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What are the principal affordable housing problems Dallas faces?
What are the solutions to the affordable housing problems?
Dallas City Council Member
(1) Our housing stock is not growing as fast as it should.
(2) Housing prices are rising to the extent where families are being priced out of the housing market.
(3) A need for more communication, coordination and confrontation.
(1) Communication means that the public is aware of housing programs offered - The continual battle is to make sure people know what programs are out there and that there is money available. And obviously we need to make that information available in English but also in Spanish, and a number of other languages as well. (2) Housing is truly an effort that requires coordination among all levels of government. What one of the running frustrations that I have had at City Hall is getting our city government to coordinate its housing efforts with the state government and with the federal government. On the City’s level there is definitely room for improvement (3) One thing that I’m happy to say is that we on the City Council have gotten away from the mentality that we do not spend our own tax dollars on housing, that is to say we only rely on the Federal government. Thankfully that tradition has ended and now we are spending general fund dollars on housing programs. But we are not in my view spending enough general fund dollars on housing. That’s why confrontation is important. I would love to go down to City Hall one day for a public hearing on our budget and see the whole gallery of hundreds of people filled with people there to demand the city spend more general fund dollars on housing. There is truly no more important issue to the future of the City of Dallas today.
State Representative
(1) There is in this state no will to fix affordable housing. The people in the State of Texas do not understand that we have a problem. Until the people in this state realize there is a problem, we the elected officials will not be able to do anything about it.
(2) Secondly, there is not a plan. There are lots of plans but they are fragmented, duplicative, wrought with difficulties and they are not exhaustive. We do not have an agency in Texas accepting responsibility for building a plan.
(3) And third, there are limited resources. And many times with limited resources we screw up how we use them. I’m not just talking about money ; I’m talking about programs, and people, and wisdom to put things where they ought to be.
(1) I did a poll in my district that asked "Do you think that State tax money should be used to provide affordable housing" and the overwhelming answer was "yes". So there can be a will out there if we could just harness that will. We have the opportunity to make affordable housing good business for the private sector. If we just use the leverage that we do have to make it good business.
(2) My two solutions: we need to increase the education of our public, the will, the demand, the resolve. We need to involve divergent groups of people to build an integrative plan for this State.
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(1) When you think about housing assistance it is different than other programs of Federal assistance. Housing assistance for wealthy individuals is a much larger program than for poor people in America. You have tax deductions for your mortgage interest - that’s the largest housing program in the country. It’s an entitlement program; everyone that qualifies for it, gets it. Housing assistance for poor people is a much smaller program, maybe a third of that size. It’s not an entitlement program. If you’re qualified you don’t get it. You get in line for it. So just on the simplest level there is an unfairness to the way resources are allocated. We can say this: that everyone who qualifies for housing assistance should be provided with housing assistance in the same way that the high tech industry that qualifies for the tax deduction should get it.
(2) To me the most important thing we can do is to improve the housing conditions where people live now and preserve as much of that inventory as possible such as the apartments built under the old program section 236 and 221. There are roughly 2000 of these family units and for the most part they are in pretty good shape. This is what the Texas Tenants Union has been working on since 1985. Since that time maybe 1000 units, maybe more have been lost to prepayment. Lost would mean either torn down and not replaced or gone into the regular housing market where the rents go up maybe 50% sometimes almost double and people can’t afford to live there anymore. In most cases rehab is cheaper than new construction. Code enforcement does not equal housing improvement.
(3) There are thousands of people with no where to live. You have tens of thousands of people in substandard housing. And then you have many, many more thousands of households that want to buy a home. And so as we look at trying to deal with the housing crisis, we ought to look at three levels of need. A person that’s destitute needs a different kind of housing assistance and related assistance than a working family that can afford their apartment and are trying to buy a house.
(4) How can so many people be in such bad distress in housing and not have more outcry? I think the only reason that we as a society could tolerate the level of misery that we see is that we manage to diminish the lives of people who live in this housing. If their kids have to move from school to school every two months because they are evicted, well tough beans - they’re not going to college anyway. We’ve allowed the very lives of a third of this society to be diminished as if they’re just not as important as the lives of the editor of the newspaper or the superintendant of schools. But they are.
Solutions
(1) I want to mention a couple of real practical things that could be done to help homeless people. Many homeless people work in day labor. They get paid minimum wage, but their employer gets paid maybe $5 per hour more than them to cover the expenses of the labor pool. One of the largest employers of Day Labor in this region is the City of Dallas. So one thing we can do if the City of Dallas wants to have a different kind of outreach to homeless people besides arresting them when they fall asleep, they can take the money that the City uses to pay for Day Labor now and use it as a public works kind of employment service where the men and women would be paid more than the for-profit Day Labor offices offer and the City would actually pay less for its Day Labor costs. Then after they come back from work you have counselors there and you have a positive outreach to these people that is more dignified than kicking them and saying "move!"
(2) There could be a very practical source of funds to finance programs of individual and social uplift in the downtown area for the street people. That income stream is the hotel/motel tax. If you stay in a motel in Dallas there is tax on that room. The vast majority of that money goes to the chamber of commerce to attract more convention business to the city. It’s been characterized in many newspaper articles as just an open slush fund for the chamber of commerce. This is an income stream that even a small proportion of it would provide more funds that are actually going directly to help homeless street people than are going there now. And because the sight of destitute people is supposed to be bad for convention business, it’s even an appropriate use of that money.
Woodland City Alliance of Tenants
I lived in an apartment where they did not have subsidized rent. When I got injured on the job, I lost my job and ended up homeless with my family. And so I moved to a subsidized apartment. I obtained another job, I worked there about a year. Six days a week, sixteen hours a day. Then I got injured on the job again, I got fired again. But this time instead of me being evicted, my rent was subsidized. It went down to twenty five dollars and that was fine. But when I looked around the apartments I saw drugs, gambling, graffiti and that wasn’t fine for my family. It wasn’t decent, but the rent was affordable.
Solution
One day one of the tenants came to my door and asked if I would come to one of their meetings. Since then I have been participating. What we did first was to find the source of the problem which was the owner himself and people who didn’t live there coming to the property and bringing problems. It wasn’t the people who lived there doing damage to the property but they got all the credit for that. What the tenant group did is we talked to Sandy Rollins at Texas Tenants Union who guided us along our way. We talked to the legistlature in Austin. They said that if the tenants were interested in doing something to help the property, then they would help. We went back and got the support of the tenants.We talked with HUD. We asked HUD to take over the property and HUD did because they saw the tenants were concerned. So if you come to Woodland City you will see we have 24 hour security on the property, there’s no drug dealing, the place is not trashed, the tenants feel safe because there aren’t gunshots all day and all night. Now we are anticipating a merger with Operation Relief Center, so that we can maintain the subsidized affordable rent and maintain the decency of the property. So the solution to the problem is to step up and speak up. Someone out there is listening. Don’t just sit around and wait for "them" to do it, it’s not a "they" thing, it’s a "we" thing. It wasn’t just a handful of the tenants; all of the tenants participated in this. Together we stand, divided we fall. All of the tenants aren’t uneducated, a lot of them have had their own businesses, good jobs; a lot of them lost their businesses, lost their jobs. That means that as long as you live there will always be a need for affordable and decent housing because you never know where you’ll be next year. You may be in subsidized housing next year, but you still want it to be decent, affordable and safe. We need to support the efforts of the legistlature, the city , state and federal government to address the needs of the poor, because the poor will be with us always.
Executive Director, Operation Relief
(1) From the CDC perspective, most of us could do a better job of providing housing to the community if we could get the funding. That’s one of the things in Dallas I feel that we’re not doing.
(2) We have funds, sometimes we return funds - the lack of knowledge, lack of professional staff that we have in these positions shows there is education and communication that needs to be done.
(3) Trying to reach those at 30-40% of median family income. Just because a person only makes minimum wage does not mean they should have to live in substandard housing.
(1) We have been trying to lobby staff in the City and if you want to see more housing call the city staff and tell them to put the funds on the ground.
(2) We really need to get a better working relationship with the city and also with our private industry. One of the ways we could do this is collaboration, by the city stepping forward to do some of the infrastructure, some of the abatements. That way the city would help bring more development into low-income areas.
(3) Everybody should be entitled to live in decent housing and not pay more than 30% of their income for it. One way to do this is to subsidize housing. We can put more funds into the subsidies, multi-family, single-family. We can do abatements. We need to come together to do whatever we can to subsidize these people.
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