At a meeting of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Solutions Committee on Tuesday, Council Member Cara Mendelsohn of District 12 claimed that the City is not effectively addressing Dallas’ homelessness and vagrancy crisis.
During the meeting, City officials updated council members on the status of the Homeless Action Response Team (HART).
While officials touted the success of HART, Mendelsohn reprimanded staff for not cleaning up homeless and vagrant encampments in her district.
Office of Homeless Solutions (OHS) Director Christine Crossley reported that HART closed 143 service requests within 10 days since the initiative was launched in December.
However, Mendelsohn said several of her constituents have told her that they have reported encampments to the City, but that their service requests were getting closed without the issue actually being remedied.
Crossley claimed that staff members were simply clearing out “duplicate requests.”
Mendelsohn maintained that the City is “not doing enforcement that’s necessary” and its failure to address homeless and vagrant encampments is making her constituents “extremely frustrated.”
According to Crossley’s report, HART visited 110 encampment locations and cleaned 94 since its inception.
City marshals provide security for HART during encampment engagements and operate based on a three-tiered response protocol. Tier 1 is simply an encampment cleaning with no threat of violence. Tier 2 is an encampment cleaning or closure “with intelligence that activists will be at the location protesting.”
Dallas City Marshals Chief David Pughes said Tier 2 was instituted, at least in part, because of the armed activists who prevented City staff from cleaning encampments last summer.
“Prior to the creation of the HART team … marshals encountered resistance, and at one location, armed activists tried to prevent the City from doing their job and cleaning up the encampment,” he said.
Crossley previously claimed to The Dallas Express that this was not the case.
Pughes told council members that Tier 2 was activated when the City undertook a large encampment cleanup at Baylor Street and Dawson Street.
He added that Tier 3 — which involves an encampment closure with the likelihood of active resistance, open-carry protestors, and possible arrests — has yet to be activated and he does not anticipate that it will need to be.
During the same meeting, Crossley also reported that OHS is in the third marketing phase of its “Give Responsibly” campaign, which encourages residents to direct their donations to organizations that offer support to the homeless rather than simply giving cash to panhandlers.
“Giving spare change without offering support could make matters worse,” the City previously said in a tweet.
Despite the City’s efforts, and the many services it and local nonprofits offer the homeless, many vagrants continue to willingly live on the street.
While the City continues to spend millions in taxpayer money responding to homelessness and vagrancy, many Dallas residents favor the successful approach of Haven for Hope in San Antonio — a one-stop shop for homelessness that provides services in a contained geographic area.
More than 75% of downtown residents believe that “homelessness is a significant issue,” according to polling conducted by Downtown Dallas Inc.
Additional polling conducted by The Dallas Express has found that the majority of Dallasites view “homelessness, vagrancy, and panhandling” as “serious problems in Dallas.”