OHS Director Christine Crossley fields a question by Kathy Stewart.
A community meeting and listening session was held at Lake Highlands North Recreation Center Tuesday to discuss potential funding for homelessness.
Director of the Office of Homelessness Solutions Christine Crossley and Councilman Adam McGough shared the current state of homelessness and funding in District 10 and throughout Dallas. They opened it up to questions after the presentation.
The city’s four track strategy for funding includes: increasing shelter capacity, creating temporary homeless centers (warming and cooling centers), continuing the Landlord Subsidized Leasing Program and developing new supportive housing.
“It’s not that the funding necessarily has to split evenly across all four tracks. But we need to make sure that these are the guideposts we are always tying everything back to in terms of how we serve people,” Crossley says.
Track four is prioritized with $55 million in investments. Here’s where spending in tracks one through three went:
- Track one put $219,000 toward a pay-to-stay program with a minimum of 50 beds available for the homeless.
- Track two invested $812,518 toward sheltering people from inclement weather.
- Track three earmarked a little over $1 million for subsidized leasing, which served 112 people as of April.
Crossley discussed housing vouchers and Point in Time (PIT), which uses a once-a-year count to measure how long people have been homeless. This year’s count has been the lowest since 2019.
“We’re actually starting to decrease the number of people who are overall unsheltered,” Crossley says. “We still have a population that is largely aging in place, a population that is largely older, African-American male, also, more single adults and families. Additionally, we know that while our overall homelessness is going down, our demographic of who is homeless is changing, and has increased dramatically.”
Crossley says previously discussed plans to transfer 12000 Greenville Avenue to a county-owned asset are no longer in the works. The property will remain city-owned.
A memo was released by Deputy City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert detailing the Interlocal Agreement Proposal, which covers the proposed partnership with Dallas County during the May 23 council meeting.
“Staff will continue to work on additional funding and partnership opportunities to develop other projects within City Council districts to serve the most vulnerable segment of the population,” Tolbert stated in the memo.
On June 22, City Council met to discuss the proposal and other projects at South Hampton and Independence Drive. Both sites are still on the Interlocal Agreement to be transferred to the County for developments for the homeless.
