The Dallas City Council approved spending $10 million to expand a homelessness program and bolster rental assistance and supportive services to help transition people out of shelters and into housing.
Elected officials voted 14-1, with council member Cara Mendelsohn as the sole vote against the move.
The funding came from unspent federal relief dollars and went to Housing Forward, the region’s lead agency serving unhoused residents, to further raise public and private dollars toward a $28 million effort. The agency is expanding its street-to-home program, which was used to house 250 residents who were experiencing homelessness in downtown Dallas earlier this year.
The program seeks to reduce chronic street homelessness by pairing unhoused residents with resources based on their needs and get them into stable housing.
Political Points
There’s also added pressure to rehouse people faster as the FIFA World Cup is only months away, and the city is expecting thousands of visitors to arrive in Dallas to enjoy the celebrations.
Homelessness service providers and nonprofit leaders like Dr. David Woody III, Peter Brodsky and Jennifer Scripps urged the council to approve critical funding. Scripps said three years ago, stakeholders were panicking in downtown Dallas during the holiday season because more than 50 people slept outside the public library and the City Hall Plaza every night.
“At that time, we were begging for more support and a real strategy to address a situation that we believed was rapidly becoming unmanageable,” Scripps said. “Now today, we have hosted a beautiful turkey trot. We are getting ready for the marathon.”
Council members Cara Mendelsohn and Paul Ridley debated the timing of the vote and why it couldn’t be deferred. Others, including members of the housing and homeless committee who did not discuss the funding Tuesday due to a public spat, were concerned they didn’t have the opportunity to scrutinize how the funding would be applied in a public setting.
Peter Brodsky, a board member at Housing Forward, said a delay in funding would impact the program’s progress, and remove resources that could push 700 new people into homelessness.
“I know there are members of the City Council that have questioned our data, but the fact is that since we’ve been implementing this strategy, our unsheltered homeless population has declined by 28%,” Brodsky said.
Mendelsohn, who has been critical of the agency’s claims of effectively ending street homelessness downtown, said business leaders were referring to the allocation as “FIFA cleanup money.”
“It’s kind of a gross way to describe what’s happening, but that’s what they’re saying,” she said, adding that the actions mirrored efforts in California to clean up the city of San Francisco before the arrival of the Chinese President Xi Jinping. “It’s the creation of a short-term illusion that an issue is solved or doesn’t exist,” she said, adding that the money could be better used for other needs such as City Hall repairs, pension funding or money for the new police academy.
Most council members said Housing Forward’s street-to-home program was a solution that needs to be coupled with different strategies. They said they wanted city officials to spur the development of temporary housing options such as tiny homes and pallet homes, which have been a subject of discussion for about two years.
“We need more options, and so let’s stop talking and start moving to action,” deputy mayor pro tem Gay Donnell Willis said, adding that the City Council could work toward budgeting for other solutions in the next cycle. ”We know that we need more in this soup, but it’s not going to happen right at this minute,” she said.
For now, council members are focused on getting to what they can. “Doing nothing is not an option. And I think people around this horseshoe realize that it may not be perfect, but we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of the good,” council member Paula Blackmon said.