A candidate for Dallas City Council is making noise about the city’s crisis of homelessness and vagrancy.
Priscilla Shacklett, whose background is in accounting, real estate, and development, is challenging Gay Donnell Willis for Dallas City Council District 13 in the upcoming general election on May 6.
In an interview with The Dallas Express, Shacklett discussed the growing problem of homelessness in Dallas and shared how she would clean up city streets and provide the homeless with the help they truly need.
“While we’ve been throwing more and more money at the problem, it’s not getting better; it’s getting worse,” she said, adding that she thinks the rampant crime across Dallas is tied to worsening vagrancy.
She claimed that District 13 has homeless encampments at almost every major underpass.
“I feel like we’re paying enough in taxes that we should also see results in clean streets and less homelessness in our area in District 13,” she said. “I’m very concerned about Vickery Park where I see [homelessness] near children [and] near high-density housing.”
Shacklett told The Dallas Express that her plan to tackle homelessness would focus on being more efficient with how the City spends taxpayer dollars, consistently enforcing laws on vagrant encampments, and providing the homeless with real support.
She said she would support a “zero tolerance” policy for encampments in public areas.
“It’s not legal to have an encampment there,” Shacklett added.
The need for more vigorous enforcement of laws on the city’s homeless population has also been highlighted by a sitting member of the Dallas City Council, Cara Mendelsohn, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.
Shacklett emphasized that she would focus on identifying the underlying causes of homelessness and treating those causes rather than simply putting people into housing.
She argued the City’s “idea of success is getting someone off the street for a couple months, maybe, and housing them temporarily, and then I don’t know what happens after that.”
“The emphasis is always on housing — housing first,” she explained. “Unfortunately … the population of homeless families is growing [and] the population of homeless veterans is growing, but the emphasis is getting them shelter and you rarely hear about getting them treatment.”
As previously covered by The Dallas Express, a report from the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth and Poverty found that “housing first” solutions championed by government entities as high as the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are “doomed to failure” because they “begin with an inadequate diagnosis of the cause” and ignore the roots of homelessness.
Shacklett explained that underlying causes, such as addiction and mental health, must be addressed if the situation is going to improve.
She added that the “layers and layers” of government bureaucracy meant to deal with homelessness and vagrancy are not being managed efficiently and have become poor stewards of the millions of taxpayer dollars they spend every year.
“A lot of people are giving their time and money individually, and I think these agencies mean well, but I’m not so sure that the City and the City Council and those who really have control are coordinating all of these efforts properly,” she explained.
“If they did coordinate with the resources we have available, it sounds like we should be able to not only take them off the street and give them shelter … but also treat them,” Shacklett told The Dallas Express.
One organization that has experienced success in treating the underlying causes of homelessness is the nonprofit Haven for Hope in San Antonio, which provides supportive services to the homeless in a limited geographic area.
Polling conducted by The Dallas Express has shown that this “one-stop-shop” approach to homelessness is favored by the majority of Dallas residents, but it has yet to be employed by City officials.