The CEO of a local nonprofit dedicated to building low-income housing says Dallas cannot rely on the government to fix the city’s problems but should instead leverage private investment and engage the community as a whole.
The City of Dallas has been criticized in the past for having burdensome and ineffective housing policies.
“We can no longer put local government in the driver’s seat to solving our city’s needs,” said James Armstrong, president and CEO of Builders for Hope, in a recent interview with the Dallas Business Journal. “We all have a part to play.”
Builders of Hope began in 1998 and aims to provide “much needed services for low-income homebuyers, workforce development, and fostering community pride in the neighborhoods we work.”
Armstrong suggested shifting away from dependency on the government and moving toward more investment from the private sector — particularly when it comes to “affordable housing.”
“When I got to the community development space in Dallas, I realized how dependent community development corporations were on the City,” he explained. “If the city’s programs shut down … community development corporations could no longer operate. I thought that was a very inefficient model for such an important work.”
Inefficiency has been a chief complaint against the City of Dallas, not only when it comes to low-income housing but across other areas of development as well, such as the building permit process. As previously reported by The Dallas Express, the City’s slow turnaround times saw residential permit approval hit its lowest level of the year last month.
While the City of Dallas is involved with several ongoing “affordable housing” projects, the effectiveness of its approaches has been called into question, with some even arguing that initiatives have had the opposite of the intended effect.
“Local developers whose projects aren’t budgeted to handle the costs required to build affordable housing units are taking their projects elsewhere,” developer CEO Scott Beck previously told The Dallas Express.
But Armstrong said private institutions do have the funding to support such undertakings.
“For a city that boasts about its real estate prowess, it’s ironic that we’re not leveraging that strength of our real estate community to solve an issue like affordable housing,” he said. “From the real estate community that has the model on building efficiently and effectively, local philanthropy that has the pockets and practitioners that know the ins and outs of this business, we all have a part to play.”
To illustrate his point, Armstrong noted the millions of dollars of investment Builders of Hope has recently received from private institutions.
Benchmark Bank gifted $5 million to the nonprofit, which Armstrong said will allow Builders of Hope to build over 25 units per year while decreasing overall construction time by two months.
Armstrong juxtaposed the efficiency of Benchmark Bank’s gift with the inefficiency of taxpayer-funded grants.
“When it comes to affordable housing because we often use federal dollars … we see as much as three to four months delay for one home,” he explained.
Armstrong said that Private institutions can move more quickly, describing this recent gift as “capital that allows us to get families into homes sooner.”
“It’s capital that will allow us to move on development projects rather than sitting idly waiting for the City to sign this,” he added. “It cuts out a lot of the empty time that is common in affordable housing developments.”
Builders of Hope has already built 47 low-income homes with private funds provided by Benchmark Bank, which has invested over $7 million into the nonprofit thus far.
Looking forward, Armstrong said the organization has “secured a steady pipeline of 291 units.”
“We would like to take those units down in the next three years,” he explained. “A lot of that quantity is subdivision build-outs that the county has invested money into [and] a 36-unit mixed-income multifamily development.”
“[This is] a first for Builders of Hope and part of our model of diversifying our housing stock and creating financial stability for the organization,” he continued. “Then it includes projects like Farmers Branch, where we’re going north of the Trinity River to bring affordable housing to high-opportunity areas, so the pipeline is diverse and stocked.”
The Dallas Express reached out to Armstrong with further questions but received no response by press time.