-like atmosphere.

The complaints started flowing as soon as the beer did. They've mostly come from residents of the adjacent Park Towers Condos, who say that the noise that wafts across the Katy Trail is unbearable. They've called police. They've contacted city officials. They even filed a complaint with the TABC. And they've gotten nowhere.

In a last-ditch attempt to get something done, a condo resident -- I didn't catch her name -- detailed her concerns to the Dallas City Council this morning.

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Shortly after being sued last September by a neighbor for registering melissakingston.com and using it to email anti-Walmart screeds, inveterate Lower Greenville shit-stirrer Avi Adelman did something rather unprecedented: he agreed to cut it out. The temporary injunction he signed barred him from sending emails from the domain, redirecting traffic to the web address to barkingdogs.org and stepping within a block of Melissa Kingston's house.

But Adelman has doubled down since the lawsuit was filed, making Kingston-bashing a full-time project rather than merely a part-time hobby. The question is, has he gone too far? Melissa Kingston answered with a resounding yes in a court filing last week, in which she asks the judge to go ahead and rule in her favor.

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trulia

There are some large and generally predictable drawbacks to living a stone's throw from Vickery Meadows' Five Points intersection, which is a notorious hotbed of crime. Steve Parker learned as much soon after moving into his Hemlock Avenue condo in 2008.

Things started innocuously enough when someone kicked a hole in his fence. The next month, he was walking to his mailbox when he saw someone driving a nail into the tire of his 2005 Chevy Cobalt. Then someone kicked another hole in his fence.

All told, Parker has reported to police 14 instances of burglary, robbery, theft, and vandalism in the past five years. There was the time a weedeater and leaf blower that were stolen from his storage shed. An "X" that was keyed onto his trunk. The trespasser who showed Parker the pistol tucked in his waistband and threatened murder. The neighborhood kid who punched Parker in the face and stole his phone after asking to use it to call his mom. The stolen car.

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Since news of Walmart's plan to build a scaled-down supercenter at the corner of Arapaho and Coit Road in Far North Dallas, neighborhood opposition has been building. The outcry was covered this weekend by the Morning News and NBC 5, and the Change.org petition promising a boycott is at 2,300 and counting. Opponents now have a full-blown website and, coming soon, yard signs!

Momentum aside, stopping the store remains a long shot, particularly given that the 90,000-square-foot model the retailer has is within current zoning and therefore doesn't need City Council approval. But there remains at least a glimmer of hope.

Council member Sandy Greyson met with Walmart representatives on Thursday and posted her notes from the meeting online.

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