12 July 13-19, 2023 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents cording to the report. The report also found that Dallas doesn’t have enough housing for people making less than 50% of the city’s area median income. The report refers to this kind of housing as “deeply affordable housing.” Most people in jeopardy of be- coming homeless or those trying to climb out of homelessness make this level of in- come, according to the report. “Until Dallas either has more deeply af- fordable housing or fewer people who need it, we will be playing a game of musical chairs in which there is always someone who can- not be housed,” the report said. According to the report, previous com- missions and task forces have said the city needs well over 1,000 units of additional permanent supportive housing, but only about 300 have become available in the last five years. Many of the county’s homeless have mental health or substance abuse condi- tions, the report said. The report cited a statistic from the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute showing that 40% of home- less adults in Dallas County suffer from se- vere mental illness, 32% have substance-use disorder and 14% suffer from both conditions. With this in mind, the report said that permanent supportive housing should include behavioral health services. In its report, the task force said there is a need for a strategy to comply with Texas House Bill 1925, which bans camping in public places. But it isn’t an easy law to follow considering the state of homeless- ness in Dallas. The report essentially said that sweeping up encampments without any place for those residents to go isn’t an effective strategy because, it noted, dis- placing an encampment without any- where else for the homeless to go can push them into hiding. Dallas and its partnering organizations have been trying to communicate with each resident and get them into temporary shel- ter or housing before shutting encampments down. The task force recommended that problems like violence and crime should be main factors in deciding what camps to shut down next. Hollowell didn’t view that as fair. “What about the ones that aren’t vio- lent?” she said. “I feel like we’re just being pushed over because we don’t live in a vio- lent crime encampment. That’s because we don’t want to be around that.” Because of the severity of Dallas’ home- lessness problem, the task force urged caution in using temporary solutions. Nonetheless, some were offered including the transitioning of encampment resi- dents to non-congregant shelters like ho- tels or existing nonprofit shelters, or to city-owned facilities set up as temporary shelters. There are a few steps Dallas needs to take to beef up its creation of deeply af- fordable housing, according to the report. The city’s permitting department, which has seen backlogs and delays since the start of the pandemic, needs to be im- proved. Funds in the 2024 bond package should be allocated for this kind of hous- ing. All of this housing should be fairly distributed across the city’s 14 council dis- tricts. The city also needs to release some of the land it owns for the development of this kind of housing, as well as other cre- ative housing models. To reduce redundancy, the task force also recommended dissolving the Citizens Homeless Commission and the Dallas Area Partnership to End Homelessness. The commission and partnership were initially created because Dallas and Collin counties didn’t have an effective lead agency. Things are different today, according to the report, and these two entities just make the local homeless response more complicated than it has to be. So, the city should dissolve them both, the report said. The city could also hire more street out- reach workers and speed up the use of prop- erties acquired by the city to house the homeless. According to the report, only one city- owned facility acquired with pandemic re- lief funds is operational today. The others have been delayed for a variety of reasons, but mainly due to “ineffective practices within the city,” the report said. The procurement, legal, zoning, permit- ting and reimbursements processes in the city “pose significant challenges for non- profits organizations.” That results in facili- ties sitting vacant, despite the urgent need for housing. Lisa Marshall, a local homelessness ad- vocate who started an organization called Fighting Homelessness, said that the pro- curement process, in which different orga- nizations are contracted with the city, “is so costly that many smaller organizations can’t participate.” Brodsky, chair of Housing Forward, said the processes can unintentionally act as de- terrents. “The procurement process at the city of Dallas is complicated and long enough that it effectively prevents smaller nonprofits from partnering,” he said. “In ad- dition, the reimbursement process ends up causing nonprofits to float funds for the city, sometimes months at a time, which most small nonprofits cannot do.” On top of this, residents’ opposition to homelessness projects is getting in the way of progress. “It is crucial to recognize that if there is reluctance to establish shelters or provide housing for individuals who were previously homeless in our immediate neighborhoods, the consequence may be an increase in visi- ble homelessness and encampments in pub- lic spaces, directly impacting our own communities,” the report said. It said City Council members in every dis- trict should work to assure residents that new shelters, housing or services won’t be accom- panied by increased crime or disorder. Hollowell said she started reading the new report, but it didn’t seem very promis- ing. She said it appeared to give a lot of weight to opinions of experts in the home- lessness field but not much to the experi- ences of the homeless. Brodsky said the task force didn’t consult anyone currently home- less when creating the report. “They’re only seeing it from the government side of it, not from our side of it,” Hollowell said. She said she can only wait for things to get better in Dallas or go to another county to start her search for help all over again. ▼ SUPREME COURT STUDENT DEBT SWITCHEROO NORTH TEXAS SUIT PLAYED ‘INTEGRAL ROLE’ IN STUDENT LOAN DECISION, ADDISON GROUP SAYS. BY JACOB VAUGHN T he U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Joe Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt for millions. In a 6-3 decision, the court said the Biden Ad- ministration overstepped its power by trying to implement the student loan forgiveness program. The program would have forgiven up to $20,000 in student loan debt for students who received Pell Grants and up to $10,000 in debt for those who didn’t receive the grants. People with individual incomes less than $125,000 and household incomes of $250,000 would have been eligible for for- giveness. However, such forgiveness, which would have cost about $400 billion over 30 years and benefited some 40 million people, re- quires authorization from Congress, the Su- preme Court ruled. The decision drew disappointment from student loan borrow- ers and elected officials. In a post on Twitter, President Biden called the decision “unthinkable” adding, “This fight isn’t over.” During a news conference on June 30 af- ternoon, Biden said that his administration is still pursuing student loan forgiveness through the Higher Education Act of 1965. He said this approach will take longer, which is why the administration is creating a temporary 12-month, on-ramp repayment program. If you cannot make payments, this on-ramp will temporarily remove the ability to default on student loan repayments. “To- day’s decision has closed one path,” he said. “Now we’re going to pursue another.” In light of the decision, U.S. Rep. Colin Allred of Dallas said he’d continue trying to expand repayment plan options and job training opportunities and lower the cost of higher education. “Today’s decision on stu- dent loans by #SCOTUS is disappointing to the millions of folks who were hoping for re- lief,” the Democrat representative, who is running for Ted Cruz’s Senate seat in 2024, said in a post on Twitter. “Too many Ameri- cans are burdened by student loan debt, and no one should be buried in loans just for get- ting an education.” Allred’s colleague, U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett of Dallas, said in a state- ment that the Supreme Court has decided to shackle millions of borrowers to often pred- atory student loan debt. “Millions of Americans were pressured to take on student loan debt to compete in our modern workforce, and are now trying to pay off mountains of debt with wages that have remained largely stagnant for de- cades,” she said. “The cost of higher educa- tion is roughly ten times higher than it was 50 years ago, rents and cost of living have skyrocketed, while average wages adjusted for inflation have barely changed in that same amount of time.” Crockett also referenced Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who voted to strike down Biden’s program. Thomas ad- opted his son Mark Martin when he was 6 years old and eventually sent him to a board- ing school, according to ProPublica. It would cost about $6,000 a month to attend the boarding school, but Thomas didn’t cover the bill. A bank statement obtained by Pro- Publica shows that Harlan Crow, a billion- aire Dallas real estate magnate, paid the tuition the month of July 2009. A former ad- ministrator at the school told ProPublica that Crow paid for Martin’s tuition the whole year he attended. “This ruling is especially ironic, given that a Supreme Court Justice has appar- ently found the cost of education in Amer- ica so unbearably high that he must depend on the generosity of a billionaire patron to cover the cost of tuition for a child in his care,” Crockett said. For the majority of Americans who don’t have billionaire bud- dies to cover their bills, this ruling threat- ens to bankrupt a generation already crippled by two recessions and a pandemic in their prime working years.” The Student Borrower Protection Center condemned the Supreme Court decision. “Today’s decision is an absolute Unfair Park from p10 Jacob Vaughn Danielle Hollowell, 36, sits at a homeless encampment that the city of Dallas has since shut down. >> p14
