For the last month, the KERA series One Crisis Away: Inside a Neighborhood has illuminated the lives of folks on the financial edge in Jubilee Park.
As KERA’s Courtney Collins reported, Jubilee has seen change for the good, but there are still plenty of problems in the East Dallas neighborhood: it’s tough to find fresh food, bank accounts and decent-paying jobs.
Our vice president of news, Rick Holter, sat down with Courtney for this week’s Friday Conversation.
Interview Highlights: Courtney Collins on...
...Taking a walk down a Jubilee Park street:
“It’s really quiet actually; you can always hear the birds, that’s one of my favorite things about it. There’s not a lot of trees in Jubilee Park, especially in the winter, there’s not a lot of leaves on the trees. When the sun’s out the whole community is bright, like you are standing on the face of the sun, it’s really special. There’s also a lot of community pride in Jubilee, residents that have been there for decades are really proud of the improvements their community has made. You also run into the same people all the time, which is fun. It really is a community.”
...The biggest surprise in Jubilee Park: “Everything I read kind of made it seem like a bad banking history was the only obstacle to folks having a checking account, like everybody who didn’t have one maybe had insufficient funds in the past and couldn’t get an account but they were yearning for one anyway. When I got to Jubilee Park and asked people why don’t you have a bank account, they were pretty ambivalent. A lot of people said, they’re just not for me or I don’t have a need for a bank account. On the other side of that, people were mistrustful or a little hostile toward the banking system."
