The City of Dallas has used taxpayer dollars to purchase three facilities to house the homeless that remain vacant.
Council Member Cara Mendelsohn raised this issue during a Monday meeting of the City Council Housing & Homelessness Solutions Committee.
“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 responded that two of those three locations “are about to be under active construction or are under active construction” but did not specify which locations.
The Dallas Express reached out to the City for additional information but received no response by press time.
Crossley explained that the facilities are intended to be “a way to long-term house people so we can move them out of the shelters.”
As previously reported by The Dallas Express, the City has purchased four hotels to be used for homeless services:
- The former TownHouse Suites Hotel at 4150 Independence Drive.
- The former Hotel Miramar at 1950 Fort Worth Avenue.
- The former Candlewood Suites at 19373 Preston Road.
- The former Gateway Hotel at 8102 Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway.
The latter two locations were renovated into Family Gateway North and St. Jude Center Park Central, respectively. The first two remain unused.
The also-vacant former hospital on Hampton Road in Oak Cliff referenced by Mendelsohn sparked an outcry last year when the City announced plans to convert the facility into a “homeless services” center without consulting the community.
Residents were upset that the planned homeless services center was across the street from an elementary school, as previously covered by The Dallas Express.
The subject of these vacant facilities came up during a discussion between Crossley and council members about the availability of homeless shelter beds throughout the City.
Mendelsohn, who has been publicly critical of the City’s handling of the homelessness crisis, praised Crossley “for stepping up and making sure people had a place to go.”
Crossley noted that “there has been an overflow need by shelters that they have supplemented with hotels for a long time,” and added that the City would soon spend $1 million on additional contracts with local organizations to provide transitional housing for the homeless.
The need for more homeless response services has grown in recent years as homelessness and vagrancy have reached critical levels in Dallas.
The majority of Dallas voters view homelessness and vagrancy as serious problems in the City, according to a March survey conducted by The Dallas Express.
While the City government’s strategy for addressing homelessness employs a “Housing First” approach, research has shown that “housing first” 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, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
The City of Dallas continues to spend millions of taxpayer dollars fighting this “scourge,” as Mayor Eric Johnson has called it. Still, the City has yet to employ the approach favored by many locals of a one-stop-shop for homeless people.
This approach has proven successful in San Antonio through the nonprofit Haven for Hope.