About the Vickery Meadow Community

During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the Vickery Meadow area, located in the Northeast quadrant of the Dallas inner-city, evolved as one of Dallas’ most vibrant residential and business communities. To meet the demands of Dallas’ sizeable young, upwardly mobile professional crowd, developers built thousands of small apartments and condos in the area. Upscale restaurants, dinner theaters and specialty shops soon followed. By the early 1980’s, Vickery Meadow was fully built out with 15,500 apartments and 2,300 condos squeezed into a 2.86-square-mile area. As far as the eye could see, apartments connected by paved parking lots dotted the landscape of this thriving community of young professionals.

With the Fair Hosing Act and the economic downturn of the 1980’s, Vickery Meadow’s singles had matured and moved out of the community. Concurrent with the out-migration of prosperous residents, upscale businesses closed their doors and were replaced by liquor stores, video, and arcade-type businesses. Apartment rental rates in the area fell precipitously. In the late 1980’s the city passed an ordinance to ensure that children and families had access to all apartments.

Attracted by affordable rents, low-income minority families and foreign-born newcomers began filling the area’s apartments. Families were now filling a neighborhood meant for single adults. Children of these new tenants had no place to play as the area had no open spaces, playgrounds, or parks. Nor was there a single public school or library in the area to serve children. The once-fashionable Vickery Meadow Community had started to experience drug dealers, prostitution and other serious crime. Newcomer families in the area were fearful not only for their own safety and well being but also for that of their children. By the early 1990’s, the area reflected signs of severe decline, deterioration, and neglect, in both its residential housing stock and in the quality of its business community. Area crime rates were among the highest in the city by 1993.

In 1993, concerned property owners and residents began to collaborate with the City of Dallas to halt the environmental plight and to prevent further degradation of the Vickery Meadow community. This collaboration resulted in development of a public improvement district whose purpose is to enhance the quality of life and thereby to stabilize or increase the values of real property and property improvements within the residential, commercial, and medical community of the Vickery Meadow Improvement District (VMID).

With the community working together, the crime rate has decreased, 5 schools have been built, 4 clinics have opened, dozens of social service organizations have started providing services, and property rates have increased.

Location of Vickery Meadow

Vickery Meadow is located in the 75231 zip code of Dallas, Texas. The boundaries are Northwest Highway, Royal Lane, Central Expressway, and Skillman/Abrams.


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