Let's begin this new year with an old familiar: Ridgecrest Terrace, the 50-year-old sprawl of subsidized housing in west Oak Cliff -- forever in the city's scopes but always, somehow, elusive.

When I went to visit the morning of New Year's Eve, the 16-acre apartment complex perched on a trash-strewn hill off Walton Walker Boulevard just south of Interstate 30 looked better than when last I stopped by in October, shortly before tenants went to Dallas City Hall asking the City Council for the hand it refused to extend. But better is only a relative term for a place damned in legal documents -- written by city attorneys -- as "a place where persons habitually go to commit crimes of disorderly conduct, aggravated assault, arson, criminal mischief, sexual assault, robbery, and aggravated robbery."

The 19 brick buildings, housing some 250 units, have a fresh coat of olive-green paint. Grass -- brown and soggy the day after a pouring rain -- has been been freshly laid atop what had been bare, muddy patches. Cracked sidewalks have been patched; the parking lots, freshly striped.

New signs demand visitors register their vehicles with an online parking-permit company. The city, too, has planted no-parking signs along the adjacent thoroughfare off Loop 12, clearing the street of dealers who provided curbside service to Ridgecrest residents.

"It looks a lot better," 53-year-old Donna Alexander said when I stopped her in the parking lot. She was one of the few tenants willing to talk on the record. Most fear being evicted if their names appear in the newspaper.

Come April, Alexander will be a 2-year Ridgecrest resident. She said she works two jobs to pay the bills, one at AT&T Stadium, where she is a greeter and usher. Her rent, like everyone else's here, is subsidized with a housing voucher tied to the complex -- meaning she can't just move to another complex with space, if one existed.

One of the most striking things about RIdgecrest Terrace is its size -- 16 acres that feel twice that (Robert Wilonsky / Staff writer)

She said workers recently installed new floors, toilets and closet doors. They also patched holes in her walls (without painting over the putty). Alexander said it's quieter now, the result of a curfew that went into effect Oct. 30 that prohibits tenants from hanging outside between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

But some things remain the same: When I tried to find the manager who residents say they never see, the front office was dark and sealed tight behind an iron gate.

What has changed here is orders from a judge demanding the New Jersey owner fix up the place or else. The temporary injunction was the result of the city's lawsuit, which was filed in August. A lengthy list of to-do's and deadlines stretch into May, when a trial is scheduled.

The city has tried many times to shutter Ridgecrest, where a teen was shot to death in 1995, a Dallas firefighter fell to his death through a poorly patched roof in 2011, and a mother was fatally stabbed in front of her little children in 2014. Now the city is just suing to try to make the place livable for the men and women and children -- so many little children -- who live here because they have nowhere else to go and no one else is coming to their rescue.

Perhaps you recall: In the fall a buyer emerged from the Rocky Mountains wanting to purchase and vowing to makeover the apartment complex. Residents pleaded with council members to support Denver-based Steele Properties' application with the state to fund the purchase and renovation with low-income housing tax credits. A majority of the council said they could do no such thing, because that would violate the city's new housing policy, which says Dallas will now -- finally -- "overcome patterns of segregation and concentrations of poverty."

Residents, already segregated and concentrated in poverty, did not care about a housing policy -- words on paper that will be rewritten, again and again, until they are finally erased altogether at some later date.

Steele Properties' principal Chad Asarch said he remains "willing to engage in the rehabilitation of this property at some point in the future, particularly for the benefit of the residents who we sadly feel have been left holding the bag."

1 / 2Shalay Pea, resident of Ridgecrest Terrace Apartments, kisses her daughter, Tyneisha Pea, 2 months, as she listens to members of the City Council debate the future of Ridgecrest at Dallas City Hall on October 24, 2018.(Shaban Athuman / Staff Photographer) 2 / 2Two buses full of people wearing Steele Properties shirts attended a Ridgecrest hearing at Dallas City Hall in Dallas on Oct. 22, 2018. (Carly Geraci / Staff Photographer)

But, he told me Monday, the City Council's decision led his company to terminate its contract to buy Ridgecrest.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, broken long before it was temporarily shut down by a temper tantrum, is not Ridgecrest's salvation either.

I know this because of investigative journalist Molly Parker, who writes about public housing. Last Friday, she described Ben Carson's HUD as "paralyzed," torn between letting people live like Ridgecrest's residents -- in "below average" housing, to use understated bureaucratic parlance -- and booting them into a world where there's no place to go. That lose-lose of HUD's own making, Parker wrote, is "forcing agency officials to run from one embarrassing oversight failure to the next instead of creating systems and policies that proactively improve access to affordable housing."

The same day Parker's article published, City Manager T.C. Broadnax sent a memo to council that said Ridgecrest recently passed a HUD inspection -- because "HUD's standards are lower than the City's ... minimum housing standards." He said the feds were working on the parking situation, and that a new management performance review rated Ridgecrest "below standard."

But after a Dec. 17 meeting with HUD's regional director Beth Van Duyne -- the former Irving mayor who often governed like an AM talk-radio host -- Broadnax said he learned management's voucher contract is tied to Ridgecrest through 2020. It will be automatically re-upped, he wrote, "unless the owner is in default of the contract" or assigns it elsewhere with HUD's OK. In other words: same as it ever was.

At memo's end, Broadnax said he and staff "asked specifically about any new tools or programs that might be forthcoming from HUD ... that would assist jurisdictions with the obligation to affirmatively further fair housing. Ms. Van Duyne recommended that the City look at best practices from other jurisdictions as she did not anticipate any new tools or programs coming from HUD."

The city manager told me via email last week only that the meeting was "informative." On Dec. 21 a HUD spokesman said the agency "will continue to monitor the property." He has since been furloughed.

So there it is, plainly stated: The city is on its own. So, too, are Ridgecrest's residents. But we already knew that.

Before we parted ways, I asked Alexander if she's happy with the court-ordered fixes.

"I wouldn't say happy," she said through a small smile. "I'm good because I have a place to stay."