As temperatures dipped below freezing on the evening of Jan. 18, a panel of Dallas City Council members discussed the Homelessness, Organizations, Policies, and Encampments report — the HOPE report, for short — calling for a solution to the city’s unsheltered homelessness crisis.
District 2 Councilman Jesse Moreno, who chairs the Housing and Homelessness Solutions Committee, pointed out that meeting attendees would walk or drive away from the gathering and end up in their heated homes. Action frequently falls short of meaningful change, he said.
“Homelessness is a humanitarian and health and safety concern that we must address,” he said. “Businesses, residents, and sheltered individuals alike suffer when our unsheltered population suffers.”
According to the HOPE report, Dallas has seen a sharp rise in the number of individuals experiencing unsheltered homelessness — from 242 in 2014 to more than 1,300 in 2022. Dallas’ unsheltered homeless population over this time period outpaced the national average.
View the June 2023 HOPE report here. View the Jan. 18 meeting here.
Recommendations For Addressing Homelessness
Speakers at the January HHS meeting included the mayors of Farmers Branch, Addison, and Carrollton. Task force co-chairs Peter Brodsky, Ellen Magnis, and Betty Culbreath presented the HOPE report and took questions from council members.
The task force found that a holistic approach — including permanent supportive housing and mental health services — is needed in addition to cleaning up cumbersome permitting issues, Magnis said.
“While both interim and long-term solutions are needed, sometimes the interim solutions take up the money that could go toward longer-term solutions and it has to be a balanced approach,” she said. “There’s no one magic bullet. There’s no single solution.”
The city is short 33,000 units of “deeply affordable housing” for those who make 50 percent or below of the area median income, according to a Child Poverty Action Lab report.
“This is a big issue that will continue to drive people into homelessness if we don’t address it,” Magnis said.
Until Dallas either has more deeply affordable housing or fewer people who need it, the city will be “playing a game of musical chairs in which there is always someone who cannot be housed,” the HOPE report states.
Recommendations to increase the availability of affordable and market-rate housing are included in the report.
“While past commissions and task force groups have identified the need to add well over 1,000 units of additional [permanent supportive housing], only about 300 units have come online in the past five years,” the report states.
Housing Committee Members Address Solutions For Homelessness
The HOPE Report spans 46 pages and the Jan. 18 meeting lasted three hours, so interested parties should check out the full document and meeting video to get the whole picture.
District 13 Councilwoman Gay Donnell Willis said more people are being housed, but it’s moving slowly.
“What we have in the meantime is people being warehoused under underpasses and on parkland,” she said. “I know that’s free, but you bring up the need for temporary shelter. I don’t love the shelter idea. I’d love to have a middle ground, something that’s a little more like housing.”
A lot of conversation centered around how to serve drug-addicted and mentally ill unsheltered residents. About 40 percent of Dallas’ homeless population suffer from mental illness, 32 percent have substance use disorder, and 14 percent experience both. There are no dedicated no-cost beds to address those issues, Culbreath said.
That is shocking, said District 12 Councilwoman Cara Mendelsohn. More than 300 homeless individuals died in Dallas in 2022, she added.
Brodsky did not recommend “low-barrier shelters” where drug use is permitted, because they can create crime issues for the city. However, a person cannot be forced into drug treatment, task force members explained.
“We always need more behavioral health and drug treatment,” Brodsky said. “The North Texas Behavioral Health Authority does a good job. What we are getting much better at is coordinating the homeless response system with the behavioral health system. That’s why it is so important that this collective impact model continues to gel.”
District 7 Councilman Adam Bazaldua said city leaders have to be more intentional with the data they’ve received.
“I think that the data you provided on the amount of the population that experiences substance use disorder and/or mental health really coincides with the ratio of unsheltered individuals who accept resources versus those who don’t,” he said. “That means there’s an entire population that we are not hitting.”
Bazaldua suggested a low-barrier shelter “of some sort,” aligned with the language In Texas House Bill 1925 to address those who are resistant to accepting resources from the city.
“We know that the Housing First model isn’t going to work with everyone that is unsheltered,” he said.
Brodsky said reducing homelessness is “long, hard, arduous work.”
“There’s always a new flavor du jour of, ‘This is going to solve the problem’ … The answer is to get people housed,” he said. “There are a million different ways we can improve. We’ve tried to list the ones that our task force agreed upon, but we don’t want to take a hard right turn and turn away from what seems to be showing results. There will be bumps in the road but what we’re doing seems to be showing results and it has worked in other communities.”
