Harriett Everett lived in her 1925 two-bedroom Craftsman on Leads Street, in Oak Cliff’s Tenth Street Historic District, for more than 60 years. The 98-year-old and her late husband, Lawton, raised six girls in these 1,140 square feet — and, years later, their grandkids, too. She cooked soul food from scratch, measuring ingredients by how they felt in her hands. For 45 years, she walked Lawton his lunch at the WestRock paper mill on Clarendon Drive, just down the block. As their family grew, her humble house with the deep lot became a waystation for grandkids and cousins and nieces and nephews.
“Everybody had a key,” says Juliet Everett, her daughter.
By 2021, the little yellow house needed work. The roof was old, the foundation was shifting, the paint was peeling, the siding was splitting. It was cooled by window units and warmed by space heaters. But it was home, where Harriett planned to live the rest of her life before willing the property to Juliet, who was born in one of the back rooms in 1961. The matriarch periodically paid for small improvements — a new laundry room, new flooring in a couple rooms, patching the roof, re-asphalting the driveway — hoping they’d buy her house another few years.
When city staffers came knocking on her door a few years ago and said she likely qualified for a program to fix what ailed the old house, their offer felt like a salve. The city had recently launched a home repair program to help homeowners like Harriett using federal coronavirus relief dollars. Under the program, her home would qualify for up to $100,000 in repairs.
“It was enticing to her, this idea that they had all this money that they were willing to put towards the house,” says Amariah Williams, her great granddaughter. “The idea that they could do all this in the span of three months and it will be a completely new house for my great grandmother — how could you say no to something like that?”
The Dallas City Council voted in 2021 to allocate $11.2 million of the American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, pandemic relief funds it received for home repair and public infrastructure improvements in three neighborhoods, where many low- to middle-income residents live in houses built before 1959. The program launched in the communities of Tenth Street and Five Mile in Oak Cliff, and Joppa in southeast Dallas. The Bottom neighborhood near the Trinity River levee was added in 2022.
Over the past decade or so, the city’s housing policies have supported repair programs to help longtime homeowners afford to stay in parts of town where, in recent years, the appraisal district had seemingly discovered gold in the dirt. The city pitched what it called the Neighborhood Revitalization Program as a make-good for historically Black neighborhoods with outdated or missing infrastructure, like absent sidewalks and old sewer and drainage systems. It poured the $11.2 million into three buckets: $6 million for home repair, $4.7 million for infrastructure, and the remaining half a million or so for administrative expenses.
Harriett applied for the program and was accepted, but she needed to move out during construction. The city’s inspection showed the floors would have to be ripped out before work on the pier and beam foundation could start. She signed the contract in September 2022. Her family celebrated her 98th birthday a few weeks later in the house, then got to work cleaning and putting furniture in storage. Juliet remembers being told they’d be back in the house by Easter. The city’s contract with Harriett allowed for another month: “Project Completion shall occur within 120 days after contractor begins Work,” it reads.
Harriett never got to see the finished product. She died in March 2023, about six months after she signed the contract, and two-and-a-half years before her home was habitable again. After the city spent its budget for 315 Leads, Juliet says it took nearly $30,000 of her own money to fix what went wrong.
The federal government’s pandemic relief fund sent billions of dollars to local governments and granted them great flexibility in how they spent their portions — particularly in “qualified Census tracts” where at least 25% of residents live in poverty.
In Dallas, which received a little over $350 million, some of those funds went toward the home repair program that touted a goal to rehab a “minimum” of 20 homes in each of the chosen neighborhoods. A city email newsletter highlighting the program said it was “designed to address the disproportionately negative impact COVID-19 has had on typically underserved communities by preserving affordable housing and increasing livability.” It allotted a maximum of $100,000 per house.
In Tenth Street, one of the country’s few remaining intact freedman’s towns, its neighborhood association viewed the program as a stability tool to help longtime homeowners update their properties so they could age in place. In the roughly three years the program was active, documents obtained through an open records request show the city completed work on just 13 homes in the neighborhood. A spreadsheet of properties accepted into the program shows the city spent $1,151,958 on the homes it listed as complete in Tenth Street. The original budget amendment allotted $2 million for each of the three targeted neighborhoods. (The 15 council members and the mayor split a total of $16 million in discretionary funding for “eligible activities within their district.” Ten completed homes are listed as “discretionary” and include no information detailing their location.)
It is difficult to trace if and how the ARPA dollars were spent on infrastructure projects here. The feds required the city to submit quarterly expenditure reports to the U.S. Treasury and an annual report detailing how the federal money was being spent. While the city’s 2024 report notes that “[i]nfrastructure projects have since been identified,” the city did not provide a list of these projects when asked in an open records request and in separate requests to its communications department. The report says the housing department is “working with the Department of Public Works to determine the amount of funding that will be used to invest in sidewalks, which are part of larger infrastructure improvement projects.”
A spokesperson said the city was “unable to accommodate” an interview with representatives from the Office of Housing and Community Empowerment. Council member Maxie Johnson, whose district includes Tenth Street, also declined to be interviewed for this story.
The city’s 2024 report to the U.S. Treasury on its ARPA spending states that the home repair program’s “performance will be reported using the number of affordable homes preserved and total dollars invested.” The annual report the following year includes a single sentence mentioning the program, without any supporting metrics: the “Neighborhood Revitalization Program offers services to provide long-term housing security and housing support.”
The 2024 report included an italicized note that may explain why: “Project experienced delays. As the city began the process of reassessing programs and priorities, it was determined that this project was best fit for other funding sources. ARPA funds were reallocated to address negative economic impact, to investment in public safety, and effective service delivery.”
In a memo, Chief Financial Officer Jack Ireland told the City Council that the federal relief money had to be earmarked by September 30, 2024 and spent by the end of September 2026. City staff received permission from Council in February 2024 to reallocate the money left over in the Neighborhood Revitalization Program and other ARPA initiatives to pay for other things, like payroll for Dallas Fire-Rescue operations during the pandemic.
Dallas received $355.4 million in total from the ARPA program and reallocated just about half, $172.9 million. Because of the deadline to spend the federal relief dollars, staff suggested using leftover money from programs like this one to settle other expenditures — but promised to replace whatever had been encumbered with money from its general fund, which has no such deadline pressure. This was intended to give the city more time to execute the projects it created using the federal money, like the Neighborhood Revitalization Program.
The last relevant expenditure report for this particular home repair program reflected spending through the first quarter of 2024. It indicates an adopted budget of $11.25 million. Obligations are listed as $3.2 million. Expenditures are listed at $2.1 million, which makes their sum about $5.3 million. That leaves a total of $5.9 million that wasn’t used before the line item was zeroed out and the money flowed elsewhere.
A financial status report from October 2025 indicates that $3.9 million was returned for “Targeted Home Repair/Infrastructure,” which still leaves about $2 million unaccounted for in publicly available documents.
One of the homes considered complete is owned by Barbara and Donald Johnson, a Craftsman with a front porch that spanned the length of the house on Cliff Street, one block east of the Everetts’ home. The Johnsons did not have to move out during construction. Their contract shows the home was approved for $97,300 worth of repairs. The city’s spreadsheet shows it spent $66,265.50 on the property before closing their case.
The scope of work lists new doors, windows, a roof, an HVAC system, a coat of fresh paint, a new pier and beam foundation, gutters and a French drain to keep water away from the home, and a concrete driveway. The list of projects also budgeted for cutting back a tree that lurched over the roof.
The work was never finished. Today, the new roof is bowing, held up by rotted wood in the attic. The house didn’t get painted and the driveway was never paved. There are holes in many exterior corners of the home, between the roof and the siding, which the couple says have been discovered by squirrels and other rodents. They wound up having to spend $1,500 of their own money to trim the tree. They say the city-hired contractor left holes in their walls from where they ran new electrical, which the Johnsons have spackled over with plywood and putty paste. Donald says the new breaker box can’t accommodate the home’s needs. Turning on the new air conditioning tripped the breaker, Barbara says. “You turn the microwave on, the washer don’t run,” Donald says.
Because Tenth Street is a historic district, residents are required to adhere to strict rules governing the exterior appearance of the home, from the style of windows to the type of siding. Donald says the city’s contractor refused to purchase the windows recommended by the city because of their price.
“They could do all this in the span of three months and it will be a completely new house for my great grandmother — how could you say no to something like that?”
Amariah Williams, Harriett Everett’s great-granddaughter
The Johnsons say they felt pressured by the contractor to sign off on their work so the repairs could progress. “There was a contractor saying, ‘I ain’t received no money yet, I gotta pay my crew,’” Donald says. “All he needed to do was get some money to keep it moving.”
The Johnsons say they felt like project managers, verifying the contractor’s work without the help of a city inspector. In 2024, they say, the city, upset with the progress, decided to fire the contractor and re-bid the job. Barbara remembers a group of city workers walking the site to see what work still needed to be finished. The money was reallocated before a contractor was hired.
Work stopped at the Johnsons’ home on Cliff Street and never began again.
“We didn’t know we was going to have to go through this battle,” Barbara says. “We didn’t bother documenting stuff. We didn’t expect them to do a bad job.”
Donald suspects homeowners’ experiences with the program varied based on the quality of the contractor assigned to the work. He says his next-door neighbor also participated in the program; the small Craftsman has new siding, a fresh coat of red paint, and a new roof.
“I told the contractor, ‘I wish I would have got you,’” Donald says. “He said, ‘yeah, if you’d have got me, your house would have been put together.’”
The Johnsons say City Hall hasn’t been much help in the years since the work stopped on their home. “I’ve been told, ‘Oh, well, you know, it took so long and they reallocated the money,’” Barbara says of a conversation she had with an employee in the city of Dallas’ Office of Housing and Community Empowerment. “Well, how are you going to reallocate something you never completed?”
In early May, homeowners across Tenth Street received a letter from the Office of Code Compliance announcing “property-to-property inspections” beginning on Memorial Day. Violations include things like high weeds and overgrown vegetation, but also peeling paint, rotted wood, and other structural, mechanical, and electrical violations. This has put the Johnsons and other residents on edge. They feel it’s especially cruel because some of those violations were meant to be addressed through the home repair program.
“If the code compliance want to come up to me, because my windows are all rotten and raggedy, and my roof is not up to par, or whatever they want to cite me for, that’s because of y’all,” Barbara says.
A few blocks north of her house, on Betterton Circle, Rosa Medrano says paint is already peeling from the two homes she enrolled in the home repair program. “You can see the paint is coming up because they didn’t scrape it off first,” she says, pointing to the side of her shotgun house.
The Tenth Street Residential Association called a meeting in early May after residents received code enforcement’s notice, summoning Dennis Broadnax, the department’s supervisor, to the North Oak Cliff Branch Library. He told the room the sweep had been planned long in advance, that code had spent months in the nearby Cedar Crest neighborhood and Tenth Street was next. But he also said code had received “a lot of calls” complaining about conditions here, especially in alleys and vacant lots.
Indeed, there are many vacant lots and untended homes among Tenth Street’s 240 or so remaining “domestic structures.” The neighborhood association complains about absentee owners who let their properties fall into disrepair. And while code is focusing on alleys and vacant lots, Broadnax told the residents that inspectors can write citations for any violations they come across.
Shaun Montgomery, the president of the Tenth Street Residential Association, knows the home repair program would not have addressed every violation throughout Tenth Street. But the concerns she’s heard make her feel that the neighborhood should be awarded some grace. Numerous homes have burned down in recent years, which residents suspect were caused by squatters during winter. An ordinance approved by the City Council in 2010 allowed owners to demolish any home less than 3,000 square feet, which describes most of the residences still standing. The neighborhood association says more than 70 were torn down before the ordinance was repealed, in 2024. The organization is fighting to protect what is left of its history as a community created by formerly enslaved people after emancipation.
Which is why it was important to them that the Neighborhood Revitalization Program promised to pay for more than just home repairs. Montgomery was excited to see direct investment in the public infrastructure throughout the community that unfurls immediately east of Interstate 35E. Instead, she says she feels the city broke its promise to the community.
“We need lighting; not just to come in and repair poles, but bring in additional lighting. We have several streets that don’t even have sidewalks,” Montgomery says. “We have some areas where, since there is no storm drainage, that water piles up. I’ve seen it pile up in people’s yards. Eventually that will be a problem.”
Tenth Street feels left out of the conversation. Larry Johnson, the association’s vice president, says he’s discussed the issue with Council member Johnson, who took office after the money was reallocated. “He told us, in essence, that the money is gone and that … he would help us but we’re going to end up having to basically raise money for what we’re needing,” Larry Johnson says. “We’re gonna have to raise our own funds.”
The city of Dallas has struggled to manage home reconstruction programs. Most recently, in 2024, a Dallas Morning News investigation found the city had to return $1.8 in unused federal money for a lead abatement program it failed to administer.
In 2018, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development ordered City Hall to pay back $1.3 million from a repair program after an investigation confirmed shoddy work, extended construction delays, and improper vetting of contractors. The HUD report complained the contract terms protected the city more than the homeowner: “the City tried to avoid its responsibility by including clauses in its contracts stating that it was not responsible for the contractor’s failure to carry out work in accordance with requirements.”
The Everetts retained lawyers with Legal Aid of Northwest Texas in February 2024 to help them navigate the issues they were having with repairs at the home on Leads Street. Ben Gerzik, an attorney with the organization’s Community Revitalization Project, says the contract for the ARPA home repair program still put the onus on the homeowner to verify the quality of work conducted.
“The city places all of the risk and responsibility on homeowners, tries to immunize itself from accountability, then passes the buck to contractors after it fails to adequately vet and supervise them,” he says. “That is the clear through-line here.”
The initial foundation work was finished on May 31, 2023, three months beyond the contract’s completion date for the entire project. The contractor was paid in full five days later, according to an invoice. But Juliet Everett says she could roll a ball from one end of the home to the other because of the sloping foundation. The flooring had been removed and the foundation was either topped with loose plywood or left uncovered. The family requested city officials walk through the house and demanded the original contract be terminated and re-bid. The new contract was not finalized until August 2024.
Legal Aid arranged for an independent architect to assess the condition of her home on Leads Street. “The quality of work in place would generally be considered unacceptable in our market,” he wrote in the report’s introduction.
The report included photos of the siding falling from the house, either because of improper installation “or catastrophic failure of fasteners.” Trim was missing from the windows, some of which had been sprayed with yellow paint. Inside the home, the report found “excessive gaps” between the floor decking and portions where it was “completely missing,” which “present a safety concern.” Some of the floor joints were not uniformly spaced or were spaced beyond what city code allows. The workers had placed a girder on an exterior load-bearing wall, introducing a structural concern.
The city had paid out about $47,000 on the original contract; a letter city officials sent to the family indicated that “roughly” $57,000 remained for the house. An analysis of invoices and change orders by Legal Aid found the city then paid the new contractor $18,000 for repeat work, which Gerzik understands to reflect projects that needed to be fixed.
Work finally finished in August 2025. But after the change orders and the cost to fix prior work, the budgeted $100,000 ran out. Juliet says she was left on the hook for about $30,000 to re-level the home, replace the flooring that the first contractor yanked out and trashed, and paint.
Juliet was out of the house for about three years. She paid rent to a family member to stay at her home in Red Bird, about eight miles south. She stayed current on bills at 315 Leads while the work was ongoing. Without formal representation, Juliet worries whether the house would have ever been finished.
“It was blood from a stone just to get specific contractual terms followed by the city, and that’s what representation provided here,” Gerzik says.
Life has returned to the Everetts’ house, which Juliet painted white. Its neatly arranged rooms don’t divulge what they’ve been through, even if it’s difficult to lock the front door because of how the home has shifted. Harriett’s old fishing pole hangs on a wall in a framed box next to a portrait of her late husband in the sitting room. The home is as she intended, a gathering place for her large family. On a recent Friday, Juliet’s niece, 2-year-old Kalyn Smith, bounded back and forth, peeling around corners, leaping onto a couch. Joyce, Juliet’s oldest sister, emerged from the back of the house to visit with her siblings. Alice, the fourth sister, lounged on a couch and told Kalyn to be careful. The family is home.
“It’s bittersweet,” Juliet says. “I’m glad my mom didn’t have to see it the way it was, but I’m glad we didn’t give up on it. My nieces and nephews wouldn’t let us. This is Mama’s house, we’re gonna get it back the way it was. I thank them for that.”
The Dallas City Council late last year approved privatizing future home repair programs, hiring Volunteers of America, which manages similar operations in cities like Houston, to administer them. The city will still be responsible for conducting environmental reviews and inspecting the quality of work. The $11.7 million contract, funded by a variety of programs, will serve up to 449 households.
The city held a press conference in March to announce the new arrangement. Barbara Johnson was in the audience at City Hall, and raised her hand to ask a question. “My house was not finished — I had 18 windows, painting, and the foundation was not really done. Would my house be a part of this?”
Johnson was directed to speak to a city employee after the event. She says she was told what she already knew: There was no more money available for the program that was supposed to fix her home.
Matt Goodman is the co-founder and editor for The Lab Report. matt@labreportdallas.com.
