The Dallas City Council has officially authorized spending nearly $6 million to renovate a hotel into housing for the homeless.
During a Wednesday council meeting, City leaders approved a $5.9 million agreement with UCR Development Services to redevelop the former Miramar Hotel on Fort Worth Avenue into “supportive housing” for the homeless.
The project will be paid for using $3.6 million in federal ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) funds and $2.3 million from the Homeless Assistance Fund from the 2017 Dallas Bond Program.
Council Member Chad West proposed paying for the project by reallocating the $3.6 million of ARPA funds from the Office of Emergency Management to the Office of Homeless Solutions.
“At the committee level, we had a discussion specifically about the item and had also recommended that we move forward with this specific funding,” added Council Member Cara Mendelsohn.
The former hotel was purchased by the City for $3.5 million in December 2020 and has remained unused for almost two and a half years.
Two other facilities bought for millions of dollars by the City to be used for homeless housing are also still vacant: the former TownHouse Suites on Independence Drive and a former hospital on Hampton Road in Oak Cliff.
The issue of these unused properties was raised by Council Member Mendelsohn during a committee meeting on Monday, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
“We’ve bought a hotel in District 8 [and] in District 1. We’ve got the hospital on Hampton [Road],” she said. “These are three facilities that we’ve already purchased that are vacant.”
Office of Homeless Solutions Director Christine Crossley then said two of those three locations would soon be under active constriction.
During the same meeting on Wednesday, the City Council approved waiving 75 years of taxes for “affordable housing” developments, as reported by The Dallas Express.
The City of Dallas continues to put millions of tax dollars into “Housing First” solutions to the City’s homelessness and vagrancy crisis, despite research indicating these types of solutions are “doomed to failure” because they “begin with an inadequate diagnosis of the causes” and fail to adequately address underlying causes such as mental illness and drug abuse.
A different approach has proven successful in San Antonio with the nonprofit Haven For Hope, which provides services for the homeless in one contained geographic location.
This “one-stop-shop” model is favored by Dallas residents, according to polling conducted by The Dallas Express.
