Denton mayoral candidates gathered for a forum Monday night at the Village Church near the University of North Texas to discuss how they plan to tackle such topics as growth, homelessness and affordable housing.
Hosted by the John B. Denton Neighborhood Association, the event featured candidates Angela Brewer, Shannon Childs, current District 2 council member Brian Beck and Chris Watts, a former council member who served as mayor for six years before Mayor Gerard Hudspeth was elected in 2020.
The forum occurred days before Friday’s candidate filing deadline for the May municipal election, which means it’s possible another candidate could announce a mayoral run before then.
Close to 100 people attended the forum Monday, including council members Jill Jester, who is seeking reelection to a second term, and Vicki Bryd, who is stepping down a year into her third term to pursue a school board seat.
Two other council candidates were also introduced — Robert Archer III, who is seeking the District 2 seat, and Planning and Zoning Commission member Erica Garland, who is attempting to secure the citywide Place 5 seat since council member Brandon Chase McGee opted to run for a Denton County justice of the peace seat rather than seeking a third term on council.
McGee beat Garland by a close margin in May 2024.
Nick Stevens, who is also seeking the District 2 seat, welcomed attendees to the Monday night forum. Stevens, a member of the neighborhood association hosting the forum, lost the District 2 race last year to Beck, who is stepping down a year into his third term to seek the mayor’s job.
Stevens said the association’s mission statement is simple: “Love where you live.”
“Love where you live” was a statement all of the mayoral candidates embraced.
Ten questions were submitted for consideration to ask the mayoral candidates, but only six were asked due to time constraints. Those questions related to growth and identity, small area plans, homelessness, road construction and affordable housing.
Here’s a highlight of their responses:
Growth and identity
Brewer said it’s important for city leaders to become intentional about directing growth and stressed it needs to be led by the community, which she said leaders have ignored with the Hartlee Field small-area plan and the Craver Ranch decision that will bring 9,000 homes to far north Denton.
“It cannot be led by developers. It cannot be led by investors,” Brewer said. “It has to be us coming together in community to design that growth and to help lead it to what we want to be. I don’t want to be like those cookie-cutter suburbs to our east. I know we need to, and we can maintain our identity here in Denton if we stick together and have a real clear vision and collaboration with one another.”
A lot of zoning but not a lot of planning is the issue Childs mentioned. She said it’s important to listen to community voices, which include artists and musicians, “and not the voices of developers.”
“It’s so important that our people are at the center of these conversations and not the potential money for kickbacks,” Childs said. “I’m so sick of seeing that.”
Back to the basics was Watts’ response. He mentioned there has been a lot of division recently on the council, but it’s been an issue since he was mayor.
“We have to plan our infrastructure more timely and more proactively,” Watts said. “Because when we’re putting in four, five hundred or a thousand homes with no infrastructure around it, without the road infrastructure or without solid waste and sewer infrastructure, then we’ve basically done a disservice to our community.”
Beck said city leaders haven’t been following the 2040 land-use plan, which calls for protecting Denton’s rural fringe and keeping growth centralized to avoid urban sprawl.
“Yet, we continuously put infrastructure out on the edges of town, and that sprawl is what’s increasing the cost to our taxpayer base,” Beck said. “If we were to develop [based on] the comp plan, you would see that not only would we retain green space, but it would be more affordable in the long run.”
Homelessness
Watts mentioned the Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness that he put together with the council several years ago. It ended with the creation of the Denton Community Shelter on Loop 288.
“What we have to do is put together another communitywide conversation where we address all the stakeholder interests to see how can we most effectively continue to render the services to the people who are in need in a way that we can afford, in a way that is reflective of the values in our community,” Watts said.
However, Beck said, addressing unsheltered people’s critical needs is what city leaders haven’t been doing.
Beck suggested that they divert people into secure, wraparound housing similar to what the Denton Affordable Housing Corporation offers and get people in a housing-first approach and out of the shelter. Our Daily Bread, Together with Monsignor King Outreach Center, which operates the shelter, quit following the housing-first model in September.
“We stopped focusing on human beings. We stopped focusing on their needs,” Beck said. “And we started focusing on numbers. I don’t think we can do that.”
Brewer stressed that Denton’s “unhoused neighbors are part of our community.”
“They are also our neighbors, and they deserve a life of dignity, worth and respect, the same that all of us in this room do,” Brewer said. “We have to start responding to them as a community,”
Brewer said that a big problem that unhoused neighbors face when they get housing is a separation from their unhoused community members.
Brewer said it’s not only housing first — but community first.
“When we put them in an apartment or a house separated from their friends and from the folks that they are used to meeting, you’re setting them up to fail,” Brewer said.
When she started her campaign, Childs said she connected with Mama T’s Butterflies, a local nonprofit that works with the homeless, and began spending almost every Sunday handing out supplies to people “because people deserve hygiene products, they deserve food, they deserve meals, and they deserve to be treated with dignity without paperwork.”
Childs said Denton police went to the community shelter nearly every day last year, multiple times.
Prior to the Sept. 1 changes at the shelter, Denton police responded to the shelter for any call type an average of 2.2 times a day, according to the Police Department.
Since Sept. 1, Denton police have responded to the location an average of 1.0 times a day.
“To me, that says there’s a larger issue with our homeless shelter that we need to be taking a look at, whether it’s providing more mental health services, refocusing our wraparound services, finding social workers, counselors, people who are incentivized to do this work, that we can obtain from our amazing universities,” Childs said.
“Not only can we bridge that into helping our homeless communities, we can bridge that into getting these students to want to stay in Denton and to make our community a healthier, kinder, happier place.”
Affordable housing
Brewer said sharing a home with her parents was the only way her family could afford to buy a home in Denton.
Before that, Brewer said, they had been in a rental house, paying about $2,200 a month.
“It’s just not feasible for working families to pay these kinds of rents every month, or mortgage costs that are currently happening in our housing market here in Denton,” Brewer said. “We’ve got to do something to get this under control.”
Childs suggested that the council start holding landlords accountable for charging high prices.
“Rent is out of control,” Childs said. “My apartment feels as old as dirt, and then I’m paying as much as these fancy apartments that are over in Rayzor Ranch.”
Though she is a renter, Childs said renters’ rights aren’t all she cares about and said families deserve affordable single-family homes.
“Your children deserve to have a backyard that they can run around and play in while you’re still simultaneously able to afford groceries, which right now is not something that’s happening,” Childs said.
Watts, an apartment landlord, pointed to a recent study that revealed city leaders have failed to meet the affordable housing needs of those at the lowest income level.
He mentioned a proposal he pushed for a few years ago to allow the city to create a corporation with private developers to bring more affordable housing to Denton.
“It was rejected four times, folks,” Watts said. “And someone on this platform rejected it four times, and not three months ago that same person [Beck] said, when talking about affordable housing, we’re in a crisis now. We’ve been in a crisis for three years.”
The city has had an affordable housing crisis for the lowest income levels of people since Watts was mayor, according to a 2020 housing study commissioned by Watts and former council members.
“We finally got it passed after two years because I stuck with it,” Watts said. “So that’s what we have to do. We have to make good decisions based upon people, not about politics.”
Beck said the recent study revealed that the Denton Housing Authority had been focused on 30%, 50% or 80% of Dallas’ area median income instead of Denton’s.
It meant that the 80% AMI rate based on Dallas’s income levels is market rate for Denton.
“It’s not affordable in the same way it would be for Dallas,” Beck said. “And the kind of thing that I find really sort of concerning is that you know who appoints the board of the Denton Housing Authority? The mayors.”
Beck said that for more than a decade now, the mayor — Hudspeth and Watts before him — has been appointing the boards and setting the policy.
“If we were wanting to have high and deep in-depth affordability at the 30% and 50% level, why didn’t we do that for the last almost 20 years, when those mayors were setting those policies?” Beck said.
“It took this recent council. It took the changes in this council to shift it to a focus on 30% and 50% AMI only.”
CHRISTIAN McPHATE can be reached at 940-220-4299 and cmcphate@dentonrc.com.
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