Public Input and Private Dollars Needed for Comprehensive Housing Policy

Once again, the City of Dallas is crafting a plan, this time to address mixed-income and affordable housing. But once again, it’s just a document, and will depend heavily on private investment, public buy-in, and a council committed to making housing a priority. 

With his constituents in Oak Cliff, District 1 Councilman Chad West has been at the forefront of the housing discussion, asking tough questions and seeking information he can take back to the development community and the residents who want to live in Dallas but can’t afford to. 

“The scope and complexity of what is needed in a new [Comprehensive Housing Policy] is so large that [Housing and Homelessness Solutions] cannot provide sufficient council feedback during agenda-filled monthly meetings,” West said in a recent email to city staff. “I believe that the end product will be enhanced and achieved faster if a 12- to 15-member CHP advisory committee of subject matter experts and housing and neighborhood thought leaders is formed and functions similarly to the Economic Development Task Force.” 

At press time, there was no word on whether such a task force is in the works.

A two-day strategy session is planned in October to engage the community on the plan. A follow-up briefing to the city council will be held in December. 

Comprehensive Housing Policy 

The Dallas City Council created the CHP in 2018 and revisited the matter earlier this year, amending it in May. A team from TDA Consultants is assisting in developing the next iteration of the policy. 

Its purpose is to create and maintain available and affordable housing throughout Dallas; promote greater fair housing choices, and overcome patterns of segregation and concentrations of poverty through incentives and requirements. 

David Noguera, director of housing and neighborhood revitalization, said the CHP was intended to drive affordable housing to high-opportunity areas and to provide unrestricted, or market-rate units to high-poverty areas. 

“It was also intended to redevelop some of our blighted communities,” Noguera said. “Much of the funding that was allocated through the housing policy was offered on a repayment basis with the intention that we would be able to recycle the funds and use them moving forward.”

Since the CHP was created four years ago, the city has leveraged tax credit resolutions and density bonuses to produce affordable housing. A pipeline of more than 5,600 units has been developed through density bonuses and 4,300 units through the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program, Noguera said.

The Goals 

City officials acknowledge that building trust with the public is part of the process going forward. They’ve outlined several goals to be discussed at the strategy workshop in October. The goals include: 

• Reimagine community engagement 
• Embrace the history of Dallas’ struggles with race and ethnicity
• Measure housing needs
• Invest in housing development
• Preserve affordable single-family and multi-family housing
• Expedite service delivery
• Cultivate nonprofit capacity
• Eliminate infrastructure deficit
• Dedicated revenue stream
• Anti-displacement strategy

Challenges

Challenges include the lack of market flexibility, lack of community-led strategies, and a high bar for developers who want to create mixed-income housing in Dallas. Developers have to have experience building in the city and bring forward well-funded projects to qualify, Noguera explained. 

The plan acknowledges that shrinking housing affordability is disproportionately affecting Black and Latino households, according to the CHP report. Such information also has been reported in the city’s recently-adopted Racial Equity Plan and the Child Poverty Action Lab’s housing report. 

But the plan, according to Councilman West, lacks vision.

A preliminary vision statement presented in a May meeting of Housing and Homelessness Solutions states, “Every resident in all 14 districts has affordable, quality housing.” 

West said that’s inadequate, vague, and generic. He also would like to see the plan address all housing needs from the lowest area median income segment to market-rate housing, he added. 

“The primary reason for the city’s inability to successfully implement past housing plans is because it lacked the staff, and the expertise to do so,” West said. “That appears not to have changed.”

He further questioned the city’s inability to raise public and private funding for public housing programs, noting that Austin, Atlanta, and Seattle have established both new public revenue sources and harnessed private-sector sources to help reach housing equity goals. 

“The private sector in Dallas has not been engaged in scaling up and leveraging the impact of CHP programs,” West said. “The only way to reverse course is to engage with private sector leaders as true partners.” 

Community Engagement

The next few months will involve lots of stakeholder and community engagement, Noguera said. Consultants told board members at a Housing and Homelessness Solutions meeting last month that the plan should be sustainable for several years. 

Programs are in place, such as Bank of America’s initiative to offer zero-down mortgages to Black and Latino households in Dallas. The city also is engaging private-sector stakeholders and plans to leverage dollars in creating more housing, Noguera said. 

“We’re also looking at ideas coming from the community,” he said. “We met [last] week about our comprehensive housing policy and one of the key messages there was community outreach. I feel like I’m a pretty sharp person, but I know I don’t have all the answers. I want to make sure that whatever recommendations I’m bringing forward are not just from my own experience, but those from the community and what they see as being most important to being articulated in the programs and initiatives that we bring forward.” 

City leaders also are proposing a 2024 bond package that would allocate $300 million to housing infrastructure over the next decade. 

Cleaning Up a Mess

The CHP prioritizes housing investments in Dallas’ strongest real estate markets north of Interstate 30, with the expectation that development will spread out to the neediest neighborhoods over time, Assistant City Manager Majed Al-Ghafry wrote in an Aug. 18 memo to city council members. 

“Dallas’ CHP was developed at a time when the city was managing more than $50 million in noncompliance audit findings,” the memo states. “At the time, certain individuals working on housing projects were being investigated for bribery charges relating to the act of wasting city resources.’

The memo goes on to state that the CHP created a compliance framework that has effectively deterred “bad actors” who would otherwise misuse city resources. 

“The city’s 13 housing programs and associated rules and guidelines are all maintained in the CHP and cannot be changed without city council approval,” Al-Ghafry wrote. “Over the course of 153 pages, the CHP lays out the city’s housing goals and plans to achieve the goals.”