Dallas City Council voted Wednesday to expand its efforts to preserve the city’s historic and cultural spaces important to communities of color after decades of disinvestment.
The council unanimously adopted the Historic and Cultural Preservation Strategy as a city-wide framework for equitably protecting Dallas’ history. It begins a process that could take years and includes surveying potentially historic properties, and funding and finding a staff.
Dallas City Council member Jaynie Schultz — who led efforts to adopt a robust preservation plan — called the strategy an easy win to unite the city around protecting and celebrating the unique neighborhoods and diverse communities.
“Every single neighborhood in Dallas has a legacy to share,” Schultz said. “The great thing about this plan is it gives an opportunity for every single neighborhood to talk about what’s important to them, what makes them unique, what makes them special, even if it’s the people, not the buildings.”
Dallas is home to about 4,000 properties that are designated as historic sites. Those include 153 individual landmarks. Of those, 36 are significant to Black, Mexican American or indigenous communities.
The city’s Historic Preservation Program — housed within the Planning and Urban Design department — would primarily focus on regulatory tools such as zoning to create historic districts and designate landmarks.
But the strategic plan expands the preservation efforts outside the department to include others, including code compliance, economic development, library and city archives, among others.
“Many of Dallas’ most powerful stories do not have an architecturally significant building to house them,” the plan states.
City Council member Cara Mendelsohn said she was skeptical the city would have enough money to fund the three or four additional preservation city staff needed to implement the plan.
“Maybe there’ll be some genius budgeting coming in the future, but I don’t see that,” Mendelsohn said.
Implementing the preservation strategy could cost more than $1 million in a one-time investment, with $500,000 already budgeted by the city for a “historic resource survey,” according to the city strategy.
The other $500,000 — which would be raised through philanthropic efforts — would pay for the rebranding and launching of a Historic Preservation website, manual and documents, generating design guides for historic districts, and creating pilot programs.
Hiring additional city staff focused on preservation would still require additional City Council approval in its biennial budget process, said Janette Weedon, Dallas’ director of Budget and Management Services. The city has not established a timeline for completing those steps.
Dallas’ first historic preservation ordinance in 1973 aimed to stabilize neighborhoods during a time of displacement and disinvestment of communities of color.
However, over the next several decades, the city failed to allocate funds to create comprehensive preservation plans and historic resource surveys and cut funding to only one full-time staff member, according to the strategy council adopted on Wednesday.
Instead, the city relied on an army of passionate volunteers, including the Landmark Commission, to carry out the often complicated and expensive work of protecting culturally significant sites in Dallas.
The lack of support for preservation programs hurt communities with lower incomes as they often had little access to education and legal services needed in navigating the process, according to the city.
At the public hearing Wednesday, Shalondria Galimore, a fifth-generation Joppa resident and member of the city’s Historic Cultural Preservation Steering Committee, recommended the City Council consider adopting a neighborhood-level designation focused on helping residents, small businesses and cultural organizations with non-zoning options such as informational signage.
“A city-initiated signage program will provide an accessible, lower-cost alternative program, while also giving the city an opportunity to curate public history and empower residents and neighborhoods to share their stories that are important to them, highlighting the stories of historically marginalized communities and others that have been systematically forgotten like Joppa,” Galimore said.
West Dallas resident Ronnie Mestas spoke in favor of adopting the strategy to help protect a part of Dallas he and many Hispanic families call home.
“We’ve been neglected awhile,” Mestas said. “We’re still struggling over here on the west side of Dallas.”
The city lacks any historic district specifically for Hispanic history, although Dallas recognizes individual sites as landmarks, like the Luna Tortilla Factory in northwest Dallas, Eagle Ford School in West Dallas and El Ranchito restaurant in Oak Cliff.
The city recently abandoned a rule that led to the demolition of historic homes in the predominately Black neighborhood of Tenth Street over the past decade.