Dallas County has approved an additional $10 million dollars for Housing Forward — an organization dedicated to ending homelessness — with a caveat from some commissioners.
Commissioner Elba Garcia asked for a strategy and timeline to shelter people before FIFA World Cup events begin in June.
"What is the plan for the next four months?" she asked. "As you all mentioned FIFA in our briefing, I don't see any information and I didn't see information either on Commissioner [Andy] Somerman's briefing."
Ron Stretcher, Systems Integration Vice President at the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute said the "Street to Home" initiative remains focused on sheltering people, regardless of timing.
"FIFA's a bit of a motivation here, but this is just the work that Housing Forward and partners have been doing," he said. "And this will allow us to get about another 1,100 off of the streets, out of these encampments and mini encampments — and they're still hidden around. I mean, we're trying to get them.
"They're still hidden all over around," he said. "And so that lets us get another 1,100 out and into housing. With this money coming in, it gears up."
Funding won't be available to Housing Forward until the end of March — about two months before the international soccer tournament.
In addition to concerns about the possibility of clearing streets before the World Cup, commissioners who did not see presentations or briefings ahead of time, said results and numbers didn't match jail data.
"You serve 6,004 unique unsheltered individuals, right? Of which 5,758 were repeat book-ins in the Dallas County Jail," Garcia said. "That's 246 people that didn't get booked. Most of that, they will book again. So while I'm trying to be very supportive and understand the numbers, I still don't get what is the goal...."
Garcia said she would be in favor of not have this many more 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."
Garcia and Commissioner John Wiley Price both said they support homelessness initiatives and the people who do the work, but progress and accurate numbers are needed.
"There are are people who are unsheltered book-ins that are what we call 'shelter resistant,'" Price said. "How do we say that that $10 million investment by Dallas County ensure these individuals don't book back into the jail?"
Price said he was not asking for those guarantees.
"But we've got to have something to hang our hat on more than a media presentation, your advocacy."
Last month the Dallas City Council also approved a $10 million contract with Housing Forward to go toward the second phase of Housing Forward's Street to Home initiative, which started last year and aims to provide permanent housing for Dallas residents experiencing homelessness.
At the time, Council Member Cara Mendelsohn had alleged that the funds were being used as "cleanup money" ahead of the FIFA World Cup. The tournament is expected to bring in $2 billion and more than 100,000 visitors a day to the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
"It's the creation of a short-term illusion that an issue is solved or doesn't exist," Mendelsohn said.
Jennifer Scripps, president and CEO of Downtown Dallas Inc., had said the city needed to prepare its downtown for hosting FIFA visitors and added that housing initiatives needed more support.
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