The public-private partnership that exists between city officials and nonprofit leaders in Dallas is an encouraging sign on how to deal with the homelessness crisis, and it could be worthy of replication on a national level. This is according to Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner, who journeyed to the city this week to discuss the issue.
Turner, a native of the Dallas suburb of Richardson, met behind closed doors this week with municipal officials and local nonprofits. The meeting was hosted by faith-based homelessness nonprofit and ministry OurCalling. Turner later discussed the meeting in an interview with The Dallas Morning News.
In the interview, Turner said he was pleased with the partnership between city officials and nonprofits.
“I was very encouraged by the collaboration in which they work together,” he said, adding that the approach might be worth applying to other major cities nationwide.
The partnership also appears to be working, based on HUD’s own data. Late last year, the department released a point-in-time report aiming to tally everyone in the U.S. experiencing homelessness on a single night in January 2024. It found that the national figure rose 18% year over year.
In Dallas, however, homelessness declined. After reaching a peak in 2021, the new report showed that overall homelessness in the city fell by 19% and unsheltered homelessness fell by 24%, according to data submitted by Housing Forward.
“Housing Forward leaders credit the decline to an overhaul of the local homelessness response system, increased funding from HUD over the years and greater collaboration among the All Neighbors Coalition, a network of about 150 local organizations working to end homelessness,” the report said.
Organizations that attended the meeting with Turner included OurCalling, Austin Street, Catholic Charities, The Bridge Homeless Recovery Center, Family Gateway, Cornerstone Baptist Church, Union Gospel Mission and the Stewpot.
OurCalling pastor and CEO Wayne Walker used the opportunity to tell Turner about the level of cooperation between the involved organizations. Walker said this has driven measurable improvement in the city’s homelessness level.
Walker also explained that Turner — himself a minister for Prestonwood Baptist Church in nearby Plano — previously served as an adviser to OurCalling. Last fall, Turner delivered an opening prayer at a groundbreaking ceremony for a planned tiny home development 25 miles southeast of Dallas.
But in the interview, Turner also said that certain policy changes need to be considered to adequately address homelessness, including local zoning rules.
‘“I’ve been encouraging our team and also the local leaders that I’ve been meeting with to take inventory of your regulatory environment and ease that so that we can come in, reduce those barriers, and build affordable housing,” he told the outlet.
In a Senate Banking Committee hearing on March 12, Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson (R) told the committee that one of the key ways to address homelessness would be to incentivize homebuilders to participate more readily.
“[T]he most effective way to bring down housing prices is to encourage the private sector to increase home building throughout the United States, but particularly in cities like Dallas, where we see unprecedented demand for our existing housing stock because of our economic growth and success,” Johnson said in his opening testimony.
