Come home, and make it soon! Some problems that led to Garland's hospital closing could be avoided with a strategic demographic shift in our city

Come home! Older parts of town need refueling. The extensive renovations and restorations in Travis College Hill Historic District on Garland's 11th Street are an example of what can be done throughout the entire older parts of Garland. (Photo by Deb Downs of Take to Heart Images)

By now, Garlandites are becoming highly verbal on the frightening details: closing Baylor Scott & White at Garland could add at least 10 to 15 additional minutes to an ambulance ride from central Garland to the nearest hospitals in Richardson, Plano, Dallas, or Rowlett.

Also, another gruesome statistic is making the rounds: for every six-tenths of a mile further to a hospital, the death rate goes up 2 percent. Translated that means because of the hospital's closing, 20 to 30 percent or more Garlandites could die on the way to the hospital in an ambulance. That does not count those who attempt to use a private automobile to go to an emergency room.

The security for the elderly, for the sick, for the injured that Baylor Garland once provided will simply disappear along with the hospital. All of us must face the reality squarely and recognize fully what the closing of Garland's third-largest employer and our hedge of protection truly means.

If you happened to listen to Saturday's budget hearings before Garland City Council, you heard Fire Chief Mark Lee state that the department already is making contingency plans for emergency services after the Garland hospital closes. Lee told council that the department has personnel for the longer response times, but what about "ambulance overload"—responding to a second call while the first one is delayed making an emergency run? Adequate equipment will be a challenge, he stated.

I know from personally talking with Garland EMS ambulance drivers that extra minutes spell death for some patients. These heroes in our community are also worried that our hospital's closing will overload nearby hospital emergency rooms and slow the medical process further.

Not only is time crucial in medical emergencies, one of my nonwhite, working-poor friends living in Central Garland without health insurance or Medicaid approached me and asked whether it was true that the hospital was closing. "What are people going to do?" he asked. "Where will we go? When you're really sick, you can't ride a bus to downtown Dallas to get help."

All good questions. Every answer depends on where the person in need lives or is injured or needs immediate assistance. Garland has a wonderful fire department; the men and women who drive our ambulances will do everything humanly possible to get us help. But there are limits to what even they can do. They can provide artificial respiration for just so long before brain damage sets in!

The optimists among us are voicing hope we can yet attract another hospital some day. City leaders knew since at least last February that the hospital closing was a possibility. Some naturally ask, Could more have been done to halt momentum toward closing?

Without a dramatic shift in our demographics in central and south Garland, the chances of reviving or attracting another hospital are slim.

I've asked many sources, "Will Garland be the largest city in the United States without its own hospital?" Nobody seems to know the answer. When I look at all the statistics, that seems like a real possibility.

The blame game has already begun, while the emergency situation remains real!

Finger-pointing is not necessary. The government's census statistics have been telling us the truth for several decades. Garland's impoverished people, who will suffer the most from this unfortunate closing, live mostly in central and south Garland, nearest the dying hospital. The numbers have been stacked against us for years. No hospital enterprise in this economic environment wants to touch a poor community without health insurance or funds to pay the outrageously expanding bills. (Keep in mind—25 percent of our population has no health insurance; 47 percent of our citizens live at or below the federally established poverty level; uncollected bills at the hospital escalated from 5 percent a few years back to 16.5 percent, or some $20 million, now) .

The solutions will take years to implement. Forget Washington. Forget Austin. Those leaders there could care less whether Garland has a hospital. And instead of relying on those quicksand pits, we had best figure out what we ourselves can do. This is going to be a case of having to "pull ourselves up by the bootstraps".

And time is of the essence, too! Some of our citizens will literally die because of this travesty.

Veritex Bank of Garland is moving to Main Street to help revitalize the inner-city core. Three historic houses (the last of which remains here) have been preserved and moved to other lots in the downtown area to clear the way for bank construction.

 Here's what you, the citizens and former citizens of Garland, can do, starting right now:

1. If your income level is above the poverty line, please squelch that planned move north of Belt Line, especially to the George Bush Freeway area. We need your income level here in the central and south to help us balance the poverty engulfing us.

2. Stop the White Flight now! Most of our impoverished citizens are nonwhites. Even nonwhites who prosper often move north of Belt Line. If you are white or affluent nonwhite, don't even think about leaving us here in the central combat zone. We need you here.

3. For those of you who've escaped your responsibility to Garland as a community, come back home. Come home from Frisco, Plano, Sachse, Murphy, Rowlett, Richardson, and other wealthier Dallas 'burbs. If you earn your salary or income in the poorer parts of Garland and then go home to the more affluent parts of the DFW Metroplex to live and spend your money, look yourself in the mirror and ask, "Am I really a part of the problem and not a part of the solution?"

Too many of our community and business leaders slip away to those more affluent cities—or Firewheel—at night, when we need their presence and incomes in the poorer parts of Garland 24-hours a day. Our leaders in the inner city and southern part of Garland need to live among us here. Stay and build up Garland's schools, which are commendable. Your kids might even improve the graduation rate in some of our high schools in this area. Set aside the yen to live on the golf course or among "your kind of people" only.

One fabulous new development at the Wyrick farm, located along Shiloh near Buckingham, will feature new homes that will be in the league with many additions in other northern-rim DFW suburbs. When it opens, make sure to check out those homes, buy one, and join us in rebuiding central and south Garland.

Come home to central and south Garland and buy or build new homes to help us rebuild our basis for getting back a hospital.

4. Consider joining us as "urban pioneers". We live in central, older Garland. Even though it has its burdens, we love living, working, and being a part of downtown Garland. We can afford to live elsewhere. We have multiple options. We are not stuck here. Because we love Garland, we CHOOSE to be a part of this community—to spend our money in Garland (particularly stores in the central core area) as often as we can, to support our local businesses whenever possible, to attend community events, to be a REAL part of community life here and not just part-timers or exiles.

5. And here's a message to our Garland church leaders, especially those in our larger downtown churches which seem to dominate the downtown area. Come back to the inner-city. Don't pretend to do "ministry" by living in any of those other wealthier 'burbs while handing out meals to the homeless or providing food and clothing to those that live in the poorer parts of Garland.

Ask yourself if you are enabling the problem or helping us find solutions to the issues we face. If you answer correctly, it will shock you.

Tell your flocks to come back, too. Tell them to sell their fancy new homes in those 'burbs and buy houses in the inner city and fix them up. Add your income to the leavening that needs to occur here. If you want to have a REAL ministry here, come back and live among us. Find out what is really going on—how the community is changing and what you REALLY can do to minister to this community instead of what you imagine from afar that you can do! Don't enable the slippery slope. Help us work to reverse it!

Prayerfully consider whether being a "commuter" church is God's will for your congregations. Or for you church leaders either. Period! You've missed your calling by running and hiding. Parking lots owned by churches don't pay taxes. They don't show up on the census reports and help raise the income levels that are scaring off these gigantic hospital operations that worship the god of profit. Stop tearing down homes in the inner city and southern part of Garland. Instead, build yourself a new home on an empty lot somewhere in the so-called "decaying" central and southern Garland areas. Consider turning one of your mostly empty parking lots into housing for the most affluent in your churches! Yes, the MOST AFFLUENT!

If all the exiles who moved away to more affluent parts of the DFW Metroplex would come back and fix up their homes, this could propel Garland back into the league with the other prospering 'burbs.

The same is true for our city leaders! We need a moratorium on mayors who live in Firewheel or other wealthier parts of Garland. After he was elected mayor in 2013, Mayor Douglas Athas got our hopes up by expressing fondness for rehabbing a vacant house on our street. Unfortunately no move was in the offing. Firewheel definitely does have its allure!

Friends of ours have built beautiful new homes in this inner-core area. Be courageous as they are! Or be like us and our neighbors and purchase older homes, then restore those houses until they shine like new—and make the neighborhoods in the inner city bright spots on the map once again, too.

Yes, the solution is all around us. Don't wait on the folks in Austin and Washington to "do something"; we are just another sad statistic on their charts.

Garland doesn't have to be a "Tale of Two Cities", the wealthier one to the north and the poorer one to the south. Each of our citizens holds in his or her own hands the keys to the solutions that we need so desperately.

Please join us in changing this community for the good—one family or one household or one person at a time! 

Come home! And make it soon. We need you! Please.