The Fight For Sugar Hill

Paul Meyer at the Dallas Morning News with a series (thanks, M): "Pastor Rock Carpenter says he has been called here through the dead brown eyes of a teenage mother. He saw her in a newspaper photo a few weeks ago. She wore a tight olive T-shirt with "Little Miss Princess" in pink across the chest, cradling her baby in one arm and sitting outside an apartment. She looked like hopelessness. It swallowed him.

So he came to save Sugar Hill, the poorest place in Texas' richest county. And today, an autumn Tuesday in 2004, he walks unit by unit, indignation ignited by the disrepair.

Apartment 124: ants in the bathtub, mold growing and reports of rats.

Apartment 139: water still leaking through the walls.

Apartment 145: patchwork Sheetrock where duct tape once kept snakes out.

"I've got to get out of here," Rock says, followed by an apartment manager noting needed repairs. "It's making me sick."

The truth is he should not be here at all. Forty-one years old, alone and bone tired.

He should be sleeping or job hunting or battling debt collectors. His church, a mile away in a historic McKinney house, has no regular congregation. The bank foreclosed on his home three months ago. "