Conversation Highlights Dallas’ Affordable Housing Problem, Though Solid Solutions Seem Scarce
Share News:
Dallas has an affordable housing problem. That’s not news to anyone in the region. However, addressing the root issue of housing affordability and building lasting solutions is a dilemma local officials and business leaders are still puzzling out.
David Noguera, the City of Dallas Housing and Neighborhood Revitalization director, opened the discussion hosted by Michael Mooney of Axios Dallas on June 6 with an oversimplified explanation for the city’s affordable housing woes.
“Right now it really comes down to supply and demand,” Noguera told the audience at Axios’ “Advancing Housing Affordability in Dallas” discussion. “We can’t build housing fast enough to meet the demand.
As we dug deeper into the discussion with Noguera, The Real Estate Council president and CEO Linda McMahon, and Texas State Rep. John Bryant (D-114), the affordable housing crisis in Dallas started to look increasingly complicated and difficult to solve with just one approach.
While Dallas residents at the higher end of the income spectrum may be able to afford housing, for everyone else, it’s what Noguera called a “race to the bottom to swoop up whatever units are available.”
Those who are left standing in affordable housing musical chairs “end up either in overcrowded situations living with family members, or moving to the outer rings of the outer suburbs where they can find affordability,” Noguera said. “Some give up altogether and leave the region because it’s just not there for them.”
Noguera says that the city’s Housing Policy 2033 helps his department make the most of the resources they have by targeting areas and bridging efforts to revitalize communities with other city departments, the housing authority, school districts, DART, as well as other organizations.
It’s a team effort, Noguera said, with all of these entities actively investing in these areas.
Headwinds For Affordable Housing
A city of 380 square miles, especially one that ranks fourth in the nation for the number of Fortune 500 headquarters, needs to act quickly and strategically to make even the smallest dent in the problem. But the issue can’t be solved just by building more housing, which McMahon says is not as easy as it seems.
“Obviously the economic markets are impacting what people can afford, construction costs are really high,” she said. “One of the biggest impediments in Dallas, particularly Southern Dallas, is the lack of investment in infrastructure.”
Building and maintaining infrastructure — sidewalks, streets, lights, water, and wastewater — is expensive, McMahon said. “So if you’re talking about creating affordable housing, you really have to be talking about the total cost of that and that includes a major investment that needs to be made in infrastructure, particularly in Southern Dallas where there is either lacking infrastructure or it’s so old and crumbling that it’s not capable of being able to handle a modern home or apartment complex.”
Besides that, another major headwind for affordable housing in Dallas is political will, McMahon said. With the close of the regular session of the 88th Texas Legislature, no laws were passed that would put a dent in North Texas’ housing crisis, though according to McMahon, it wasn’t for lack of trying.
“The focus is on areas that are not urban Texas, and the majority of people who live in the state live in urban areas,” McMahon said. But initiatives and bills in the legislature actively sought to curb cities’ abilities to regulate housing and affordability, which is anathema to The Real Estate Council’s objectives
“Each city should be able to define its own future in terms of what kinds of regulations and policies there are,” she said, and increasing density is one objective that Dallas is struggling with.
McMahon pointed to a time in the early ’90s in which developers were building what’s now called “missing middle” housing in droves.
“We haven’t seen that type of development — that small-scale development, and having multifamily, not 300 units or high-rises, but multifamily within a residential context is really important, and increasing density is really essential to the health of urban Texas,” McMahon said. “Our North Texas legislative team did a great job — as best they could — but when the overriding attitude is about other areas other than urban areas, and the state, that’s a big impediment for us.”
One issue that Noguera and McMahon agreed on was changing the conversation about affordable housing from skepticism to acceptance.
“The biggest challenge we face, particularly from an affordable housing perspective is NIMBYism — those who are not interested in the word ‘affordable housing’ or anything that looks like it,” Noguera said. “So one of the biggest investments that I think we need to be making in the coming years is building YIMBYism — Yes In My BackYard — helping folks understand who are these people that we’re serving, what are the professions that they come from, how will that impact my property values, and why should I be interested in supporting those efforts.”
McMahon agreed, suggesting a marketing campaign to change the mindset around affordable housing and how it benefits everyone.
“Our organization has always been a big proponent of mixed-income housing,” she said. “A neighborhood is healthier if it has a variety of income levels within that neighborhood.”
Wage Growth is a Part of The Problem
But to Bryant, state representative for Texas House District 114, we’re ignoring the elephant in the room. The former congressman, ambassador, and civic leader represents downtown Dallas, parts of North and Southern Dallas, as well as the vast majority of East Dallas.
“I think you can’t talk about affordable housing without talking about people’s ability to afford houses,” Bryant said. “You have to start talking about people’s income.”
According to the Child Poverty Action Lab, 40 percent of Dallas’ workforce makes at or below $40,000. The average cost of a home in Dallas is more than $500,000. As McMahon said, “I don’t know a lot of people who can afford a half-million dollars for a home.”
It’s a problem not just for Dallas, she pointed out, but also for Frisco. The northern suburb doesn’t have enough workers because there’s a dearth of affordable housing close to jobs. But the solution isn’t just to build more affordable housing. Fair wages have to be a part of the conversation, too, Byrant insists.
“We’re in a situation now in which we’ve grossly underpaid entire segments of the population that do great work all day long every day and have to go and work second jobs just to get by,” Bryant said. “We cannot, as a practical matter and as a moral issue, discuss affordability without also talking about whether we’re not paying people well enough.”
Hot Takes
“From a regional perspective, it’s a universal issue in providing affordable housing and we’re going to work on that in every way that we can by trying to bring innovative solutions like the [Dallas Housing Opportunity Fund]. The other initiative we’re working on is community land trusts, which are very important, and that’s a shared equity model that Dallas has not really implemented yet. And then really figuring out what kind of property tax interventions we can have because we actually mapped the City of Dallas and areas that have the highest increase in property valuation were majority low-income communities. Gentrification is something that’s a part of a growing economy and is something that we are trying to manage in a smart way to maintain opportunities for people to live in their communities and provide that stable neighborhood that they want in addition to having more people move into those communities, but again, infrastructure investment is going to be critical to that, zoning is going to be critical to that, all kinds of reforms that need to happen from a local perspective are all important.
Linda McMahon, President and CEO, The Real Estate Council
So many folks talk about ‘We need affordablity in high-opportunity areas.’ The reality is, in Dallas, we don’t have enough high-opportunity areas. And those that we do have are built out, and the land that is available is at the higher end of the spectrum. So we’ve got to figure out how do we build new high-opportunity areas, improving the quality of life for those residents that already live there, bringing services and housing stock for market-rate residents who are not currently interested in living in those areas, and figuring out from a long-term perspective if we’re successful at doing all of these things, how do we preserve affordability either through deed restrictions or through tools like community land trusts, or any other innovative products that may come on line so that we can sustain mixed-income communities.
David A. Noguera, Director, City of Dallas Department of Housing & Neighborhood Revitalization
We as a society need to decide what kind of government we want — is the government is active in this area and trying to create a situation in which we have affordable housing and people who can pay the rent, or do we want to stay completely out of it and just let the situation take care of itself? Texas is 49th in the nation in regard to affordable housing. Only Nebraska is beneath us. Nebraska has fewer people than we have in Dallas County. So we have to make a decision about that and we make that decision at election time … Right now we have a state government that is not interested in being involved in this area.
State Rep. John Bryant, D-114
