Tear Downs: Fact Check

Creating or expanding conservation districts is a bad idea. These districts limit a homeowner’s ability to make changes and improvements to their own homes, and when they’re ready to sell, have a chilling effect on buyers, who quickly realize the additional cost & headaches they will endure to make the house their own.

It’s, at best, optimistic to believe that conservation districts protect and maintain the character & charm of a neighborhood. In my experience, cds give legal weight to the opinions of a small group of homeowners–about your house & property, your paint color choices, your gutters, your driveway, your mailbox, and on and on and on. Often, homeowners defer maintenance to the exterior of their homes due to the headaches of gaining approval from the often self-appointed entity that polices the rules.

And these policies are difficult to challenge and the district, once established, is impossible to undo.

Lakewood and other East Dallas neighborhoods have improved over the last few decades as folks have purchased “fixer-upper” homes and done just that. And, many of the long-neglected houses that weren’t worth fixing, were replaced. Our property values haven’t increased because homeowners were limited in what they can do but because we have been free to make the needed improvements.

My personal experiences that formed the above opinions:

Our hood, not far from Lakewood, has a neighborhood stabilization overlay created by a group of homeowners that were afraid their aging homes would be devalued to lot value. When we bought our house, the overlay gave us a sense of security that we were making a stable investment, that the neighborhood would maintain its character & charm.

Several years later, when we had added two kids and another on the way, and knew we either had to leave our beloved neighborhood or add on to our house, we discovered the massive headaches that come with these restrictions. The additional plans, drawings, and inspections to meet the overlay were costly, in both time & dollars, and limited how we could add on–requiring us to build more a “pop-up” style addition because of complicated height restrictions, specified from the street view, to keep houses’ front facades roughly the same size.

When our neighbors purchased another lot in our hood from an original owner, their renovation was stalled numerous times by inspectors who had been called by neighbors who had appointed themselves the police for the overlay. This cost a lot of time & money, even though they were within the bounds of the overlay. Those who opposed their renovation & addition were able to stall their construction just because they thought, maybe, it defied the overlay. With each complaint, our neighbors had to prove that the (already approved by the city) plans were, in fact, within the bounds of the district, and that the construction matched the plans. The city would stop their construction each time until they could prove they were “innocent” of violating the rules. All the complainants had to do was complain; they did not have to prove any “guilt”. And, as such, there remains animosity between these neighbors.

While our neighborhood stabilization overlay is not quite the same as cd2, they are similar insofar as once created by a current group of homeowners, they restrict all future homeowners, home sales, improvements, etc. And the rules might be created by well-meaning neighbors, but they will, before too long, be used to wield an excessive amount of control by one neighbor (or a group) over the properties and decisions of other neighbors.

And, as I have worked with several clients whose properties are in cds, if you think the City of Dallas is slow to permit, inspect, make decisions, and so forth, creating or expanding a conservation district is inviting a doubling or tripling of that inefficiency. If you’ve ever tried to get an essential handicap ramp approved in a conservation district, or add erosion control or improve a parking lot, you’ll know how asinine and contrary to the public good cds can be.