JULY 5, 2023- Dallas Observer- Jacob Vaughn
Danielle Hollowell has been in and out of homeless encampments for almost a year while waiting for the housing assistance that she signed up for. “I’m still in limbo waiting,” she said.
Whenever encampments get swept, she said, residents are directed to homeless shelters. But she said the shelters are always full and many won’t take people with pets, like her. She used to have two dogs, but one was stolen. She now has one young pit bull that she calls her service animal. “I’ve yet to really get any assistance other than ‘Hurry up and wait,’ and it’s been since last August that I applied for the housing.”
Hollowell said she hasn’t heard from her case worker for some time. The last she heard is that she’s on a waiting list for rapid rehousing. Hollowell has since applied for several forms of housing assistance with no luck. She said all she needs is safe, stable housing so she can start looking for a job. “But I can’t do that when I’m having to worry about keeping it all together in 105 degree heat and not overheating or killing my service animal in the process,” she said. “That’s hard. It’s really hard.”
“I’m so ready to go to work,” she said. “I just feel like I’m being stonewalled in the process.”
Hollowell’s experience is similar to others living on the streets in Dallas. According to a report released last Friday, the number of unsheltered homeless people, like Hollowell, has increased over the last decade and things won’t get much better for them until the city has more affordable housing.
In February, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson formed a task force to answer a few questions he had about how the city and its partners were tackling homelessness. He called it the Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness Organizations, Policies, and Encampments, or HOPE for short.
Hollowell’s experience is similar to others living on the streets in Dallas. According to a report released last Friday, the number of unsheltered homeless people, like Hollowell, has increased over the last decade and things won’t get much better for them until the city has more affordable housing.
In February, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson formed a task force to answer a few questions he had about how the city and its partners were tackling homelessness. He called it the Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness Organizations, Policies, and Encampments, or HOPE for short.
It’s made up of several leaders in the city’s homeless response system: Peter Brodsky, chair of Housing Forward; Betty Culbreath, Dallas Housing Authority chair and former director of Dallas County Health and Human Services; and Ellen Magnis, president and CEO of Family Gateway.
The mayor gave them a few months to put together a report answering 12 questions aimed at what Dallas and its homeless response system can do better to house the homeless. The task force has spent the last four months meeting with numerous national and local experts to find answers to these questions.
“I strongly urge the Dallas City Council to carefully review this report, as I believe it can be a useful tool in helping us achieve our goal of improving Dallas’ worsening unsheltered homelessness problem,” the mayor said in a press release.
The report found that there were 242 unsheltered homeless people in Dallas in 2014; by 2022, that number was in excess of 1,300. This rise outpaces the national average, according to the report.
But it’s not all bad news. There have been some improvements over the last 12-18 months. The 2023 census of the homeless in Dallas and Collin counties showed a small decrease (2%) in overall homelessness. There were bigger declines in unsheltered and chronic homelessness, at 14% and 32%, respectively.
These results “provide early indications that the state of homelessness in Dallas is heading in a positive direction,” according to the report.
The report also found that Dallas doesn’t have enough housing for people making less than 50% of the city’s area median income. The report refers to this kind of housing as “deeply affordable housing.” Most people in jeopardy of becoming homeless or those trying to climb out of homelessness make this level of income, according to the report.
“Until Dallas either has more deeply affordable housing or fewer people who need it, we will be playing a game of musical chairs in which there is always someone who cannot be housed,” the report said.
According to the report, previous commissions and task forces have said the city needs well over 1,000 units of additional permanent supportive housing, but only about 300 have become available in the last five years.
Many of the county’s homeless have mental health or substance abuse conditions, the report said. The report cited a statistic from the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute showing that 40% of homeless adults in Dallas County suffer from severe mental illness, 32% have substance-use disorder and 14% suffer from both conditions. With this in mind, the report said that permanent supportive housing should include behavioral health services.
In its report, the task force said there is a need for a strategy to comply with Texas House Bill 1925, which bans camping in public places. But it isn’t an easy law to follow considering the state of homelessness in Dallas. The report essentially said that sweeping up encampments without any place for those residents to go isn’t an effective strategy because, it noted, displacing an encampment without anywhere else for the homeless to go can push them into hiding.
Dallas and its partnering organizations have been trying to communicate with each resident and get them into temporary shelter or housing before shutting encampments down. The task force recommended that problems like violence and crime should be main factors in deciding what camps to shut down next. Hollowell didn’t view that as fair. “What about the ones that aren’t violent?” she said. “I feel like we’re just being pushed over because we don’t live in a violent crime encampment. That’s because we don’t want to be around that.”
Because of the severity of Dallas’ homelessness problem, the task force urged caution in using temporary solutions. Nonetheless, some were offered including the transitioning of encampment residents to non-congregant shelters like hotels or existing nonprofit shelters, or to city-owned facilities set up as temporary shelters.
There are a few steps Dallas needs to take to beef up its creation of deeply affordable housing, according to the report. The city’s permitting department, which has seen backlogs and delays since the start of the pandemic, needs to be improved. Funds in the 2024 bond package should be allocated for this kind of housing. All of this housing should be fairly distributed across the city’s 14 council districts. The city also needs to release some of the land it owns for the development of this kind of housing, as well as other creative housing models.
To reduce redundancy, the task force also recommended dissolving the Citizens Homeless Commission and the Dallas Area Partnership to End Homelessness. The commission and partnership were initially created because Dallas and Collin counties didn’t have an effective lead agency. Things are different today, according to the report, and these two entities just make the local homeless response more complicated than it has to be. So, the city should dissolve them both, the report said.
The city could also hire more street outreach workers and speed up the use of properties acquired by the city to house the homeless.
According to the report, only one city-owned facility acquired with pandemic relief funds is operational today. The others have been delayed for a variety of reasons, but mainly due to “ineffective practices within the city,” the report said.
The procurement, legal, zoning, permitting and reimbursements processes in the city “pose significant challenges for nonprofits organizations.” That results in facilities sitting vacant, despite the urgent need for housing.
Lisa Marshall, a local homelessness advocate who started an organization called Fighting Homelessness, said that the procurement process, in which different organizations are contracted with the city, “is so costly that many smaller organizations can’t participate.”
Brodsky, chair of Housing Forward, said the processes can unintentionally act as deterrents. “The procurement process at the city of Dallas is complicated and long enough that it effectively prevents smaller nonprofits from partnering,” he said. “In addition, the reimbursement process ends up causing nonprofits to float funds for the city, sometimes months at a time, which most small nonprofits cannot do.”
On top of this, residents’ opposition to homelessness projects is getting in the way of progress.
“It is crucial to recognize that if there is reluctance to establish shelters or provide housing for individuals who were previously homeless in our immediate neighborhoods, the consequence may be an increase in visible homelessness and encampments in public spaces, directly impacting our own communities,” the report said.
It said City Council members in every district should work to assure residents that new shelters, housing or services won’t be accompanied by increased crime or disorder.
Hollowell said she started reading the new report, but it didn’t seem very promising. She said it appeared to give a lot of weight to opinions of experts in the homelessness field but not much to the experiences of the homeless. Brodsky said the task force didn’t consult anyone currently homeless when creating the report. “They’re only seeing it from the government side of it, not from our side of it,” Hollowell said.
She said she can only wait for things to get better in Dallas or go to another county to start her search for help all over again.
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