{"id":83684,"date":"2025-12-10T22:32:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T22:32:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/83684\/"},"modified":"2025-12-10T22:32:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T22:32:07","slug":"dallas-directs-10-million-in-arpa-funding-to-expand-homelessness-program","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/83684\/","title":{"rendered":"Dallas directs $10 million in ARPA funding to expand homelessness program"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Dallas City Council approved spending $10 million to expand a homelessness program<\/a> and bolster rental assistance and supportive services to help transition people out of shelters and into housing. <\/p>\n

Elected officials voted 14-1, with council member Cara Mendelsohn as the sole vote against the move. <\/p>\n

The funding came from unspent federal relief dollars and went to Housing Forward, the region\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

The program seeks to reduce chronic street homelessness by pairing unhoused residents with resources based on their needs and get them into stable housing.<\/p>\n

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There\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\u201cAt that time, we were begging for more support and a real strategy to address a situation that we believed was rapidly becoming unmanageable,\u201d Scripps said. \u201cNow today, we have hosted a beautiful turkey trot. We are getting ready for the marathon.\u201d <\/p>\n

Council members Cara Mendelsohn and Paul Ridley debated the timing of the vote and why it couldn\u2019t be deferred. Others, including members of the housing and homeless committee who did not discuss the funding Tuesday due to a public spat<\/a>, were concerned they didn\u2019t have the opportunity to scrutinize how the funding would be applied in a public setting. <\/p>\n

Peter Brodsky, a board member at Housing Forward, said a delay in funding would impact the program\u2019s progress, and remove resources that could push 700 new people into homelessness. <\/p>\n

\u201cI know there are members of the City Council that have questioned our data, but the fact is that since we\u2019ve been implementing this strategy, our unsheltered homeless population has declined by 28%,\u201d Brodsky said. <\/p>\n

Mendelsohn, who has been critical of the agency\u2019s claims of effectively ending street homelessness downtown, said business leaders were referring to the allocation as \u201cFIFA cleanup money.\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of a gross way to describe what\u2019s happening, but that\u2019s what they\u2019re saying,\u201d 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. \u201cIt\u2019s the creation of a short-term illusion that an issue is solved or doesn\u2019t exist,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

Most council members said Housing Forward\u2019s 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cWe need more options, and so let\u2019s stop talking and start moving to action,\u201d deputy mayor pro tem Gay Donnell Willis said, adding that the City Council could work toward budgeting for other solutions in the next cycle. \u201dWe know that we need more in this soup, but it\u2019s not going to happen right at this minute,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

For now, council members are focused on getting to what they can. \u201cDoing nothing is not an option. And I think people around this horseshoe realize that it may not be perfect, but we shouldn\u2019t let perfect be the enemy of the good,\u201d council member Paula Blackmon said. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Dallas City Council approved spending $10 million to expand a homelessness program and bolster rental assistance and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83685,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,105,106,104,103,287],"class_list":["post-83684","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-city-council","tag-dallas-city-hall","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83684","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83684"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83684\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83684"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83684"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83684"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}