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KERA's One Crisis Away project focuses on North Texans living on the financial edge.

'Unprecedented' $22.8 million grant will help unhoused people in Dallas and Collin counties

Jimmy Coleman, who is experiencing homelessness, chats with volunteers with the Collin County Point in Time count Thursday, Jan. 26, 2023, in Plano. The count measures trends in the homeless population and brings resources to the county.
Yfat Yossifor
/
KERA
The funds will help increase the ability to provide long-term subsidized housing and wrap-around services for people with the greatest need.

A new $22.8 million federal grant will help a coalition of nonprofits and government agencies in Dallas and Collin counties to find permanent homes for the most visible unhoused people with the greatest needs.

It also will help provide the services they need to keep from falling back into homelessness.

The award is part of a federal push to reduce unsheltered homelessness and spur increased coordination between public housing agencies and the homeless services sector.

Housing Forward, the nonprofit charged with coordinating homeless response in Dallas and Collin Counties, applied for the funding late last year on behalf of the coalition.

“This grant funding that we received from HUD is absolutely pivotal to allowing us to further the work that's already happening in our system,” said Joli Angel Robinson, Housing Forward’s CEO.

Meeting the greatest needs

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced last year that it would provide new funding to address unsheltered homelessness, which surged across the country as the pandemic made it harder to provide services.

The funds will help increase the ability to provide long-term subsidized housing and wrap-around services, and prioritize people living unsheltered. This permanent supportive housing model is seen as vital to meeting the often complex and severe needs of people who’ve lived on the street the longest, and who are unlikely to stay stably housed without significant and ongoing support.

But permanent supportive housing units are in extremely short supply in North Texas and around the nation. As the population ages, the need for permanent supportive housing is expected to grow.

Locally, the 2021 point-in-time count in Dallas and Collin counties found over 1,000 people who’d been unhoused for more than a year, or who had been in and out of homelessness frequently over several years. Data from this year’s count is not yet available.

“We saw a steady increase in the chronically unsheltered numbers, but we did not see that increase of permanent supportive housing units,” Robinson said.

Robinson said it’s too early to say how many permanent supportive housing units the new funding could pay for, or when they might come online.

Front-end solutions

In addition to helping people who’ve been homeless the longest, the funds are also going to be used to help curb homelessness by preventing it in the first place.

The money will help expand efforts to help people before they end up on the streets or in a shelter. Diversion efforts rely on caseworkers helping people on the verge of losing their housing to identify options that’ll keep them stably housed. That might include a few months of rental assistance, getting connected with social services, or arranging transportation to a family member’s home where they can live.

With the pandemic and inflation driving up the cost of housing, groceries and all sorts of other household expenses, Robinson said more and more people are struggling just to keep up.

"We know in our system that there's an increased pinch for a lot of individuals. What we are trying to do with the expansion of diversion is trying to fill the gap that not a lot of other agencies are able to fill," she said.

And Keeping someone housed in the short term is far less expensive than sheltering them in a homeless shelter and helping them get out of homelessness later.

“We also know that moving into shelters, whether an individual or a family, is a is another layer of trauma,” Robinson said.

The federal guidance calls for a focus on racial equity in the efforts and is intended to deepen coordination between service providers and public housing authorities. It includes an additional 4,000 housing vouchers targeted to people experiencing homelessness.

“Homelessness is a crisis, and it is solvable. Housing with supportive services solves homelessness. That’s why, for the first time the federal government is deploying targeted resources to meet the needs of people experiencing homelessness in unsheltered settings or in rural areas,” HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge said in a statement announcing the grants.

Increasing coordination

Dallas is receiving the third largest grant the department’s first round of grants, which totals $315 million and will go to dozens of communities across the country. HUD also awarded funds to $7.7 million to the Austin area, and $4 million to the statewide effort to address rural homelessness.

The department is expected to announce another round of recipients in the coming weeks. The Tarrant County Homeless Coalition has applied for funding as well, but was not included in the first round of grantees.

Efforts to increase the coordination and effectiveness of homeless services in Dallas and Collin Counties are paying dividends, Robinson said, which may account for the region receiving such a large grant in the first round of allocations.

“I think what put us at the front of the line really is the deep system transformation work that we've been doing over the past couple of years,” Robinson said, “the increased collaboration with our health care system, the increased collaboration with our North Texas behavioral health system, our housing authority, our county partners.”

The new funding comes more than a year into a major $72 million regional push to provide a year of housing and services to about 2,700 unhoused people. That rapid rehousing program came together after local governments, the Dallas housing authority and nonprofits pooled their one-time federal pandemic relief funds and housing vouchers to launch a coordinated effort with the potential to halve homelessness in Dallas and Collin Counties.

“The City and its partners have demonstrated its ability to deploy successful initiatives to reduce homelessness and this reinforces that the investments and priorities we have undertaken are aligned to the Housing-First principles,” Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax said in a statement. 

While the program has helped more than 1,500 people move out of homelessness and into housing, providers have also struggled to find enough affordable apartments with landlords willing to take tenants from the program.

Dallas and other local governments around North Texas have also used federal money unleashed during the pandemic to buy old hotels and other buildings to convert into permanent supportive housing.

Got a tip? Christopher Connelly is KERA's One Crisis Away Reporter, exploring life on the financial edge. Email Christopher atcconnelly@kera.org.You can follow Christopher on Twitter @hithisischris.

KERA News is made possible through the generosity of our members. If you find this reporting valuable, considermaking a tax-deductible gifttoday. Thank you.

Christopher Connelly is a reporter covering issues related to financial instability and poverty for KERA’s One Crisis Away series. In 2015, he joined KERA to report on Fort Worth and Tarrant County. From Fort Worth, he also focused on politics and criminal justice stories.