Dathe Street, Death Street

So, here's what I do on most Saturday mornings. I drive to some hellish part of Dallas to look at real estate, hoping to find some undiscovered neighborhood full of cheap restorable houses on a street with potential.

Sadly Dathe Street does not have potential. I want it to, seeing as this house is on Dathe Street in a historic South Dallas neighborhood called Queen City. This three bedroom Craftsman is exactly what I'm looking for. It has a fireplace with built-in book shelves next to it with glass front doors, a great front porch and a bathroom with original tile. All of this comes with a $32,000 price tag.

The downside to Dathe Street, as I observed while down driving the length of the block where this one is located, is that at least three of the houses have been abandoned so long that the roofs on them have caved in. Not kind-of-caved-in, but there's-no-roof-left-caved-in. That's one of the many perplexing and frustrating things about South Dallas is that when people die there, most of them don't have wills, so nobody inherits the house --- except crackheads and rain water. So the houses go to hell and nobody can do a damn thing about it. And why would you want to live on a street where a significant portion of the once cool houses there are so F'd up from neglect that they have to be plowed down? Not only that, a guy walking down the middle of Dathe Street gave me the two-finger wave as I was driving by him. I saw his fingers go up in my rear view mirror as he was looking straight at my truck. I don't think he was being friendly. I'm pretty sure he was signaling to me that he had some smokeable illegal products for sale.