Officials in Dallas have purchased a hotel near RedBird mall, with plans to convert the building into housing for homeless people.
The Dallas City Council voted unanimously to approve the $5 million purchase on February 23.
According to The Dallas Morning News, the purchase will be the fourth hotel city officials have bought for homelessness service if approved.
The TownHouse Suites is a 108-room extended-stay hotel located near the Duncanville border along Independence Drive in southern Dallas. The hotel covers an area of 82,000-square-feet and is surrounded by three other hotels, at least one apartment complex, and interstate 20.
Tennell Atkins, a council member representing the area where the hotel is located, told The Dallas Morning News that officials plan to add the hotel to the city’s homeless shelter options.
Atkins revealed that the city plans to contract with a nonprofit to assist homeless people who would be residing at the hotel to get support for mental health or substance abuse. He revealed that the nonprofit will help potential occupants with job placement services and obtain permanent housing elsewhere.
“This is vastly needed,” David King, chair of the city’s citizen homelessness commission, told council members. “We have to do everything that we can to begin to turn around the number of unsheltered homeless individuals that has been steadily increasing in the city and coming from the very communities where we are establishing these facilities.”
Atkins said the hotel will is set to become transitional housing for houseless individuals. However, King and Christine Crossley, director of the Dallas Homeless Solutions Office, said the type of housing the hotel will become has not been finalized, and the council plans to reach out to the community to determine how the hotel should be used.
Crossley says Dallas needs more permanent housing solutions that support the city’s homeless population.
According to The Dallas Morning News, the city purchased the hotel with funds from the 2017 bond money.
Dallas voters approved the $1.05 billion bond package in November 2017 to help improve parks, streets, public safety facilities, homelessness assistance, amongst other city amenities.
The money was initially meant to be spent over a period of 5 years, but the city extended the timeframe by a year to September 2023 due to the pandemic.
Even though the city has allocated $20 million of the 2017 bond package to pay for permanent and transitional housing for homeless people, it only began spending the money towards the cause in 2021.
