Elm Thicket Builders Plead With Dallas to Revoke Stop Work Orders For Projects the City Erroneously Permitted 

CandysDirt.com broke the news Friday night that the City of Dallas erroneously issued several building permits in the Elm Thicket/Northpark neighborhood and later “red tagged” the projects — some of which were complete — ordering builders to stop work. Several hours later, an assistant city manager revealed that the inspection team that issued the permits was using outdated zoning information when they signed off on plans and permits.

Dallas Admits Elm Thicket Permits Were Issued Erroneously, Builders Ordered to Stop Work

“The initial fact-finding revealed that permit applications for projects in the Elm Thicket-Northpark neighborhood reviewed between October 12, 2022, and June 2, 2023, were evaluated using outdated zoning information, and some permits may have been approved in error,” Interim Assistant City Manager Robin Bentley wrote in an Aug. 2 memorandum. “We are working to determine what led to these errors.”  

The development community was livid and immediately turned to social media to express their concerns. While the idea of a lawsuit has been raised, builders acknowledge that could take several years to resolve while their incomplete projects sit in the middle of a former Freedman’s Community where neighbors fought for and were granted protection almost two years ago. 

“A lot of these guys are building just one or two houses,” said real estate broker Clay Stapp, whose clients are among the red-tagged builders. “Do they really want to let their project sit for two years and spend a ton of money on a lawsuit? It’s a no-win situation to have a lawsuit, unfortunately.” 

Elm Thicket’s Zoning Change 

Bentley describes the back story of the Elm Thicket/Northpark zoning change in her memo. 

In September 2017, the City Plan Commission authorized a hearing to amend Planned Development (PD) No. 67. The resulting amendment, effective October 12, 2022, sought to preserve Elm Thicket-Northpark’s historic character and prevent displacement. Key changes included district expansion, height restrictions, a revised land-use map, reduced lot coverage, and new roof design standards. 

Earlier this year, the City began receiving complaints about construction violations on new homes and duplexes. On June 12, 2024, Interim City Manager Tolbert announced the consolidation of the Planning and Urban Design and Development Services departments with new leadership. Immediately, the staff of the newly merged departments collaborated on a deeper dive into the complaints. 

A total of 29 initial sites were identified for review in collaboration with Save Elm Thicket, a neighborhood advocacy group. Of the 29 initial sites investigated, 10 met the PD requirements and therefore had no violations, five had non-compliant plans but had not yet started construction, and the rest were in various stages of construction with violations.

Last week, after completing the fact-finding and field visits, Planning and Development Department staff began contacting contractors and applicants to address the 19 sites with violations. Actions taken by staff included issuing stop work orders and placing holds on violating sites. Our residential and enforcement teams are working closely with applicants and contractors to quickly bring these sites into compliance with the new development provisions. 

ROBIN BENTLEY, INTERIM ASSISTANT CITY MANAGER

Builder Response 

The building community took to X (formerly Twitter) Saturday morning to express their frustration. We received more than 100 social media messages and the comments are still coming in on our original story. 

Nightmare fuel

Dallas downzoned a neighborhood but kept approving building permits under old code.

Now, multiple half-built properties are red-tagged, with owners told permits were issued 'in error'. Demolition ordered. pic.twitter.com/zgxG773MtZ

— Barrett Linburg (@DallasAptGP) August 3, 2024

WFAA reported on the erroneously issued building permits on Saturday, focusing on the departure of former Development Services Director Andrew Espinoza. While Espinoza’s departure is relevant to the building permits, it was announced more than six weeks ago in the wake of another fiasco. Employees of the permitting department had to move out of their new office space on Stemmons Freeway when it was discovered the building was plagued with code violations and didn’t have proper permits. 

Some builders told us the red tags in Elm Thicket were actually a directive from the City Attorney’s Office, not the work of a trigger-happy team of zoning inspectors. 

The general consensus was the city screwed up, but varying opinions exist on where to go from here. Some have said a lawsuit is likely. Others say the appropriate recourse is for builders to take their plans to the Board of Adjustment and ask for a variance. A Board of Adjustment hearing is set Aug. 20 and at least one builder — Akber Meghani — has filed an appeal on his property at 6801 Tyree St., where he’s reportedly sunk $500,000 into a duplex. 

If the Board of Adjustment sides with the builder, they’re simply reversing the stop work order, not changing the zoning for future projects on that site, city officials said. 

Egregious violations? 

Stapp, who works with Meghani and others in Elm Thicket, told CandysDirt.com on Sunday that the most reasonable way to address the problem is to let the builders finish their work, particularly those who were issued permits during the October 2022 to June 2023 timeframe that the city neglected to update its development code.  

“If they push it back six months they can save the city a ton of money and time and just let these 24 or 30 projects move forward,” Stapp said. “If you look at the changes, they’re super-minor, like a 5% decrease in coverage area … A lot of times builders can just take off covered porches and meet that requirement and then just pour that porch later as flatwork.”

Changing a flat roof to a gabled one is also a minor revision, Stapp added. 

“Builders want to build correctly, but you’ve got to tell us what that is because we didn’t know,” he said. “A builder does not want any more trouble than they’ve already got. Some of these guys will go out of business if this goes on longer because they just can’t carry these projects — the interest, the debt, investors — people just pull out of them.”

Stapp said he’s hoping for a bold stance in favor of the builders from an elected official or high-ranking city administrator.

“I hope somebody in their right mind gets a hold of this and says, ‘Let’s do the right thing, let’s save the city some money, and let’s move on down the road’ instead of doing whatever they’re doing,” he said.  

We reached out to Dallas City Council members Jesse Moreno and Omar Narvaez, who each represent portions of Elm Thicket/Northpark, and did not receive immediate responses. 

When the neighbors got together more than two years ago and formed Save Elm Thicket, they wanted to preserve the character of their neighborhood, protect legacy residents from displacement, and minimize teardowns and construction of incompatible megamansions. 

Stapp said the red-tagged projects do not represent egregious violations. While a couple of duplexes are being built based on outdated zoning, the construction sites are surrounded by other duplexes. It’s not like they’re building an apartment complex in the middle of a single-family neighborhood, he said. 

“These are tiny, minute things that six months before you could build,” he said. “They’re not unicorns. The differences are so small that no one would drive down the street and say, ‘That house is out of compliance.’ Some of these houses are five inches over the [height] limit and they put a stop work order on the house. It’s ridiculous.” 

 Next Steps 

Bentley said in her memo that a staff review of all additional Elm ThicketNorthpark permits issued between October 2022 and June 2023 will be complete no later than Sept. 30. An update will be provided to the Dallas City Council at that time, she said.

“In addition to resolving these specific Elm Thicket-Northpark permitting errors, staff is looking at larger systemic changes to ensure this type of error does not occur in the future,” Bentley said.

Interim City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert announced the formation of a City Action Strike Team to engage and collaborate cross-departmentally in situations like the one in Elm Thicket. 

“A City Action Strike Team will evaluate the processes by which the City updates our GIS and permitting systems following an ordinance change,” Bentley said. “The CAST will also consider procedural changes such as allowing a short delay between ordinance approval and implementation to build in time for staff training and system updates.”

That sounds nice, Stapp said, but the key takeaway from this situation is that development code updates weren’t published online, so builders didn’t know their projects weren’t compatible, and even if they had known, the city gave them permits and stamped their plans. 

“Obviously the city has made a mistake, and mistakes do happen, but where is the taking responsibility for the mistake?” Stapp said. “Correct it for the people that are affected. We’re talking about less than 1% of the homes in that neighborhood are even in question, for minor infractions.”

Elm Thicket/Northpark residents have resolved to continue their fight and are expected to show up at the Board of Adjustment meeting on Aug. 20.

“According to the memorandum, the city reviewed 29 building permits,” the founders of Save Elm Thicket wrote in a Sunday email to neighbors. “Of those 29, nineteen were found to have erroneous permits. Of those 19, five were empty lots. The permits on those empty lots have been corrected thanks to Save Elm Thicket. The remaining 14 homes are in various stages of construction and the builders are being told they need to come into compliance or appeal to the Board of Adjustment. In other words, because we were all vigilant, new homes being built in our neighborhood will follow the new building standards we fought for and won in October 2022.”