Housing advocates say they plan to pack Dallas City Hall Wednesday to pressure the city council to make a huge investment in affordable housing in next year’s bond package. The council will hear recommendations from city staff for how to allocate $1.1 billion in bond funds to address the city’s brick-and-mortar needs from housing, arts and parks to storm water management and streets.
According to city documents, staff will recommend $70 million to subsidize the development of affordable housing, with some of that set aside to build permanent supportive housing for people leaving homelessness. While that is more than Dallas has put toward housing in any previous bond, advocates say it won't come close to meeting the city's housing needs.
A coalition made up of dozens of nonprofits, activists, businesses and faith groups has been pushing for the city to include $200 million to build and preserve affordable housing, and another $35 million for homeless housing and shelters.
“We are in dire need of affordable [rental] units and affordable homes for people to purchase,” said Ashley Brundage, executive director of housing stability at the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas and a spokesperson for the Dallas Housing Coalition.
Dallas has a shortage of 33,600 rental homes that are affordable to lower-income residents, which is expected to more than double by 83,000 as even middle-income renters get priced out, according to the Child Poverty Action Lab.
Brundage said the city is also short about 60,000 for-sale homes in the price range teachers, bus drivers and other middle-income earners can afford, pushing homeownership out of reach for more and more Dallasites.
That shortage will make it harder to attract businesses, continue to drive homelessness, and push more young families out of the city, advocates said.
“It’s just gotten so much more expensive to rent and purchase homes in the city of Dallas,” said Kidus Girma from Sunrise Movement Dallas. “It’s not even 20 years ago. Even five years ago the housing market felt so different, and we were just noticing that this is a crisis that the public truly cares about.”
Sunrise activists hung a banner in front of City Hall on Monday calling for the city to put $200 million into green affordable housing.
Ups and downs
Increasing housing funding means less money for other city priorities like arts and streets and parks. In a memo, Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax told council members that his staff recommended increasing funding for housing to $70 million after the city’s bond task force recommended just $25 million.
Broadnax’s recommendations put nearly half of the bond toward streets, mostly repairing existing roadways. Parks and recreation facilities get the second biggest allotment, at $225 million, a major reduction from the bond task force’s recommendation and against Mayor Eric Johnson’s call for huge parks investments.
Third-most goes to public safety facilities, at $88 million. With $70 million for housing, the rest is rounded out between flood mitigation, arts venues, city facilities, economic development, and libraries.
Girma and Brundage said they’ll continue trying to build public pressure on council members to increase funding to incentivize more affordable housing as the city works to finalize the bond package ahead of the May 2024 bond election.
That will mean cutting funding in other categories, but Girma said the city’s own data shows strong support for increasing the supply of affordable housing.
“I love parks. I go on a daily walk in a park that is close to me, and I think we should definitely be investing in parks,” Girma said. “But I just think if you are a low-income person and you have to choose between cheaper rent and an additional park, you’re probably going to pick the housing. Because you might not live here to see the benefits of the park.”
Brundage said the funding for housing would have a significant multiplier effect, drawing in as much as $12 in private funds for every $1 of city bond funding. While market forces drive builders to produce luxury apartments and large, high-end houses, the bond funding would be available to help developers pencil out projects that include more affordable housing. That would would be help developers build houses that would sell for lower prices than would be profitable without a subsidy, or to set aside lower-than-market-rate units in a larger apartment complex.
The funds would also be used to preserve aging affordable housing already on the market.
The city council will finalize the bond package in the coming months, and it’s expected to come up for a vote by city residents in May.
Got a tip? Christopher Connelly is KERA's One Crisis Away Reporter, exploring life on the financial edge. Email Christopher at cconnelly@kera.org. You can follow Christopher on Twitter @hithisischris.
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