4 January 22 - 28, 2026 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents around the town of Kleberg, and I strongly urge that they be written down so that they might be passed on to the ones yet to come so that they will not be forgotten.” That warning was not one that many took seriously, as current-day Kleberg resi- dents have come to realize. Freeman panicked when he saw the con- struction equipment. There was no evi- dence of plans to tear down the home on the city’s permitting website, but the yellow CAT cavalry had come. A gouge in the home’s eastern-facing roof proved that the property owners meant business. Freeman called Carranza, who called everyone in the city he could think of to stop the demolition. But Carranza was unimpressed by the speed at which things moved on the city’s end, so he decided to take the matter into his own hands. At 6 a.m. on Dec. 31, Freeman, Carranza and their own Kleberg cavalry arrived at the house, determined to prevent contractors from tearing it down. They were too late to save the massive tree, but they were pre- pared to prevent the demolition from taking place until someone from the city took no- tice of what was happening. “We stood between them and the house, and I said I hope this works, because that’s a big machine,” Freeman said. Carranza said that once it became clear the demolition was on hold, they returned to their cars to wait for city officials. A little af- ter 8 a.m., the area’s City Council represen- tative, Lori Blair, showed up with code compliance officials in tow. Freeman said he was impressed with the way Blair took control, informing the con- tractor on site that he’d failed to obtain the proper permits to proceed with the demoli- tion. According to a spokesperson for the city of Dallas, the property owners obtained a building permit in November; however, they did not obtain a demolition permit, which is a separate but required element. Neighbors left the confrontation feeling there might be a chance the home could be saved. Freeman, who lives just down the road on 50 acres, even offered to pay to have the home moved onto his land. (He claims the property owners declined the sugges- tion, pointing to the time it would take to ar- range such a move.) Now that the city has had some time to assess the situation, it appears that little can be done to save Ridgell’s home. Blair said too much work has been done on the house in recent years for the argument to be made that it has retained its historical value. A de- molition permit request was submitted to the city on Jan. 7. “Code Compliance Services issued a No- tice of Violation after it was determined that demolition had begun without the required demolition permit,” the city said in a state- ment provided to the Observer. “The demo- lition permit is expected to be issued, provided that all applicable codes and sub- mittal requirements are satisfied.” Once the home comes down, a 6,800-square-foot AutoZone is planned to take its place. How did developers get a building permit from the city without obtaining a demolition permit? Why is the land, which sits at the front of a residential area, zoned for com- mercial use? (City records suggest the zon- ing happened in 1989.) And why is it that Kleberg, where residents have spent years begging for a grocery store or a coffee shop, seems slated only for dollar stores and auto shops? (There is already an AutoZone lo- cated 2 miles from the home on Belt Line Road.) They’re questions that Carranza isn’t ex- pecting answers to anytime soon. “People [at City Hall] are just rubber- stamping stuff, and no one is checking,” he said. Unkept Promises I f anyone has an ax to grind with Dallas, it’s David Hawes. Hawes was born and raised in Kle- berg, but the town of his childhood was vastly different from the Kleberg of today; he recalls five-and-dime stores, a bustling train station and a volunteer fire marshal’s service run by his father. “It was country people with country atti- tudes,” he said. Hawes left Kleberg for a four-year stint in the Air Force, then returned to North Texas for college at the University of North Texas. After that, he was back in the small town he’d grown up in to care for his ailing par- ents. He describes Dallas’ decision to annex Kleberg in 1978 as one that “broke his fa- ther’s heart.” The debate was divisive; city records state that the vote to consolidate with Dallas passed 559 to 342, with loud voices on both sides of the issue. “Dallas made a lot of promises that we’re still waiting on,” Hawes said. “The city is asleep at the wheel when it comes to ensur- ing services out here. They allow things out here that they’d never allow in North Dal- las.” Over lunch, the men describe their vari- ous attempts to get the city to confront the area’s problems with prostitution, homeless encampments, random gunfire and the ille- gal dumping of trash and animals. Carranza is incensed by the lack of sidewalks along roads surrounding elementary schools; Hawes is positive that his neighbors are do- ing “something nefarious,” having erected massive privacy fences around their prop- erty that code compliance has sworn for months it is doing something about. City officials have taken steps to address these issues in virtually every other part of the city. Resources are being poured into re- lieving downtown homelessness, and the Dallas Police Department has launched pilot systems that identify random gunfire in se- lect neighborhoods. Hawes worries that Kleberg has been written off; its separation from the rest of Dallas has left neighbors out of sight and out of the city’s mind. Another major worry is permitless devel- opment. The debacle at the Ridgell house was not simply the case of a lone developer failing to obtain proper permits, Carranza claimed. In Kleberg, it happens frequently. On a drive through the rural streets, he points to struc- tures here, there, everywhere, that he be- lieves were built improperly. According to a city spokesperson, the Dallas Code Compliance department has identified 197 instances of work being done without a permit in the Kleberg-Rylie area in the last six months. The department is- sued 45 citations for the violations during that time. “This represents less than 10% of the oc- currences of this violation type across the city in the same time period,” the city spokesperson said. To put that into perspective, recent cen- sus data suggests that around 24,000 of Dal- las’ 1.3 million residents live in Kleberg. That’s less than 2% of the city’s population. Hawes believes Dallas’ treatment of Kle- berg is the result of stigma. A disproportion- ate share of Dallas’ mobile homes are found in the area, and while the town was primar- ily white when Hawes was growing up, it is now a primarily Black and Hispanic com- munity. Increasingly, the last names of Kle- berg’s earliest pioneers — the Woodys, the Glenns, the McCoys — are rarer to come by. “They just think we’re hicks out here,” Hawes said. “[Developers are] coming in here and offering quick money to the heirs who don’t want anything to do with us, and the city of Dallas has gotten used to it. They think there’s nothing of worth here.” Holding on to History I f it’s too late to save the Ridgell house, community leaders are dead-set on stopping future demolitions. According to Blair, an end-of-year trip to the Dallas Central Library turned into a “fortuitous” lecture on efforts to preserve Dallas’ historical landmarks. Fresh off a con- versation with librarians dedicated to iden- tifying historic homes, Blair received the initial calls about the planned demolition of the Kleberg building. Since then, she has en- listed the library’s help in identifying what needs to be done to ensure that other Kle- berg homes can be saved. While Dallas has had recognized historic districts — a designation that, when en- forced, encourages preservation and re- quires future development to align with traditional standards — since the 1970s, she feels the effort to save historical homes hasn’t been made evenly across the board. There is a “disparity of understanding” in Dallas’ southern neighborhoods, she said, which has kept neighbors from initiating preservation efforts in the past. “Education within the southern sector needs to happen. Identifying these locations needs to happen,” Blair said. “We need to raise our hands and say, ‘Look, we have this property that’s old. Is it historical? We need partnership with those that know how to do the work. … If we don’t raise the flag, no one says, ‘Let me help you.’” Blair said the effort is an “immediate fo- cus” for her office, but that determining whether homes in the area have maintained their historical value will take time. Car- ranza, Freeman and Hawes worry that more structures will fall to the same fate as the Ridgell house: Modern upgrades will render the effort worthless, and developers will move in before the community can. Just this month, Hawes found himself ex- asperated by a neighbor’s decision to repaint a red brick home white. It’s “one of the last re- maining colonial homes” in Kleberg that he believes was built by the town’s judge. “So now that likely won’t count as a his- torical house,” he said. “They ruined it.” Freeman has similar fears. His home is stunning, with a wrap-around porch, blue- gray shutters, a dark wood door with rip- pling glass panes, and large oak trees that cover the property. Before Freeman moved in, the home was owned by Kleberg’s mayor. Blair and Carranza both emphasized their desires to get the home on whatever list will keep it from someday being torn down. Freeman recently had to replace his roof, and while he made an effort to choose new materials that mimicked the style of the old one, he doesn’t know if that sort of update would be disqualifying. Carranza insists that Kleberg is a neigh- borhood of passionate people, but he wor- ries. Many of the most involved residents he knows are growing older, and many “are Mike Brooks Kleburg history advocates delayed the demolition of this house built between 1925-1927. Unfair Park from p3
