Dallas sidewalks are by the people, for the people

A couple of summers ago, Dallas resident Melody Townsel swerved around a sign left in the middle of a sidewalk in her neighborhood of the Cedars.

“My wheels went off the wheelchair. I fell into the fence, and ended up badly injured — broke a pair of glasses, I separated my shoulder, and I’m still feeling the aftereffects of that,” Townsel said. “And there’s no one to blame, nothing to do.”

In Dallas, it can take people stumbling upon unsafe and hazardous conditions to alert the city to its sidewalk problems. Since October 2020, residents have reported more than 5,000 hazardous sidewalk conditions citywide to Dallas’ 311 system.

“I think unless you walk with me on a sidewalk, you don’t realize how completely impassable they are,” Townsel said. “It’s everywhere, all the time.”

Sidewalk obstructions like overgrown bushes and utility poles often block Townsel’s path as she makes her way through the city, sometimes forcing her to use her wheelchair in the street. Dallas relies on residents to report obstructions like these through its 311 program.

“Dallas is not a proactive city,” said Uptown resident Alex Stine. “It is a reactive city, and a poorly reactive city at that.”

As a business-to-business salesperson and Uber driver, Richardson resident Adam Sharkey spends hours on Dallas roads each week. He’s filed more than 1,000 311 requests in the last six months, ranging from pothole repairs to reports of unsafe sidewalk conditions.

Once he sends in a request, Sharkey said, he receives email updates from various city agencies as they work to solve the problem. The updates have given him insight into the way the city operates.

Replacement is residents’ responsibility

“What a lot of people don’t realize,” Sharkey said, “is that in Dallas, the responsibility of the sidewalk falls to the property owner, not the city.”

City ordinance states that property owners are responsible for repairing hazardous conditions or replacing damaged sidewalks on their property. Recently, Sharkey reported a section of the sidewalk by Greenville Avenue and SMU Boulevard that had completely caved in, in the hope that the Code Compliance department would reach out to the adjacent apartment complex and have them fix it.

Instead, what followed was a chain of emails from the Code Compliance and Transportation and Public Works departments debating who was responsible for the sidewalk. Code Compliance had determined that the sidewalk was beyond the apartment’s property line, Sharkey said, which placed the sidewalk under the care of Transportation and Public Works.

“But then public works kicked it back to code enforcement and said, ‘Well, even if it’s not on their property, they’re still the benefiting party because they’re the closest property, and therefore it’s still their legal responsibility.’” Sharkey explained. “They’ve actually been kicking that back and forth for weeks.”

One reason damaged sidewalks might go unrepaired, Sharkey said, is because people don’t want to pay to fix something they are not sure they are required to. And even if code enforcement wanted to proactively make all property owners fix their sidewalks, he added, they don’t have the resources for the required enforcement and follow-up. This can get expensive, depending on the scale of the project.

“If somebody’s got a home that’s worth, you know, $220,000 and you ask them to spend eight grand to fix the sidewalk in front of their house, that’s 4% of the value of their home,” Sharkey said. “Now, that same size lot in Lower Greenville, the house is probably worth $1.7 million. To ask somebody with a home worth $1.7 million to go find eight grand to fix the sidewalk — they might be able to get that cash by refinancing their mortgage if they don’t have it.”

Owners of single-family homes, including condos, townhomes and single-family rentals, can split the cost of replacing their sidewalks with the city through Dallas’ Sidewalk Replacement Program.

City programs relieve some financial pressure

For program participants, the city secures all necessary permits for replacement, with all workmanship guaranteed for one year, according to the Transportation and Public Works department. Assessment and cost estimation can take up to three months. After payment is received, it can take another three to nine months for the replacement to be completed, according to the city.

Not all residents who apply to the Sidewalk Replacement Program end up moving forward, which contributes to the program’s low completion rates. Residents may end up declining participation in the program, the city said, or choose to use a private contractor to complete their work. One reason for this may be that, even with the cost sharing program, sidewalk replacements can still be prohibitively expensive.

In 2021, the city completed the Sidewalk Master Plan, a comprehensive proposal to improve Dallas’ sidewalks. After attending the council briefing on the plan, City Council member Jesse Moreno posted on Facebook that “the biggest takeaway from everyone is we can’t keep the 50%-50% responsibility on sidewalks,” referencing the city’s Sidewalk Replacement Program. “That has to change if we want our city to be more equitable.”

“Realistically,” said mobility advocate Heather McNair, president of BikeDFW, “the people that can afford to do the 50-50 split, generally speaking, are not the people that are the most impacted when the sidewalks are not traversable.”

These kinds of projects, McNair said, are most needed in areas with higher concentrations of seniors or people with disabilities. These are often people on fixed incomes that might not be able to shoulder the cost of a replacement. Dallas has worked toward a solution: about a third of all sidewalk replacements completed last year were funded by the city through a program specifically for low-income senior citizens.

Still, what has puzzled McNair about the city’s approach to sidewalk maintenance is asking individual residents to cover half the price of something that is “really public property.”

“I would argue — I can’t go out and block a sidewalk with my car or with a piece of furniture,” she said. “I can’t fence in a sidewalk. So if I can’t do these things, then is it really a part of my private property?”

Ideally, McNair said, sidewalks would be treated like streets, with the financial responsibility for taking care of them borne by the city and distributed among all residents who benefit from them.

“When we have areas that are public access,” she said, “that’s generally something that we anticipate is going to be maintained by those that are putting it in.”

But this approach would require billions of dollars in funding that the city doesn’t have. Finding the budget for this, McNair said, is likely where the city will hit a wall.

In the meantime, she said, increasing transparency can help show residents that the city is making progress despite bumps in the road.

A sidewalk ‘pizza tracker’?

Daisy Fast, the director of 311, said the main complaint she gets from residents is that the city doesn’t seem to be taking any action on their requests. One of her main goals has been to build what she calls a “pizza tracker” for 311 users.

Whether they submit requests over the phone, the app or online, 311 users can opt in to receive updates at every step of the way — like Domino’s does with its pizza tracking system. Right now, the system requires that users register to receive these updates, which can pose a problem to residents who may prefer to remain anonymous.

“Fear of retaliation is a reality, you know. Especially here in the Hispanic population,” Fast said, “there’s fear that, you know, if I submit a service request that, like, somehow the city’s going to, you know, find out my identity, or whoever I’m complaining on is going to, you know, find out.”

Another issue Fast noted is that 311 fields complaints that are immediately solvable by city employees, such as requests for temporary repairs, right alongside requests that take more time, like sidewalk replacements.

Fast considered only allowing residents to submit requests that city officials were confident would be completed within, for example, a two-week span. This would mean residents would no longer be able to submit long-term requests, but would gain confidence in the city’s ability to complete requests quickly.

“The negative side of that,” Fast said, “is, well, then we’re not going to have the data that [the Transportation and Public Works department] needs to build out their bond program.”

Data is what allows the city to understand where to funnel its resources, showing it what’s succeeding and what’s not.

In June 2025, the city exhausted available funds for the Sidewalk Replacement Program due to higher demand than anticipated. The city said it anticipates council action early next year to resume the program. In the meantime, property owners can still submit 311 requests to have temporary repairs made to their sidewalks.

Since the program went on pause, about 270 residents have asked to be added to the waitlist.