Image: Flickr – Sludge G
Dallas residents did not apply for a curb-appeal rating. Since April 2026 they have one anyway. Fifty brush and bulky-waste trucks carry 100 side-mounted cameras that photograph properties from the public right-of-way as they run ordinary routes. Software assigns each flagged address a blight score from 1 to 4. City records obtained by NBC 5 Investigates show more than 21,000 properties already scored. About 1,800 courtesy notices have gone out. Leave a violation unresolved and the notice can become a fine.
A Citywide Scan, Not a Pilot
This is not a limited test. The Dallas City Council approved a three-year contract with Alabama-based City Detect for about $2.56 million in December 2025. Cameras sit at street level, cannot see over fences, and have a fixed focal length with no zoom. The vendor says faces and license plates are blurred and that the system does not connect to law-enforcement or federal databases. Images and data sit on U.S. cloud servers for the life of the contract. Human staff are required to review every detection before enforcement.
The city says the models were trained across seasons, building styles, lighting, and neighborhoods to reduce inconsistent detections. Officials describe the goal as efficiency: find illegal dumping, graffiti, overgrown lots, and structural problems without waiting for a neighbor complaint. The annual target is about 5,200 notices.
Scores Without an Application
One homeowner told NBC 5 that a score of 2 for chimney paint felt disproportionate. That reaction is the program in miniature. Residents never consented to a running inventory of their property’s appearance. The trucks already had a job — hauling brush. They now also function as a rolling inspection grid covering the city roughly once a month.
Councilmember Chad West called the arrangement a potential “tax on the poor.” He proposed stripping the camera funding, then paused that amendment after the city manager agreed to a December hearing. West’s concern is geographic: citations may land hardest in neighborhoods where owners have the least cash to paint, mow, or haul debris on a city’s timetable. The city says diverse training data addresses bias. Fair-housing advocates tracking the program are not convinced.
City Detect says it does not decide how Dallas uses the detections. That is technically true. The city still owns the choice to convert a monthly photograph into a courtesy notice and then into a penalty.
What December Decides
The December council hearing can reshape or starve the contract. The hardware is already mounted. The scores already exist. Code enforcement that once waited for a complaint now arrives uninvited on a sanitation route.
Photographing a house from the street is legal. Building a scored, citywide property file from those photographs — stored for years, reviewed by staff, and converted into fines — is a different power. Dallas is testing whether residents will accept a credit score for their front yard because the camera rode in on a garbage truck.
