City Demolition Program Clears Way For New Development
Wednesday, April 30th, 2025
The City of Dalton's Residential Demolition Assistance Program offers property owners help with razing houses that are beyond repair to make way for new development and neighborhood revitalization. Recently, the program also gave Dalton firefighters a chance to perform training drills in a real-world environment. The Dalton Fire Department performed training exercises at two houses on Penrose Drive before they were removed by the Dalton Public Works Department.
The Residential Demolition Assistance Program (RDAP) was started in 2022 as a way to speed up the process of removing derelict, burned, or irreparable structures without the need to have them condemned by a court. Under the program, the City's Public Works Department performs the demolition and removal of the structure, and the property owner covers the costs of the title work, asbestos surveys and any necessary removal, as well as the tipping fees at the landfill. The City invoices the property owner for the work or places a lien on the property if the property owner is unable to cover the costs. The program is only available for residential properties.
Caption: Dalton firefighters performed training exercises on the roof of a house on Penrose Drive before it was demolished as part of the City's Residential Demolition Assistance Program
"It's a way that we can get some of these blighted properties out of the City, and get them to where hopefully, people are going to rebuild something there that gets a property back on the tax roll at a higher value," said Dan Lewallen, the supervisor of the City's Code Enforcement Unit. "It generally makes the area look better. And at the same time, it isn't crippling somebody who has this property by forcing them to invest, you know, $20,000 into (demolishing) a property that's maybe not even valued at that."
In the case of the two houses that used to stand at 1108 and 1110 Penrose Drive in Dalton, the program will pay off for the community in multiple ways. After inspectors from the Code Enforcement Unit finished their work on the project, the structures were offered to the Dalton Fire Department for training purposes. And the local Salvation Army, which owned the two buildings, now plans to build transitional housing for low-income residents in their place. Where two derelict houses stood abandoned, Dalton benefited from public safety training and now stands to gain facilities to help people in need.
"This is huge for (the Salvation Army). I mean, the reason why those houses didn't come down for so long is because it would be so expensive to take them down. It's not something that's cheap work with machinery, the crews, everything that needs to go on to do that," said Sebastian Arroqui, one of the local directors of the Salvation Army. "It saved us a ton of money and in return because it saved us a lot of money we can therefore instead use that money to continue helping the community and continue expanding our transitional homes. We have four right now and we would love to at least double that and have four duplexes or eight units."
Caption: The Dalton Public Works Department leveled one of the houses on Penrose Drive before clearing the lot
"We ended up doing some ventilation training (at the site)," said Justin Rishel, the Dalton Fire Department's training coordinator. "On a fire call, we’ll ventilate a roof or cut a hole in a roof to release heat and smoke. We got to do a whole lot of that over there. We also did some other training on enlarged openings, where if we had to make a rescue through a window we would basically enlarge the window and make into a door by cutting out some of the side wall."
"There’s a whole lot that we can do down at Station 2 (at the DFD Training Center), but it’s so valuable getting out into other places instead of at the same old location and being able to work with real world materials rather than the burn building which is all metal," Rishel said. "It presents some new challenges and makes it more realistic instead of being at the training center."
"The Public Works Department deserves a lot of praise for the work they do. They do an amazing job with this program, clearing the way for these properties," Lewallen said. "(The Penrose Drive project) was one of the easier ones to do in terms of the work Code Enforcement had to do, but it's probably one of the ones I am the most proud of because I know what's going to go there. It's going to be low income housing and they're going to be nice facilities. The Salvation Army does a good job with what they build. So, knowing beforehand that it is going to become something that is good for the community, kind of gives you a little more satisfaction."
To learn more about the Residential Demolition Assistance Program, click here.
