Dallas staff will put a list of possible additions to the city's homeless response in front of the City Council's Housing and Homelessness Solutions Committee this morning, including 100 more emergency shelter beds at The Bridge and a temporary housing community of 75 to 150 units on a site the city would pick.
The ideas are in "State of Homelessness, Part 1," a briefing on how city departments handle homelessness, set for the committee's 9 a.m. meeting. Part 2, in November, will bring in outside agencies. Staff say they will come back with milestones and costs once council members give direction.
What the city counts
The briefing leans on Housing Forward's point-in-time count from the night of Jan. 22, which covered Dallas and Collin counties: 3,513 people experiencing homelessness, 1,077 of them unsheltered and 2,436 in shelters. The same count found 150 unaccompanied young adults ages 18 to 24, including 31 without shelter, and 231 families with children, three of them unsheltered.
For the fiscal year that ended in September, the Dallas Street Response team logged 8,814 service requests with an average response time of 3.4 days, engaged 4,619 people at encampments and made 1,352 connections to shelter or other services.
The options on the table
Staff list gaps that include too few low-barrier overnight beds, shelter access barriers for registered sex offenders, few medical respite beds and not enough emergency shelter for young adults and families. Proposed responses include:
- adding 100 emergency shelter beds at The Bridge and contracting for more beds at other shelters;
- building the 75- to 150-unit temporary housing community;
- shifting transitional space at The Bridge toward women, who have 33 beds there compared with 79 for men;
- finding city-owned property for a youth shelter and weighing a set-aside of 5% to 10% of units in housing developments for young adults on their own;
- partnering with a provider on medical respite beds.
The Bridge is described as the city's only low-barrier overnight shelter and the only one that takes pets, with about 600 day guests and 373 overnight guests.
