4 June 11 - 17, 2026 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents T he map on Hannah Sims’ phone divides the blocks sur- rounding Fair Park into four quadrants. Her colleagues hover around the device, hold- ing clipboards and water bottles to their chests, and listen to her terse morning de- brief as they divide themselves into teams. “You guys are going to take this side,” she instructs one group, her finger tracing the veiny roads that circle the South Dallas hub. “Let’s get an idea of who’s here.” Sims, a crisis-system senior manager at the nonprofit Housing Forward, is taking in- ventory. She wants to know the name and needs of every person sleeping outside within a quarter-block radius of Fair Park, where, in just a few weeks, hundreds of thousands of soccer fans will coalesce in cel- ebration of the FIFA World Cup. She wants to warn them that what they’re doing — camping outside — is against the law and can get them into trouble with local law en- forcement. She wants to tell them that help is available if they’re willing to accept it. It is a warm May morning as Sims begins driving at a crawl through the streets of South Dallas; she acknowledges that she and her team of street outreach workers aren’t always welcome at the encampments they aim to serve. Admittedly, she was “pretty grouchy” for the couple of days last summer that her air conditioning went out; imagine how you’d feel if you could never get out of the heat. She pulls over at an empty lot, having somehow spotted a camouflaged pile of be- longings on the back corner of the land. A chair, a tarp and a shopping cart holding bric-a-brac are tucked away, overgrown vines shrouding the proof of life. Sims has noticed the collection before, and she thinks someone may be living here. “Hello!” She calls out as a trio of social workers tramps across the tall grass ahead of her. No one emerges from the shaded alcove, but the team agrees the site looks lived in. After a few more calls, Sims makes a note in her phone and vows to come back later. “The whole population of our [un- housed] neighbors is becoming more tran- sient,” Sims says, which makes it hard to know who is living where or to find a person who may already be working with one of the organizations that Housing Forward over- sees. Around Fair Park, specifically, the en- campments that have formed are “less tradi- tional” than the tent villages that pop up under overpasses or in wooded areas in other parts of the city. You’re more likely to find one or two people looking for shade. Most hope to be left alone. “They’re just trying to find a space to stay safe and survive out here,” Sims says. If history is any indication, these home- less community members are the most likely to be affected when the FIFA World Cup lands in Dallas. For decades, major events like the World Cup or the Super Bowl have inspired cities to handle the homeless with temporary off-site shelters or bulldozers. It was the latter that disrupted an encamp- ment in Dallas when the World Cup came to town in 1994. But those strategies don’t work in perma- nently reducing street homelessness, said Sarah Kahn, president and CEO of Housing Forward. Instead, they result in millions of dollars spent to move homeless people out of sight for a few weeks, only to throw them back onto the streets when the games are over. That’s the kind of short-term problem- solving that Housing Forward wants to avoid. So it’s operating like business-as- usual-ish, building by-name inventory lists and working to move one person at a time into housing while accelerating outreach in areas like Fair Park, which will be especially relevant during the month of matches. “We have a system that’s built for this moment,” Kahn said. “We don’t need to in- vest in temporary fixes. … Our community made a commitment to invest in long-term solutions that actually reduce street home- lessness, that allow us to see results even af- ter the games are finished. And that was really important to us.” Temporary Fixes I t was May 1994 when Dallas turned to bulldozers to prepare for the World Cup matches to be played at the Cot- ton Bowl. Around 200 people were cleared out from under Interstate 45, The Dallas Morning News reported, and many were arrested for sleeping outdoors. The encampment site was less than a mile from where games would be played. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the city for the clearing, but Dallas won on appeal. The playbook has been run time and again. In 1996, Atlanta officials arrested 9,000 homeless people in the lead-up to the Olympics. In 2006, a Detroit homeless or- ganization hosted a three-day Super Bowl- themed watch party that ended when the game clock hit zero as a way to get the homeless off the city’s streets. In 2022, Los Angeles aggressively cleared out tent cities that officials believed would pose a “safety issue” to tourists in town for the Super Bowl. Perhaps most egregious was Louisiana’s handling of the 2025 Super Bowl. Before the game, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry allocated some $20 million to build a tent city 7 miles from the Superdome, where 200 homeless people living in the stadium’s vicinity were relocated. The pop-up shelter was sur- rounded by barbed wire, faced plumbing and heating issues and failed to offer the “support for your new start” that had been promised when relocation notices were first issued. Those notices, which promised every- thing from three meals a day (plus snacks!), bedding, hygiene kits and laundry services, also warned that failing to comply with the relocation may result in “enforcement ac- tions or legal proceedings.” (Louisiana also sent state Wildlife and Fisheries and law enforcement officials in to clean up New Orleans encampments ahead of Taylor Swift’s three-night Era’s Tour stop in 2024.) “If a community member really wants to reduce the visibility of homelessness, then dollars have to be invested in a particular way to get that outcome,” Kahn said. “Put- ting people in a temporary shelter for four months is not going to get community mem- bers the result that they want.” The first phase of Housing Forward’s Street to Home initiative launched in sum- mer 2024 and focused on assisting homeless people living in downtown Dallas. Over the course of 15 months, 2,070 homeless people living downtown were given medical care, partnered with addiction or mental health services as needed and given a permanent place to live. It’s an extensive safety net, but one that ensures people aren’t just moving back onto the streets after a few nights at a shelter. Housing Forward cites sustained re- ductions in violent crime downtown as evi- dence that the process worked. Phase two began in March of this year, and outreach workers are aiming to repli- cate those results citywide for 1,200 home- less neighbors by the spring of 2027. (The 2026 point-in-time count, a federally man- dated annual survey that inventories the number of people sleeping on a city’s streets on a given night, identified just over 3,513 unsheltered people in Dallas.) Housing Forward knew that the launch of phase two would coincide with the start of the World Cup, but Kahn said that it has had little bearing on the organization’s ap- proach to resolving homelessness. “Cities all across the country are under im- mense pressure to address street homeless- ness, FIFA or no FIFA,” Kahn said. “At the end of the day, in the absence of creating perma- nent pathways off the street for individuals, we’re just moving them from block to block, from one neighborhood to the next neighbor- hood without bringing about any change.” Still, politics is politics. Last December, City Council approved a $10 million con- tract to help support phase two, but not all the council members were convinced that the street-to-home initiative was working. Council member Cara Mendelsohn ac- cused city staff of encouraging the council to “throw more money” at a process that | UNFAIR PARK | Dylan Hollingsworth Large events like the FIFA World Cup lead to a quick removal of homeless people, only for a rebounded population after the games. >> p6 Not the Goal Dallas missed the mark with homeless response ahead of the 1994 World Cup. This year will be different, advocates vow. BY EMMA RUBY
