Dallas’s housing crisis is not just framed by the steep shortage in housing units, but also a shortage of shared understanding. 

City Council members, developers, residents and advocates are all looking at the same problem through completely different lenses. And we are all paying for that confusion with 28,000 eviction filings in Dallas in 2025 (according to the Child Poverty Action Lab), an 80% decline in new income-restricted housing units in Dallas from 2017 to 2023, as compared to the six years before that (according to the George W. Bush Institute) and a higher first-time home buyer age of 40 nationwide (according to the National Association of Realtors). Honestly, it’s hard for anyone to agree, let alone develop a comprehensive housing policy if the baseline narrative of the problems is too complex to decipher.

The confusion often starts at the foundation: Are we considering a social good, a market transaction, a wealth-building opportunity, a fiscal issue, a neighborhood debate or all of those at the same time? Depending on your lens, the same apartment complex can be a lifeline, a tax break, a neighborhood eyesore or the precipice of gentrification. 

Proponents of each of these perspectives support their framing with loads of data and terminology that only serve to preserve the logjam. Over the years, housing veterans get frustrated and burned out, while housing newbies are confused as to why there hasn’t been progress. 

This became even more evident at a recent Dallas City Council briefing where, for the first time in years, the council heard from local to national housing experts on Dallas’ housing crisis. The conversation was welcomed by many council members. 

“I’ve been trying to sound the alarm with some of you guys for years now, and I feel like today you’ve really brought it to us,” council member Chad West said. 

At the same time, council member Cara Mendelsohn noted, “I want to start by thanking the city manager for putting this on a whole council briefing … because we have a lot of new members both to the council but also to the housing committee. And what was happening is there were some very different policy ideas being expressed that I didn’t think the rest of the council understood.”

Yet, while there was a collective desire to have the conversation, other council members noted the complexity of the information and the need for more one-on-one conversations to discuss the implications for their districts. Council member Bill Roth said the presentation was “really excellent. It’s really enlightening to me. But it’s also confusing to me because there’s a lot of different aspects to the issues that you’re bringing up. This is a very complicated and diverse issue-based discussion.”

So while the council appreciated the information, the complexity of the situation made navigating strong solutions across a sprawling city with diverse topography, infrastructure, investments, incomes and history feel like an overwhelming task. 

Overwhelming is not impossible, though. To help Dallas move its policy discussion forward, I think we have to take it back to basics — looking at pictures. 

Housing experts in several other cities have designed visual representations of their housing policies. Minneapolis and Raleigh, N.C., for instance, have resources that are especially helpful. If a picture is worth a thousand words, these infographics might be worth a thousand hours of council debate. 

Minneapolis’ graphic outlines housing types mapped to resident incomes, community partners, funders and policies. In this format it becomes more evident that multifamily rental and single-family for-sale cross a range of household types but also need a range of partners from nonprofit and for-profit developers to service providers. In Dallas that would mean Housing Forward (addressing homelessness), the city of Dallas’ downpayment assistance program (supporting new homeowners), zoning reform (easing new development) and infrastructure investment (incentivizing new construction) all belong on the same visual even though they cross departments, funding strategies and timelines. 

Raleigh has created an Affordable Housing 101 resource, including a print booklet and video series, to help constituents better understand its policy emphasis. Resources like these help the average resident and busy council member speak the same language while navigating complex and divergent priorities. 

These cities and others have used a housing spectrum framework, essentially a visual ladder from homelessness to market-rate ownership, as a public education tool before debating policy. The concept is simple: You can’t build consensus around solutions if residents, advocates and elected officials aren’t even looking at the same context. 

A council vote on May 27 will impact the entities responsible for building 77% of the city’s affordable housing — the Dallas Public Facility Corp. and Housing Finance Corp. The decisions made in the next 90 days will affect renters, buyers, taxpayers and developers for a generation.

Currently the Dallas City Council has a new framework in discussion — Dallas is Home — but before Dallas can make good policy, it has to make shared sense of the problem. 

The crisis isn’t going to solve itself. But it might help to agree on what we’re solving first.

Maggie Parker is founder and managing partner of Innovan Neighborhoods.