Daniel Roby, 43, is a lifelong Lake Highlands neighbor at the forefront of the homeless crisis in Dallas.
Courtesy of Austin Street Center.
As the CEO of one of Dallas’ largest shelters, Austin Street Center, Roby spends most of his time trying to find solutions to a problem without a silver bullet. At the shelter founded in 1983, he oversees programming, collaborates with other nonprofits and works with the City of Dallas’ Office of Homeless Solutions to coordinate the city’s response.
Austin Street Center provides a robust approach to homeless outreach. Aside from being one of Dallas’ largest low-barrier shelters for adult women and men over 45 years old, the center provides rapid rehousing assistance, mental health support, substance use treatment and employment services. The center even recently acquired a shuttle bus to help transport clients to Parkland Hospital, Social Security Services and employment agencies.
Roby and his staff are working in a contentious local climate where a local political group recently threatened to sue the City of Dallas over homeless encampments in Downtown. On April 4, Dallas City Manager Kimberly Bizor Tolbert issued a memo notifying employees that the Office of Homeless Solutions Street Outreach team would be transferred to the Office of Emergency Management and Crisis Response to create the Dallas Street Team. The goal of the move is to encourage sustainable rehousing and reduce the number of encampments downtown through “proactive encampment cleanup.”
“Having a dedicated cross-trained team will enhance our public safety and health efforts and reaffirms our ongoing commitment to being one of the safest, largest cities in the country, maximizing quality of life for all residents and improving our homeless response across the City,” the memo reads.
With all the noise around the issue, we caught up with the Lake Highlands High School Class of 2000 graduate to learn more about his story, Austin Street Center and the state of Dallas’ homeless response.
How did you get into this work?
I volunteered at Austin Street for the first time when I was like 10 years old, give or take a couple of years. My parents were always people who were very socially conscious, were always doing a mission trip or something like that, so I had all these experiences as a young person with people who had significant need. And that planted some seeds that grew over time.
When I went to college, I did some internships with Mission Waco and some organizations down there, and then I moved to Portland, Oregon. That’s when I started working professionally in the homeless services arena. Fundamentally, those experiences with people who had experienced a lot of poverty kind of built a tension in me of realizing, ‘OK, why is it that I’m a 17-year-old who is driving a car that’s three years old that my parents purchased for me?’ Comparing myself to these people who had nothing, I hadn’t done anything to earn what I had. There was no moral superiority, no greater level of intelligence. I just walked into this family that had this stuff.
Do you work with OHS on rapid rehousing?
We do work with the Office of Homeless Solutions. That’s a joint program between the City of Dallas and Housing Forward and many other partners, but we’re one of the larger partners operating that program.
We facilitate a lot of that support. We also have diversion and outreach teams, which are folks that go out under bridges and try to get people connected to services. And in our diversion team, which is when someone comes to the shelter, instead of giving them a bed first, we’re finding out, ‘Hey, can we call a sister, brother or cousin, anyone that you know that’ll let you stay with them?’ Because we have so few shelter beds in the city, we are turning away three times as many people as we’re serving right now, which is not what we need to be doing. There’s just not enough emergency shelter. There’s not enough housing.
Your jobs programs receive a lot of Federal funding. Are you worried about recent cuts?
I mean, it could certainly impact Austin Street. I am more worried about our clients, because they’re the ones who are going to be hurt the most. We have hundreds of people who are on this assistance, who are working hard at their jobs. Half the people at Austin Street go to work every single day like you and I do. And so there’s this kind of common misconception of, ‘Oh, people don’t want to be out of their situation.’ Well, I’ve got hundreds of people who will tell you otherwise and are going to work every day to show you that they mean otherwise.
Is Dallas headed in the right direction in terms of homelessness?
This is a great time to remember that the devil is in the details, because are we heading the right direction? Well, interestingly, Child Poverty Action Lab came out with a report a while back that said we need 33,000 significantly affordable units, or 50% of area median income or below. Well, since that time, they’ve come out with an updated report, it’s like three times that number. It’s getting worse.
The environment that we’re living in is no one’s fault; it’s just the fact that Dallas is a great place to live. A lot of people are moving here, prices are going up, but there’s a lot of good conversation happening. We’re still waiting to see what the implementation will be like. We’re not out of the woods even remotely. And if we don’t get real serious soon, we’re gonna end up like San Francisco and Los Angeles, where you’ve got tens of thousands of people on the streets. We need to treat this like a crisis.
Where are there opportunities for growth in the city’s response?
The outreach teams that were part of the Office of Homeless Solutions are being taken from that team and moved into this new office, the Office of Emergency Management. I think that will certainly give people a lot of confidence that, ‘Hey, when I need an encampment gone, it’s going to be gone.’ But the challenge is, once again, if we don’t come up with a long-term solution, they’re just going to pop up somewhere else.
They’re not just going to disappear because we decided to clear an encampment. They’re not all going to jail either, even if they’re on property where they shouldn’t be because the reality is, guess what? People have to have someplace to go. But from a housing perspective, say, ‘If you can’t be here, I need to find somewhere.’
It seems like homeless individuals are being increasingly stigmatized in public spaces. How do you feel about the current environment in Dallas?
We have a trend issue as a society that we have forgotten the importance of loving one another. We’ve forgotten the importance of what it means to care for our neighbor. We need to remember that we’re not supposed to go around saying ‘I’m not my brother’s keeper’. Instead, we need to realize we are in community with each other, whether we like it or not. We’ve made that decision about where we live, and so we need to take care of the community that we’re in.
The breakdown of the community is the issue. When people have communities that support them, both family and civic and church and everything else, it’s different. But when we lose that respect, you’re on a slow decline to vilifying somebody based upon the fact that they’re suffering and to tell them that they are not worth even enough food to eat or a roof over their head. We haven’t yet found the political will and emotional determination to make sure that that’s available to everybody.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
