He spent $20K fixing up his new Fort Worth home. Then city hall told him to tear it up
Rodolfo Martinez remembers moving to Texas from Mexico City when he was about 17. He settled in Dallas, earning a living as a handyman on miscellaneous contracting gigs. He’d gathered enough confidence and connections by his early 30s to start his own fence installation business.
For the past seven years, he says, he’s pitched poles and linked panels at homes across the Metroplex. Last fall, he finally purchased one of his own — a new, one-story house perched on a 0.115-acre lot in Carver Heights, overlooking the Union Pacific rail line and subtle rises of homes and warehouses and trees near East Loop 820 and Rosedale Street.
Martinez wasted little time making improvements.
His short, lopsided driveway and cramped garage didn’t suit his family’s needs. He owned a pickup and a van for work and an SUV for personal use; he says thieves had looted his work vehicles at his old rental, so he felt wary parking them out in the open. He says his son, 5 and autistic, finds solace zipping around in a miniature, battery-powered car; their muddy yard and tight, hilly street were poor play areas.
“There’s no space,” Martinez said, standing in front of his home in sweatpants and a hoodie. “It’s dangerous for him to play here, because it slopes down, cars pass by.”
He thought up one solution for both problems: he stretched his driveway around the side of his home, barricading the new strand of tarmac from the street with a fence he built himself.
Martinez spent, by his estimate, around $20,000 on the project, a hefty expense well worth the safety of his son and the security of his gear.
Then, a few months later, city hall told him to tear it up.
Historic character and modern needs
An anonymous tipster complained about Martinez’s driveway extension to city hall in late November, according to city officials. Martinez remembers a letter from the city’s Development Services department landing in his mailbox the following month, stating that his driveway, his fence alignment, and his mailbox violated the building design guidelines of his new neighborhood.
Fort Worth’s City Council consecrated Carver Heights as an “historic district” in 2006. The designation, bestowed upon 13 other streets and neighborhoods across the city, legally binds buildings within its boundaries to a strict and specific set of rules. Almost every aspect of a property’s design and layout — the placement of patios, the style of curb cuts, the color of windows, and so on — is subject to regulation, with the professed goal of keeping the community architecturally consistent.
“The neighborhood and our department worked together when the district was created to create the guidelines,” a development services department spokesperson wrote to the Star-Telegram. “The guidelines are based on the federal standards for treatment of historical properties called the Secretary of the Interior Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties.”
Among the many strictures governing driveway design in Carver Heights is a prohibition against “additional parking areas that encompass the front or side yard.”
Martinez says he’d never heard of the exhaustive body of codes controlling his living space. Neither, he says, had his real estate agent or homebuilder. A city spokesperson said Fort Worth sends letters explaining “what it means to be in a district” to new homeowners in those areas after they set up their water account; Martinez says he never got one.
He recalls traveling to city hall after receiving his first warning, seeking some help or guidance. He says a city official instructed him to appeal his case to the Historic and Cultural Landmarks Commission, a medley of unelected architects and community organizers tasked with defending the structural integrity of city neighborhoods.
The commission summoned him Jan. 13.
“I thought I would go and they’d explain the process for getting it approved, or something like that,” Martinez said a few days later. “But when I got there, it was like a court.”
He attempted to make his case in halting English, a friend and translator chiming in occasionally to clarify his circumstances and emphasize his needs. They explained the shortcomings of Martinez’s old driveway and the health of his son.
“If he was to actually demolish it, it would not only affect his child, his business, but it would put another $25-$30K to demolish all that,” his friend told the commission.
Commissioners offered sympathy for his circumstances, but little else.
“I understand your sentiments and your care for your son; I also have an autistic grandson,” said commission vice chair Anna-Katrina Gardner. “However, you’re supposed to watch your kids, not just let them play.”
“They do constantly,” Martinez’s friend jumped in.
Another commissioner, Julius Jackson Jr., later asked Martinez if he’d gotten a permit to extend his driveway. He acknowledged he hadn’t.
“I’m sure if you’d gone and gotten it permitted, you would have discovered that it was in an historic area,” Jackson Jr. told him.
“Unfortunately, this has already been stated, it does not meet the guidelines for that particular area. And those persons in that area are sticklers for following the rules,” he added. “We have to follow those guidelines.”
The commission unanimously denied Martinez’s appeal.
Consistency
Earlier in the hearing, a family from Fairmount made a similar plea.
They had two cars, they explained, but only one parking spot — a 10-foot wide concrete pad constructed on their front yard before they’d purchased the property. The limited space forced one of their two vehicles to spend the night on the street in front of their home.
“We’ve had one car totaled and another side-swiped on the street, parking as close to the curb as they could get,” Paul Wieneskie, a Fort Worth attorney hired by the homeowners to argue their case, told commissioners.
They proposed doubling the width of their parking pad, repaving it with brick, and linking it to the front door with a walkway, a simple yet pricey solution that, in the words of historic preservation staffers, is “inconsistent with the Fairmount Historic District standards” and “disrupts the typical rhythm of the streetscape features and detracts from the historic structure.” The Fairmount Neighborhood Association shared the city’s opposition.
“We believe what we are proposing will not only not detract from the neighborhood, but will actually enhance both the historic character and the general appearance of the neighborhood and of Lipscomb Street,” Wieneskie countered.
He and his clients also pointed out that at least 93 homes (by their count) in the area had parking areas that ran afoul of neighborhood paving codes. Alexandra MacMartin, one of the homeowners, walked commissioners through a packet of photos showcasing other homes nearby that appeared to break the rules.
“We want to keep the structure historically appropriate, but it does need to serve modern needs,” she said. “And unfortunately, without public transit widely available in DFW, two cars is necessary for a two-person household.”
Commissioners initially seemed skeptical.
“I feel bad for them not having somewhere to park and getting the car hit and everything,” said commissioner Thomas Oliver. But, he noted, “You go to that place, and you know there’s no parking, then you take that risk.”
Commissioner Eric James cautioned his colleagues against being swayed by the images of other apparently non-conforming driveways.
“That’s because driveways tend to be items that are not properly permitted and show up in the middle of the night,” he explained.
But the commission’s attitude quickly and subtly shifted.
“They may have purchased the home in 2019, but here in 2025, as a community center continues to expand and density in the neighborhood continues to increase, do we also have to consider that?” commissioner Kelly Traeger noted.
A few other spoke, and James chimed in again.
“Part of me, after hearing y’all’s sentiments,” he said, “is thinking maybe we allow this to be an exception due to the restrictions that the lot was given to start with, and that there’s no other real solution to work out besides allowing their cars to continue to be hit on a street that’s continuing to get more traffic.”
His colleagues agreed, unanimously granting MacMartin and her husband permission to rebuild their driveway.
(Drive)ways forward
“It’s stressful. It’s another source of pressure,” Martinez told the Star-Telegram recently, driving home from a job. He says he’d spent all of Martin Luther King Day weekend working.
He says city hall has yet to tell him when and how he must destroy his new driveway. As he awaits orders, he and his friend are attempting to secure some kind of legal accommodation from the city that might allow him to keep the extension — on the grounds that his son’s disability requires a safe outdoor play area that only a longer driveway can provide.
His nextdoor neighbor, unbothered by the extension, offered to store Martinez’s work trucks in his driveway in the meantime.
This story was originally published January 24, 2025 at 6:00 AM.
