To announce millions of dollars in public investments in Oak Cliff’s Tenth Street Historic District, Deputy Mayor Pro Tem Maxie Johnson invited a homeowner to describe the condition of her house.
Barbara Johnson, no relation, enrolled her 102-year-old property into a repair program the city began administering in 2022. She told a room of reporters last month that the contractors didn’t finish the job, leaving the home in worse shape than they found it. Now two years after the work stopped, windows are still boarded up, the foundation slumps, the wood in the attic is rotting, and rodents sneak in through cracks and splits in the siding. The scope of work included fixing these problems. “It rains in the house,” she said.
Barbara and her husband, Donald Johnson, own one of 13 Tenth Street homes the city categorizes as “complete” after they received Neighborhood Revitalization Program repairs. The City Council approved that program in 2021, allocating $11.2 million in federal coronavirus relief funding from the American Rescue Plan Act.
The revitalization program, which ended in 2024 after the remaining money was reallocated for other expenditures, was intended to help homeowners on fixed incomes remain in aging homes in four neighborhoods south of downtown that have long complained of City Hall turning its back to them. It also provided $4.7 million to upgrade streets, sidewalks, and sewer infrastructure in those communities.
The Lab Report highlighted the Johnsons’ plight in May as part of an investigation into the federally-funded program. That reporting found examples of substandard repair work, a lack of oversight, and no infrastructure investment in Tenth Street. The city has not responded to a request for a list of public construction projects paid for by the Neighborhood Revitalization Program, nor did it detail any specific expenditures in its regular reports to the U.S. Treasury when the program was active.
During the news conference in July, Maxie Johnson announced that he had secured $300,000 for the Johnsons and other homeowners who were “done wrong when contractors left in Tenth Street.”
“It may not have been my fault,” said the council member, who took office in 2025, “but it becomes my responsibility.”
His announcement mirrored the goals of the prior program: $4 million will stay in Tenth Street to pay for “infrastructure, streets, sidewalks, and lights.” Another $2 million, from an existing tax increment financing district, or TIF, will pay for home repairs for new applicants in his District 4, which includes much of Oak Cliff east of Interstate 35E. The city’s new private contractor for home repairs, Volunteers of America, will be in charge.
Barbara and Donald’s three-bedroom, one-bath house was approved to receive $97,600 worth of repairs through the old program. Barbara said the city fired the contractor in 2024 for substandard work but, faced with the federal deadline to spend the money, reallocated the remaining funding before re-bidding the Johnsons’ project. That decision left the couple living in an unfinished property ever since. Documents obtained through an open record request show that about $30,000 remained in the budget when the city moved the money to pay for items like Dallas Fire-Rescue overtime during the pandemic. “It was a long, tedious process that has not been completed yet,” Barbara said.
Before Maxie Johnson visited her home earlier this summer, Barbara had spent more than two years asking the city for help. Staffers repeatedly told her the unused money had been spent. She is now confident the city will finally make it right. “I don’t know why,” she said in an interview, “but I am.”
The Tenth Street Residential Association is also optimistic. The group’s president, Larry Johnson, who is not related to the other Johnsons in this story, said he’s encouraged by recent communications with the council member, who has promised to install a dozen new streetlights as requested by neighbors. “It wouldn’t make sense for him to come this far and turn around and say there’s nothing I can do for y’all,” Larry Johnson said. “It simply wouldn’t make sense to do that.”
According to an email from the city’s Department of Transportation and Public Works, the infrastructure investments are paid for in two ways: $3.3 million the Texas Department of Transportation approved in 2024 for the reconstruction of Tenth Street from Interstate 35E to Clarendon Drive, and about $700,000 from the 2017 bond package to replace sidewalks. The street reconstruction began in December 2025 and should be complete by spring 2027. The sidewalk project will start construction early next year. (The city did not detail where the sidewalk improvements are planned.)
Dallas City Hall staff did not respond to a detailed list of questions sent by email last week regarding eligibility requirements for the pool of money set aside for homeowners whose repairs went sideways. It also did not answer questions about the scope of work and how many homes that enrolled in the program need additional repairs. It is unclear whether Tenth Street residents who spent their own money fixing problems related to the quality of the work will be able to access the funding. Council member Johnson declined an interview and, through a spokesperson, referred to his comments during the news conference.
“Our community has called me. I went and visited homes,” he said. “We are seeing some of the tragedy and some of the hardships that our seniors have experienced in District 4.”
Tenth Street is the city’s oldest intact freedman’s town. After being redlined in the 1930s, it was cut off from the west side of Oak Cliff by the construction of I-35E in the 1960s. It more recently weathered a 2010 city ordinance that made it easier to demolish many of the structures within its boundaries.
The neighborhood’s designation as a landmark district put in place strict rules regarding how owners can modify their properties to help protect the character and history of homes built here generations ago. But the ordinance allowed any property smaller than 3,000 square feet and deemed to be “substandard urban nuisances” to be torn down without Landmark Commission approval. If a home racked up enough code violations, the city required the owner to perform repairs or risk demolition. That ordinance stayed on the books until it was repealed in 2024.
Since 2006, Tenth Street has lost at least 75 of the 261 structures listed on the National Registry, according to an analysis by the genealogy and technology company kinkofa. The neighborhood landed on the National Trust’s Most Endangered Historic Places list in 2019.
This is why preservation has been a priority for the Tenth Street Residential Association. The homes, most of which were built before 1959, help tell the story of the people who settled here for generations. The group hoped that the Neighborhood Revitalization Program would be an effective tool to preserve the structures and retain longtime residents and their families. Now, even with their frustrations of how the federal program was administered, they welcome a chance to try again.
“If their homes can’t get fixed, then they’re gonna leave,” Larry Johnson said. “We hold onto good neighbors, then we hold on and we maintain the historic fabric of the community.”
While the city’s promise to make good on the botched house repairs is a good next step, the challenges still facing Tenth Street are formidable. Developer James McGee’s work in the neighborhood since 2022 provides an up-close view. He has built or rehabbed four homes and is redeveloping the neighborhood’s sole remaining commercial structure, the old Simpson’s Grocery Store and Pharmacy on North Cliff, which he plans to transform into first-floor professional offices with apartments above.
He echoes residents’ concerns about the need for more city investment. The illegal dumping, the overgrowth in a city-owned alley that took over a year to correct, the lack of an operable sewer line that extends from Ninth to Church streets. These problems — easily solvable, if you ask McGee, and peek into his yearslong email threads with city employees — are why missed opportunities sting. He has been asking the city for years to spend the money voters approved in 2017 to reconstruct sidewalks.
“They’ve had a lot of broken promises over here, and, for right now, none of the stuff has come to fruition,” McGee said. “It’s a good thing you’re taking the initiative, but you’ve got to see this through.”
Council member Johnson has assured the community he will.
Matt Goodman is the co-founder and editor of The Lab Report. matt@labreportdallas.com.
