Dallas City Council
Councilwoman Cara Mendelsohn raised an interesting point during a discussion about affordable housing at Friday’s Dallas City Council meeting on the 2024 bond election. Why spend bond dollars — which require issuing debt and paying interest — on affordable housing when there are already more than a dozen mechanisms in place that could accomplish the…
It’s back to the drawing board for the Dallas Park and Recreation Department and council-appointed advisory board as they shuffle projects in anticipation of a bond issue in May or November. At least one project — an addition to the Dallas skate parks lineup near the Glencoe Park neighborhood — is off the table, board…
In a December meeting of the Dallas Mayor’s Ad Hoc Committee on Pensions, a new solution to the Dallas Police And Fire Pension fund’s $3 billion deficit was suggested: monetize the city’s real estate assets. It’s one of numerous ideas that has been floated since the deficit came to light in 2015. Other suggestions include…
Developers like Builders of Hope CEO James Armstrong are trying their best to provide affordable housing in underserved areas, particularly in southern and West Dallas. The federal programs available for such projects — the Single Family Home Ownership Development Program and Land Transfer Program — are costly and restrictive, developers told members of the Dallas…
Every Dallas City Council member agrees that an unaffordable housing crisis exists in North Texas, but there are differences of opinion on how to best solve the problem. Case in point: A mid-December meeting of the City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Solutions Committee about reducing minimum lot size to provide for greater residential density was…
