Can Dallas Fix the Permitting Process?
Last year, we talked to John Hawkins of Hawkins-Welwood Homes about the hard work of helping his customers in Preston Hollow who were recovering from the 2019 tornado.
But he also mentioned another issue that was gumming up the works, and he said it had nothing to do with insurance companies or the weather.
“It is so difficult to get a building permit in the city of Dallas right now – we’re waiting eight weeks to get a building permit on a new home, and it’s unrelated to the tornado,” he said. “It’s not easy to get a permit in normal time, but it’s been considerably worse with the pandemic.”
Our sister publications, D Magazine and D CEO, have also been following the arduous permitting process in Dallas, and today D Magazine and D CEO editor-in-chief Christine Allison wrote about it further.
“We’ve written about the city of Dallas’ building permit debacle ad nauseum, and if it had not wreaked havoc on homeowners, builders, architects, and developers—not to mention the hundreds of millions dollars the city couldn’t add to its tax base—I’d let it go,” she wrote. “Really, I’d rather talk about just about anything else. But the failure of Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax to rectify the permit problem in a timely manner suggests a condition at City Hall, rather than a single problem to be fixed. And that merits a conversation.”
Read more here.
