Special Dallas City Council session to be held on homelessness

A special Dallas City Council Housing Committee Thursday evening will focus solely on the issue of homelessness.

The meeting will be available online at the city website channel 16.

Committee members will hear the findings from a Dallas Mayor’s Task Force formed in February 2023 to review the issue and solutions.

“It’s going to be an opportunity to dive deep into it, to allow comments and feedback from constituents,” Committee Chairman Jesse Moreno said.

The report released last June was called HOPE, short for Homelessness, Organizations, Policies and Encampments.

The HOPE report said Dallas needs much more of the operational and oversight programs already in place but provided details on those areas including:

• Temporary Shelters
• Permanent Supportive and Rapid Rehousing
• Street Outreach
• Closing Encampments
• Eliminating Duplication in Oversight
• Behavioral Healthcare
• Coordination of Efforts

Formerly homeless Dallas resident Ralph Magana knows all sides of the issue.  

“A lot of people look at us differently. They’re saying ‘Well, he’s homeless. He’s never going to amount to anything. Just give up on him,’” Magana said. “I’ve been in places where it was dangerous and I woke up and somebody was standing over me with a baseball bat in the middle of the night, you know.”

But now he’s living in an apartment provided by the Dallas Rapid Rehousing program. It gets homeless people under a roof, sometimes with a lease in a private apartment.  

He has worked to put prison time, health problems and homelessness behind him. But he is disabled from performing regular work and he prays for a housing voucher that will provide a permanent home when his rapid rehousing lease runs out in May.

“I was blessed. This is a start you know,” Magana said. “But at the same time, I wonder where I’m going when this lease is up and I don’t want to be out there on the streets.”

Lisa Marshall with the nonprofit group Fighting Homelessness said she supports the task force findings.

“We do have a lack of all those things. And the coordination and the lack of affordable housing is the main issue,” Marshall said.

Boards still cover the windows of another apartment where Marshall placed another client.

The boards were to keep vagrants out but now the tenant keeps the boards up for her own safety in a unit that also has plumbing problems.

That tenant does have a voucher to pay for the $1,750 monthly rent, a lot of money, Marshall said, for a place like that.

“As a case manager, as an advocate as someone who comes and sees them on a monthly weekly basis, our lives are in danger too in these horrific conditions,” Marshall said.

Advocates say over 1,000 homeless people housed in emergency Dallas shelters this week due to frigid weather demonstrates the need for affordable housing.

When he announced the creation of the task force in February, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said it would be different than several past efforts that did not produce enough results.

Moreno said he sees the problem in the city where he grew up growing worse and more widespread.

“This problem is not exclusive to one area. This problem is something that is growing,” Moreno said. “We need to look at new strategies. We need to come up with new solutions in order to address both the individuals who are suffering on our streets, while also addressing the quality of life that our business and residents have come to expect."

Magana had one request from his stage in a fight against returning to homelessness.

“Look into getting people like myself, look into to get them a voucher, permanently,” he said.