Hannah Sims and a homeless outreach team drive past the J. Erik Jonsson Central Library in downtown Dallas on golf carts. It’s a sunny day and people walk along the sidewalk in front of the building.
Sims points to a crossing sign.
"From this neon pedestrian sign, all the way down the end of this block, used to be 50 to 75 people regularly sleeping around it," said Sims, who's with Housing Forward.
She is the crisis system senior manager at the nonprofit. The organization — previously the Metro Dallas Homeless Alliance — was founded in 2002 to provide resources for people experiencing homelessness in Dallas and Collin counties. The homeless outreach team is with Downtown Dallas Inc.
Around the time MDHA rebranded to Housing Forward, Dallas faced a critical challenge: more people were becoming homeless than they were exiting homelessness. Sarah Kahn, Housing Forward President and CEO, told KERA that unsheltered homelessness in the city tripled between 2015 to 2021.
Housing Forward launched an initiative called Street to Home two years ago to eliminate street sleeping, beginning in downtown. It ultimately created a new playbook for addressing homelessness by combining homeless services with mental health care and first responders to create housing alternatives to get people off the street.
“We're not just enforcing local ordinances and moving people block to block,” Kahn said. “We're actually resolving people's homelessness, and then that clears the way for our ability to enforce local ordinances.”
The Dallas City Council approved a $10 million contract with Housing Forward in December for homelessness services. But the funds were almost deferred due to debate on whether there had been enough results to justify the contract funds.
Council Member Cara Mendelsohn called the money a last-minute fix to “save face” with downtown businesses and with FIFA before the World Cup during the discussion about the funds,
“We need a serious and thoughtful next step,” Mendelsohn said. “And this $10 million should have been placed to help launch us to that kind of success, not just throwing more money at the same solution that has not yielded the kinds of results that we expected.”
The money came from the American Rescue Plan Act redevelopment fund and were one-time use funds that became available to Housing Forward in March.
City Manager Kimberley Bizor Tolbert told council members that the money was included in the budget as part of a housing pathway strategy investment.
Thirteen of the fourteen council members, along with Mayor Eric Johnson, voted to approve the funds. Mendelsohn, who serves as chair of the Housing & Homelessness Solutions Committee, was the only opposing vote.
Housing Forward received an additional $10 million from Dallas County in January. Some county commissioners also questioned the organization’s results.
Commissioner Elba Garcia said the county jail continued to see repeat book-ins from unsheltered people. She spoke in favor of reducing the number of book-ins in a year
“I don't know if that is possible or not,” she said. “But the numbers I'm seeing for the money that we're putting, it just doesn't reflect the results.”
Real life impact
Sims and Wendy Noble, with Downtown Dallas Inc.’s Homeless Outreach team, ride together through downtown. A call on Noble’s phone prompts her to turn the golf cart she’s driving around to meet with a homeless resident who she knows by first name.
Noble greets the woman and asks how she’s doing before the woman continues about her day.
The interaction was indicative of the engagement work the team has done over time, Noble said.
That rapport has resulted in the woman accepting shelter during inclement weather and receiving help at the Dallas County Deflection Center.
“Now she knows, ‘Okay, I have this option’,” Noble said. “‘I don't always have to go back to this unsheltered environment’.”
Dallas residents like William Sanders live their success stories every day.
Sanders moved to Dallas in 2012 from Jacksonville, Florida. He said there are two things that will drive a man from his hometown: finance and romance.
He had come to Texas with the idea of building a future with his then-partner, but that relationship ended.
“Got here in 2012, realized I was shooting 50% of the finance and the romance,” Sanders said. “And then I got down to zero.”
Within two years Sanders was homeless. It took him six months, living in a daily “fight or flight” mode, for him to save money to pay for a hotel room a week at a time and get out of homelessness.
When he became homeless a second time toward the end of 2022, Sanders thought he could do it on his own like before. However — nearly ten years after his first experience with homelessness — he found it to be a much different situation, as someone older with different skill sets and facing a different job market.
Then Housing Forward came onto the scene.
Sanders said two people with the organization would wake him and others up early each morning in Main Street Garden Park to ask if they wanted housing. He was skeptical until about a week in when he saw that they were consistently coming out.
Sims was one of the Housing Forward workers who came out to the park to help. Sims and others would help people get the documents they needed to be housed.
The process took about 180 days for Sanders. He said at times it felt discouraging. An event like losing an ID could set him back six to eight weeks. Waiting for a voucher to be approved could cost another six to eight weeks.
"You're gonna get bad news every day until that one day come, and it's gonna make all that go away; They housed us,” Sanders said. “Me and the 12 or 13 people that I was with at the time, we all got housed.”
Soon after he was situated in his own apartment, Sanders said he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent all last year in bed, incredibly sick.
“So luckily that [housing] came through just in time because I would have hate to have been that sick living on the street," Sanders said. “The program probably came through just in time to save my life.”
Today, Sanders is still living in the apartment Housing Forward helped house him in. He spends his days taking care of his wife and newborn and is studying to become an insurance license agent for the state of Texas.
Street to Home
Before Street to Home started, there was not an organized way to help people experiencing homelessness, Sims said. She started as a homeless outreach case worker in Dallas in 2018 and was assigned to 30 people to try and get them into housing.
“And it always felt like this very elusive thing that I was offering them,” Sims said.
Underlying tension between outreach teams and government agencies made efforts to address homelessness uncoordinated, she said.
That is not the case eight years later.
Today, Housing Forward serves as the lead agency for homeless response strategy from the federal government. Kahn said that the organization braids various funding sources together to be able to fuel the system.
And that system benefits organizations, both directly and indirectly, like The Bridge Homeless Recovery Center, Austin Street Center, the Stewpot, and Downtown Dallas Inc.
"Without a backbone organization like Housing Forward to coordinate those efforts and to braid funding, homelessness then, in a community, really become something that communities manage versus something that communities solve," Kahn said.
The Bridge maintains a minimum of 100 people in its transitional shelter who are housing ready, meaning people who have accessed services, employment, and benefits.
David Woody III, President and CEO of The Bridge, told council members that Bridge care managers help people find housing solutions they can sustain.
“Continued funding from the City of Dallas to Housing Forward would translate into creating additional shelter exit pathways,” Woody told council members.
Jennifer Scripps, president and CEO of Downtown Dallas Inc., previously said there was a noticeable drop in people sleeping downtown. They have six full-time outreach workers dedicated to working with city homeless service groups to continue that work.
In the nearly two years that Street to Home started, there has been an 89% reduction in daily street counts reported by the Downtown Dallas, Inc. field team, according to data from Housing Forward. Zero downtown encampments exist.
Housing Forward has overseen more than 23,000 people permanently exit homelessness since 2021.
More than 90% of people at encampments say "yes" to working with Housing Forward when offered a clear pathway off the street — 93% do not return to homelessness after assistance ends.
Seeing results
From July 2024 up to October 2025, Kahn said they had permanently resolved downtown encampments, moving 1,200 people off the streets. That number also saves taxpayers about $48 million a year in the cost of managing people in jails, emergency rooms, and crisis services.
Kahn said the combined $20 million investment from the city and county represents a “very strong vote of confidence” in a strategy that has proven to be effective in downtown. She has also seen both the nonprofit and private sectors come together to address the issue of homelessness.
“But, at the same time,” Kahn said. “When community members are driving to work or taking their kids to school, and they see people living in tents and sleeping under bridges or sleeping on our sidewalks in unacceptable conditions, that doesn't feel like progress.”
So, while the city and county have invested in Housing Forward’s Street to Home initiative, Kahn said they feel justified pressure to do more, faster.
Phase two of Housing Forward’s Street to Home initiative started in March.
Phase one focused on encampments in downtown. Phase two has focused on rapid response to address new people coming into downtown so that they can be moved quickly off the streets and into shelter, housing, or a treatment facility.
"Ultimately, the way that this community is going to be successful and effective is when we align around coordinated data-driven approaches," Kahn said. "And I think since 2021, we've proven that that works, and we've got to keep going and we have to keep evolving to solve this problem together as a community."
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