Homelessness response organizations across the U.S. and here in Dallas allegedly have a significant lack of accountability.
Even so, Mayor Eric Johnson’s Task Force on Homelessness Organizations, Policies, and Encampments (HOPE) has recommended dissolving the Dallas Area Partnership to End and Prevent Homelessness (DAP) — a group responsible for maintaining accountability among homeless response agencies.
The HOPE Task Force said the group should be dissolved, along with the City’s Citizen Homelessness Commission, and claimed the dissolutions would “reduce redundancy” in the City’s efforts to get homelessness and vagrancy under control.
However, the suggestion has received criticism from some homelessness policy experts, such as Michele Steeb of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
“I think it’s a horrible recommendation,” she told The Dallas Express, explaining how DAP has “an extremely robust amount of power, but they haven’t exercised that power.”
Steeb said there is often a lack of accountability among providers of homeless services — both nonprofits and governmental entities alike — including in Dallas.
“There’s no crux of accountability,” she said. “No one is looking at Dallas … and how it spends its money.”
According to a three-year strategic plan released in 2018, one of the DAP’s stated action items is to maintain accountability by “develop[ing] shared goals and clear performance measures and benchmarks that all system agencies will be measured against [and] monitor[ing] progress against those goals.”
Steeb said that “historically,” the DAP “hasn’t fulfilled its purpose.”
However, that does not mean the answer is doing away with the body entirely:
“If they start to fulfill that role, I think they’re a very, very necessary player in turning the situation around in Dallas,” she told The Dallas Express.
Meanwhile, as the HOPE Task Force recommends dissolving the DAP, homelessness, vagrancy, and crime have only worsened, especially in Downtown Dallas.
In a statement to The Dallas Express, Adekoye Adams of the activist group Dallas Justice Now said the City “absolutely” needs to step up its efforts in addressing these problems, as crime and homelessness “feed off of each other.”
“Sustaining a drug habit often requires that two people participate in a crime,” he said.
Crime rates in Downtown Dallas are notably high compared to Fort Worth’s downtown area, which is patrolled by a dedicated police unit in tandem with private security.
To complicate matters further, the Dallas Police Department is experiencing a severe shortage of police officers. The department currently has about 3,100 sworn personnel, but a City analysis previously concluded that Dallas needs about three officers for every 1,000 residents — meaning the department is some 900 officers short of the 4,000 estimated necessary.
Alongside crime, homelessness and vagrancy also continue to be a “major” problem for most Dallas residents, according to a recent satisfaction survey from the City.
City officials have made an effort to discourage residents from giving money to homeless people and vagrants, advising instead to donate their time or money to nonprofits providing services to such populations, as previously reported by Advocate Magazine.
Still, Dallas has yet to attempt an approach similar to that of Haven for Hope in San Antonio, which offers a “one-stop shop” for housing and supportive services in a single location rather than maintaining several facilities across the city.
The strategy contains both the problems and solutions associated with homelessness and vagrancy in a single geographic area and has polled favorably among Dallas voters.